4 ms·

The low pay wouldn't be so much of a problem if teachers got more support from parents and administration. For example, when a teacher has to send a student out

The low pay wouldn't be so much of a problem if teachers got more support from parents and administration. For example, when a teacher has to send a student out of the room for bad behavior, the student should have hell to pay from parents and the vice principal. Instead, what often happens is parents complain about the teacher's discipline and the vice principal calls you in to "have a discussion" with the student and to "hear their side of the story". It's a fucking circus. Also, grading is a bitch. I left the profession mostly because of the insane hours you need to spend grading (well, high school anyway). Students will nickel and dime you for every point while comparing with their peers. "Sally missed the minus sign in step C of problem 4 but got the same number of points as me? WTF?" WTF indeed. Silly waste-of-time after-school meetings about meeting standardized testing goals is also a complete waste of time as well. Add to that, you have to be up and out of the house every morning by 6 am or so to be on time. If you have kids, forget about seeing them for breakfast before their school day starts. And that means giving up your evenings too because you need to be in bed early. As an aside, I knew a teacher who "retired early" basically due to a mental breakdown from the stress. I suspect most teachers know someone who's done the same. Edit: And if you're male, all it takes is an unsubstantiated claim of impropriety from a female student to end your career immediately. Easily the worst and most stressful job I've ever had. And it really sucks because I was an excellent teacher. Got great reviews from observers and students. My students learned a ton. I really liked teaching too.

