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I am an early-retired EE and I thought that I could have a second career in teaching HS physics. I got the MA Teaching in Maryland, and did my one year student

I am an early-retired EE and I thought that I could have a second career in teaching HS physics. I got the MA Teaching in Maryland, and did my one year student teaching assignment. My thoughts: 1. The degree program was decent, although a certificate program would be better for prior professionals if the law allowed it (lower cost, too much wasted time in redundant classes). 2. Teachers are sad. Very sad. They are underpaid and overworked, even at the better suburban high schools. Parents treat them poorly, even when they are veteran teachers with lots of experience. 3. In general, the public resents that teachers get “3 months off” in the summer. I believe that this is the justification for lower pay. It is silly, because teachers work more in 9 months than most professionals and they also pay for things out of their own pockets. They also counsel and tutor students after school. It’s a difficult job. 4. In my job interviews, the first and most important qualification was “classroom control.” Math, science, engineering, life experience were all distant seconds. Teachers—-even in advanced math and science classes—-are first and foremost caretakers. Think about that for a second… 5. What is the current model for education based on? There are several competing historical arguments, but the salient factors like student-teacher ratio, subjects, grades, facilities, etc. are based on economics and legal requirements. The quality of either a student’s experience or a teacher’s experience is not very high on the list. Education is about checking a box on a list of requirements that was developed 150+ years ago. Ultimately, I decided to tutor rather than to teach in a classroom. I consider this a personal disappointment, although I learned a lot from the educational experience. I wish there could be a “town hall” type of discussion to consider ways to improve the situation.

VirusNewbie 4y ago
Sounds like there are two jobs here: babysitting, and teaching. Both are valuable, though likely that the former isn’t as difficult skill to master.
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  The problem is usually that in a very disrupted classroom, teaching is going to be impossible, so you do need to have the ability to keep things manageable. If kids start climbing on things and throwing stuff no one is going to pay attention to math.
  - andrewprock 4y ago
    There have to be consequences for actions like that. If there are no consequences, then yes teaching will become impossible.
    - bobthepanda 4y ago
      I mean, there are. The thing about classroom control is that it is easier to notice early signs and stop the situation from escalating into behaviors that need to go through a whole punishment process (possible student trauma, paperwork for the teacher and administration), and so teaching how to correct things early and keep things controlled is a win-win for the student, teacher, and administration, and also the rest of the class.
- jholman 4y ago
  As a post-secondary teacher, I spend more mental energy on babysitting than on teaching. It's definitely the harder part for me. I hesitate to imagine how bad it must be in primary or secondary education. Though, it's not really that clear-cut a division. When I worry about how to manipulate students into doing the minimum readings (say an hour a week) for a class that they voluntarily signed up for and paid for, is that babysitting or teaching?
prepend 4y ago
> teachers work more in 9 months than most professionals I want to understand this more and think we need to measure this well. As a software dev, I’ve always struggled with measuring the amount of work performed and usually disregard measures of intellectual output as misleading measures (eg, lines of code, story points completed, whatever). What makes you think teachers work more in 9 months than a typical professional (engineer, attorney, healthcare worker) does in an entire year? Wouldn’t it then make sense for these teachers to change professions? Or other professionals to teach? Or is everyone just stupid? Or just really dedicated to teaching as a passion? I only have my own experience but I’ve always had a stack of work after hours- training, mentoring, networking. And I assumed all professions have this kind of additional metawork that is unpaid. Is it harder to tutor a student than to mentor someone?
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  Teachers are changing professions, in large numbers, and have been for a while. TFA discusses that and how districts are resorting to desperate measures to get bodies to teach, like drafting in college kids, cutting school hours, and importing them. You don’t have one student. You have easily dozens, maybe hundreds. There isn’t enough time to actively teach, and grade all their stuff, and figure out the next lesson plan in the eight hour day.
  - germinalphrase 4y ago
    FWIW: as a high school English teacher in a wealthy Minneapolis suburb, I had approx. 120-150 students on my roster (depending on what classes I was teaching at the time).
