14 ms·
My spouse both leads and manages ~24 direct reports, each of which require near continuous instruction, supervision, mentoring and encouragement. Her role deman
by Wistar 5y ago
My spouse both leads and manages ~24 direct reports, each of which require near continuous instruction, supervision, mentoring and encouragement. Her role demands an advanced degree with on-going education and certification requirements; exhaustive planning; an endless well of optimism; extensive individualized communication with third-party stake-holders; detailed performance accounting and reporting to stake-holders and management; frequent conflict resolution; incredible time and resources management; quick adaption to unexpected situations; acute safety awareness; and to operate in a highly-political environment with severe budget constraints.
She's a nationally board-certified kindergarten teacher in a public school.
- krisrm 5y agoThis gave me a laugh. Very well written. And, good on your spouse for doing what she does. I was fortunate to have an excellent kindergarten teacher, and still think of her from time to time.
- zaat 5y agoWell, it is very common in situations like this to have 2 to 4 assistants, and I can't believe without them it would be possible to avoid hard conflicts and even violence on regular basis.
- Wistar 5y agoShe has no assistants and never has (I just asked her). Occasionally a student teacher but not for years, now. Some students, such as ESL or special ed, are pulled out of class for about 30 minutes from 2–4 times a week but, the recent district policy is called "push in" where the specialist comes in to class to assist a particular student or two.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deepdmistry 5y agoGrowing up we had 60 instead of 24 students and 0 assistants and still no violence and less if none bad conflicts
- aklemm 5y agoTroll? Give some background info if this is to be taken seriously.
- gcmeplz 5y agoI'm not OP, but depending on where in the world you are, classrooms with 50+ students aren't that rare even today: https://www.economist.com/china/2018/09/13/anger-grows-in-china-over-school-crowding https://www.economist.com/china/2018/09/13/anger-grows-in-ch... I'm most familiar with China (I taught middle-school classrooms of 55-60 in Yunnan around 2010, and had some friends in Guangzhou teaching 75-80), but I assume there have been & are plenty of countries with similar situations.
- aklemm 5y agoGood perspective. I would've guessed when you get to numbers like that it would even be worth doing.
- deepdmistry 5y agoApologies for not giving context, i am from india and yes it was very common to have classrooms with 55-60+ students and simply 1 teacher.
- analog31 5y agoEach assistant is typically assigned to a single special needs kid.
- geofft 5y agoWhere are you basing this on? In public schools in the US (at least in my hometown in Louisiana), schoolteachers don't get assistants of any sort. You get the occasional "student teacher," who is training to become a schoolteacher, but never more than one. Faculty at colleges get teaching assistants, but their job is hardly to help with conflicts or prevent violence, their job is to help with instruction, grading, writing homework assignments, etc. When I was a teaching assistant, I myself tended to have 10-20 students in my section, and the class as a whole had close to a hundred people.
- KittenInABox 5y agoCan you let us know which public school system has 2-4 assistants in a 24-person kindergarten classroom so I can move there when I have children?
- sokoloff 5y agoWe are in a pretty well-funded district. None of our kindergarten classes have 2-4 assistants for a class of 24. Most have zero.
- anonexpat 5y agoYou missed the part where she's criminally underpaid for the work she does.
- leetrout 5y agoBut she gets her summers off! /s It's crazy how underpaid teachers are.
- marvin 5y agoIt's a wonder anyone wants to do the job at all, knowing all this in advance. I almost became a teacher once. Figured all the abuse would be a degrading waste of my efforts.
- brendoelfrendo 5y agoIn a lot of cases, they don't want to do the job. There are teacher shortages in a lot of the United States, especially in states that are infamous for mistreating teachers, like Texas.
- thanhhaimai 5y agoThere is no teacher shortage. There is a shortage of people willing to teach for peanuts.
- chrisseaton 5y agoMaybe not everyone's motivated by money?
- munk-a 5y agoYea - but maybe for such an important role for society we can actually put up the cash to make it a worthwhile career choice. I've heard the "we don't want teachers who are only in it for the cash" line enough that I want to puke. If you paid enough to attract the leeches legitimate teachers would get them sacked right quick.
- ZephyrBlu 5y agoI'm sure I could also make my job sound extremely impressive. I don't understand why everyone believes teachers are so undervalued. On average, I don't think teachers provide that much value. My pet peeve is teachers teaching children maths. How can you teach something that you don't understand?
- thanhhaimai 5y agoThere are plenty people who are qualified for teaching children math. But it would be a disservice for them and their family to accept a low wage teaching job when they can work for $400k+ elsewhere. Your argument is like hiring only minimum wage workers to build rockets, then complain that on average they don't provide that much value and can't solve integrals in their heads. If we want better teachers, the solution is not surprising: pay more.
- sparky_z 5y agoJust increase the numbers on the paychecks and the current bad teachers would all go away and be replaced by different, better teachers? Somehow, I doubt that.
- ZephyrBlu 5y agoI don't think you need someone amazing at maths to teach kids. In fact that would probably be detrimental for most kids. I don't say that teachers don't provide much value because they're useless, but because they are usually very generalized and most kids don't seem be to that interested in learning. Even if you fix problem #1, you haven't fixed the arguably bigger problem. I also don't think that significantly increasing the quality of teachers would change much for most kids.
- quickthrower2 5y agoCan’t fire them or choose who to hire either. At least they are not working on 24 different work streams.