tokenadult 15y ago
Why don't you go into teaching in private practice? http://www.mackinac.org/953 http://www.mackinac.org/953 http://www.nytimes.com/1995/05/31/us/new-breed-of-teachers-become-entrepreneurs-and-roving-innovators.html http://www.nytimes.com/1995/05/31/us/new-breed-of-teachers-b... I am a teacher in private practice. I like teaching through my community nonprofit organization much better than I would like teaching with a lot of school bureaucracy, and I can give my clients better service too.
- caterping 15y ago
  Thanks. That could possibly help me personally, but I'm not sure it addresses the larger problems brought up in the original NYT article. Also, I don't see how it helps the kids who's parents can't or won't pay for it.
endtime 15y ago
>For example, when a teacher has to send a student out of the room for bad behavior, the student should have hell to pay from parents and the vice principal. Instead, what often happens is parents complain about the teacher's discipline and the vice principal calls you in to "have a discussion" with the student and to "hear their side of the story". I had a lot of teachers with serious personality problems when I was in public school. Not all, of course, and I'm not saying you're one of them - but the implicit suggestion you're making (side with the teacher by default, don't listen to the kid's side of the story) would be even worse than the way it is now. >Also, grading is a bitch. I left the profession mostly because of the insane hours you need to spend grading (well, high school anyway). Students will nickel and dime you for every point while comparing with their peers. "Sally missed the minus sign in step C of problem 4 but got the same number of points as me? WTF?" WTF indeed. Suck it up. I TAed a bunch of CS classes in grad school, including a couple proof classes, and yes grading can be a bitch (CS103 was especially rough). And believe me, Stanford students know how to ask for points back. But that's part of the job. If you can't justify the grades you give, and/or you can't grade consistently, then you deserve pushback from students. >Add to that, you have to be up and out of the house every morning by 6 am or so to be on time. If you have kids, forget about seeing them for breakfast before their school day starts. And that means giving up your evenings too because you need to be in bed early. I agree that schools start stupidly early in the US, but when your workday ends between 2:30 and 4:00, I don't think you can really complain about having to go to bed early. I don't mean to dispute that teaching is stressful, and I'm all for much much higher teacher salaries (and the end of seniority, teachers' unions, ridiculous benefits, rubber rooms, etc.). But your complaints don't really seem reasonable.
- scott_s 15y ago
  I think you sailed past the fact that the professor for your course had a TA to help with grading. I TAed a junior level computing systems course, derived from the CMU offering: http://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/ http://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/ Some weeks I would get very little research done because the grading and office hour help duties were so substantial - and that's even with farming the work out to other TAs. If the professors in the course had to have done both teaching and grading, there's no way they could have sustained the level of instruction and assignments required by this substantial course. One or the other would have suffered. I assume the same was true for your courses. My point: college courses with TAs don't neatly map to pre-college courses because in elementary, middle and high school, one teacher has to do it all.
jmatt 15y ago
I know a number of teachers and administrators, and caterping's comments ring true. It sums up what I hear over and over. At this point it comes down to what is the low hanging fruit? Of these problems what are the easiest (and/or best value) to solve? The biggest change I've seen is the relationship between teacher/school and student/parent. That same problem is all too often described as a "student's attitude" problem. But really the school administration and parents are just as complicit. We all had the same ornery students around when we were in school. Arguably I was one of them. The way I remember it is we just had a much shorter leash. So, in the end, I was forced to just comply and "play the game". Which was a healthy life lesson. If I was given the options that these kids were, I'm sure I would have exploited fuck out of it. And I can promise I never would have learned that sometimes you just have to jump through all the hoops and "play the game" to get things done.
anigbrowl 15y ago
Also, grading is a bitch. [...] Students will nickel and dime you for every point while comparing with their peers. This is what comes from an over-reliance on GPA, which can be just as misleading as an over-reliance on standardized testing. We have the latter where I come from (Ireland): university placement was determined entirely on the basis of nationwide exit exam scores when I left school and my understanding is that little has changed. Your school grades are utterly irrelevant and have no other purpose than to help students, parents and teachers estimate the national examination outcomes. you could turn in no homework for 5 years, get Fs in everything, and be on permanent detention; it will have no effect whatsoever on your university admission prospects. This is good in some respects, flawed in others. Kids that don't fit in at high school but are smart and determined to do well academically can't be held back by discriminatory attitudes among their teachers, for example; on the other hand, those with a highly developed aptitude in a single area (eg math) or who are heavily involved in relevant extracurricular activities are at a disadvantage because such things carry no weight in the admissions process. Of course, kids that don't like high-pressure test situations are really screwed even if they consistently perform well in other contexts.
- caterping 15y ago
  > > Also, grading is a bitch. [...] Students will nickel and dime you for every point while comparing with their peers. > This is what comes from an over-reliance on GPA, Certainly true. Also, it's necessary for when a teacher has to defend themselves for failing a student. If you need to fail a student, there is high pressure against doing so. Fail a student and parents and administration both complain loudly. You've got to have all parent contacts (throughout the year) documented (time, who you talked to, what was discussed), as well as all test and exams available for combing through by interested parties.

tokenadult 15y ago

Why don't you go into teaching in private practice? http://www.mackinac.org/953 http://www.mackinac.org/953 http://www.nytimes.com/1995/05/31/us/new-breed-of-teachers-become-entrepreneurs-and-roving-innovators.html http://www.nytimes.com/1995/05/31/us/new-breed-of-teachers-b... I am a teacher in private practice. I like teaching through my community nonprofit organization much better than I would like teaching with a lot of school bureaucracy, and I can give my clients better service too.

caterping 15y ago
Thanks. That could possibly help me personally, but I'm not sure it addresses the larger problems brought up in the original NYT article. Also, I don't see how it helps the kids who's parents can't or won't pay for it.

