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I majored in math, and had several future math teachers in my homework group. One answer is future high school math teachers are some of the worst math student
by x0x0 11y ago
I majored in math, and had several future math teachers in my homework group. One answer is future high school math teachers are some of the worst math students. I'm sure that's totally unrelated to the pay being completely shit.
I have a friend who teaches in a Belmont (peninsula in the valley) school. He also works as a receptionist at a gym 4 days a week after working at the school, and he still spends half his take home pay on rent. So he's at the school where he teaches by 6:55AM and leaves the gym at 10PM, then does grading. The only reason you would legitimately struggle to understand why it's hard to hire teachers or why skilled people don't do it is because you're a startup founder (why aren't engineers jumping take a $50k paycut in exchange for most-likely-worthless 0.1% options? Engineering shortage!)
In the bay area in CA, teaching is a cute hobby that has to be supported by a spouse or a second job. If you want to draw more high-quality people into the profession, change that. And then maintain the changes and wait 10+ years at least for the knowledge to percolate and another generation of teachers to come up through high school and college.
- smokey_the_bear 11y agoI majored in math as well, and had lots of secondary mathematics education majors in my classes. While it's true they were weaker than the math majors in the advanced classes, they were certainly bright and enthusiastic enough to teach math up to basic calculus.
- Thriptic 11y agoYup, people follow incentives. I was friends with someone in college who majored in chemistry and could have easily gotten into a good PhD program or gone right into industry. She chose instead to teach high school chemistry and did a fantastic job until she burned out 3 years later. The work load was enormous, the pay was shit, many of the kids didn't want to be there, and the goals of her school administration were completely decoupled from the general purpose of teaching. She is now in industry making much more money and living a much better lifestyle.
- pc86 11y agoYou're going to have a really hard time getting anyone over to your side when your argument is basically "we need to throw a ton of money at the problem and wait a decade before suggesting maybe that didn't help much." Not saying I disagree with your goal, but politically that's just not going to happen.
- x0x0 11y agoI dunno, we have no problems wasting hundreds of billions of dollars on weapons systems or trillions of dollars on unnecessary wars brought about by liars (where exactly are those WMD?) If this were important to politicians, it could be done. And the necessary step to making it important to politicians is voting.