endtime 15y ago

>For example, when a teacher has to send a student out of the room for bad behavior, the student should have hell to pay from parents and the vice principal. Instead, what often happens is parents complain about the teacher's discipline and the vice principal calls you in to "have a discussion" with the student and to "hear their side of the story". I had a lot of teachers with serious personality problems when I was in public school. Not all, of course, and I'm not saying you're one of them - but the implicit suggestion you're making (side with the teacher by default, don't listen to the kid's side of the story) would be even worse than the way it is now. >Also, grading is a bitch. I left the profession mostly because of the insane hours you need to spend grading (well, high school anyway). Students will nickel and dime you for every point while comparing with their peers. "Sally missed the minus sign in step C of problem 4 but got the same number of points as me? WTF?" WTF indeed. Suck it up. I TAed a bunch of CS classes in grad school, including a couple proof classes, and yes grading can be a bitch (CS103 was especially rough). And believe me, Stanford students know how to ask for points back. But that's part of the job. If you can't justify the grades you give, and/or you can't grade consistently, then you deserve pushback from students. >Add to that, you have to be up and out of the house every morning by 6 am or so to be on time. If you have kids, forget about seeing them for breakfast before their school day starts. And that means giving up your evenings too because you need to be in bed early. I agree that schools start stupidly early in the US, but when your workday ends between 2:30 and 4:00, I don't think you can really complain about having to go to bed early. I don't mean to dispute that teaching is stressful, and I'm all for much much higher teacher salaries (and the end of seniority, teachers' unions, ridiculous benefits, rubber rooms, etc.). But your complaints don't really seem reasonable.

scott_s 15y ago
I think you sailed past the fact that the professor for your course had a TA to help with grading. I TAed a junior level computing systems course, derived from the CMU offering: http://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/ http://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/ Some weeks I would get very little research done because the grading and office hour help duties were so substantial - and that's even with farming the work out to other TAs. If the professors in the course had to have done both teaching and grading, there's no way they could have sustained the level of instruction and assignments required by this substantial course. One or the other would have suffered. I assume the same was true for your courses. My point: college courses with TAs don't neatly map to pre-college courses because in elementary, middle and high school, one teacher has to do it all.

jmatt 15y ago

I know a number of teachers and administrators, and caterping's comments ring true. It sums up what I hear over and over. At this point it comes down to what is the low hanging fruit? Of these problems what are the easiest (and/or best value) to solve? The biggest change I've seen is the relationship between teacher/school and student/parent. That same problem is all too often described as a "student's attitude" problem. But really the school administration and parents are just as complicit. We all had the same ornery students around when we were in school. Arguably I was one of them. The way I remember it is we just had a much shorter leash. So, in the end, I was forced to just comply and "play the game". Which was a healthy life lesson. If I was given the options that these kids were, I'm sure I would have exploited fuck out of it. And I can promise I never would have learned that sometimes you just have to jump through all the hoops and "play the game" to get things done.

anigbrowl 15y ago

Also, grading is a bitch. [...] Students will nickel and dime you for every point while comparing with their peers. This is what comes from an over-reliance on GPA, which can be just as misleading as an over-reliance on standardized testing. We have the latter where I come from (Ireland): university placement was determined entirely on the basis of nationwide exit exam scores when I left school and my understanding is that little has changed. Your school grades are utterly irrelevant and have no other purpose than to help students, parents and teachers estimate the national examination outcomes. you could turn in no homework for 5 years, get Fs in everything, and be on permanent detention; it will have no effect whatsoever on your university admission prospects. This is good in some respects, flawed in others. Kids that don't fit in at high school but are smart and determined to do well academically can't be held back by discriminatory attitudes among their teachers, for example; on the other hand, those with a highly developed aptitude in a single area (eg math) or who are heavily involved in relevant extracurricular activities are at a disadvantage because such things carry no weight in the admissions process. Of course, kids that don't like high-pressure test situations are really screwed even if they consistently perform well in other contexts.

caterping 15y ago
> > Also, grading is a bitch. [...] Students will nickel and dime you for every point while comparing with their peers. > This is what comes from an over-reliance on GPA, Certainly true. Also, it's necessary for when a teacher has to defend themselves for failing a student. If you need to fail a student, there is high pressure against doing so. Fail a student and parents and administration both complain loudly. You've got to have all parent contacts (throughout the year) documented (time, who you talked to, what was discussed), as well as all test and exams available for combing through by interested parties.