- justsocrateasin 4y ago
  I'm a software dev as well, coming from a family of educators (dad, mom, brother, all three have taught at some point during their career or for an extended part of their career). The problem I think is that you're examining 'working more' in the context of 'work output'. As a developer, it is very much about 'work output', however as a teacher it is often not. In my moms example, she had roughly 6x50 minute classes a day, with a 10 minute break between each one. So, roughly 6 hours of 'meetings', since those 10 minutes in between were really just prepping for the next class, and oftentimes speaking to students in between too. That in and of itself is draining. This is the schedule of a manager, more or less - 6 hours of meetings where you need to be "on" and can't zone out. The problem is that teachers don't just operate on a manager schedule. They also operate on a maker schedule: designing lesson plans. My mom's other 2x50 minute blocks were designated for a 50 minute lunch break and 50 minutes of planning. But 50 minutes of planning is not nearly enough time to plan two classes that my mom teaches every day. So, no actual lunch break, the lunch break is actually eating while planning. And that's still not really enough time, so my mom would get there an hour early and stay an hour late. She worked 7am-530pm M-F, and since getting behind on lesson plans means you need to put on a movie which puts your kids behind, she often worked 3-4 hours on Sunday to prepare for the week ahead. This is not my mom being an overachiever, or being dedicated to her work, this is her being dedicated to ensuring that she is just doing her job. This is what the job requires. Sure, it does get easier over time as you get to reuse lesson plans. The point I want to drive home is not that working 7am-530pm is "more [time] than most professionals", but rather the quality of work is so much different, and so much harder. Managing a classroom of 25-30 children, middle schoolers in her case, is draining, so much more draining than coding. It is more draining than being a manager, because your team is often 3x as big and significantly less behaved (they're children after all). The cherry on top is that my first job out of college as a developer I was already making $30k more than my mom a year. She had a masters and 10yrs of experience at the time. I am not under the illusion that I am smarter or more qualified. To answer your statement of "I also need to do trainings, mentorings, networking", teachers regularly need to do trainings too. For my mom, these trainings are required - she was required to do something like 20 hours of professional development a year. And they often mentor students as well, as you absolutely experienced during your own education whenever you went to a teacher during their lunch break for help. I don't think tutoring versus mentoring is that hard. Having someone come to you with questions is an easy way of educating someone. The hard part is lesson plans, to think through a year of "how can I distill this knowledge down and transfer it?", which I personally have never needed to do as a tutor. To answer your question of "why don't they change professions?", I think that's rather naive. Not everyone is on the path of trying to optimize financial independence and minimize time spent working. Why do folks go into journalism? Or art, or music? Are those people stupid, because they aren't in software engineering where work is more lucrative and easier? > teachers work more in 9 months than most professionals work in a year I do think this is an overstatement, maybe a little. Maybe not. It depends on the teacher and the subject. I hope these explanations help, growing up I definitely did not realize how hard my "good" teachers worked to provide me a solid education.
stevenwoo 4y ago
A better model for public education exists: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/why-are-finlands-schools-successful-49859555/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/why-are-finlands-s... But in the USA the federal/state separation and other political considerations are so ingrained it would be hard to do this sort of revolutionary change.
acjohnson55 4y ago
> 1. The degree program was decent, although a certificate program would be better for prior professionals if the law allowed it (lower cost, too much wasted time in redundant classes). There are certificate programs in Maryland. That's how I got my Maryland teacher's license. You typically have to be enrolled in an alternative certification program, like Teach For America, Baltimore City Teaching Residency, etc. But there are a bunch of them: https://www.marylandpublicschools.org/about/Documents/DEE/ProgramApproval/MAAPP/Alternative_Preparation_Program_Directory_July_2021.pdf https://www.marylandpublicschools.org/about/Documents/DEE/Pr...
draebek 4y ago
The emphasis on "classroom control" personally doesn't surprise me. If two or three students start refusing a teacher's orders, that teacher is done for the year, and maybe forever at that school. In my middle school, discipline was all but lost in most of my classes. Play cards in class, tell the teacher to shut up. What's she going to do? We stole her phone and keys in first period, locked the doors to the room, and we disconnected the intercom weeks ago. You can send an administrator or a police officer to sit in the class, but are they going to sit there all day, every day, until the end of the year? Are they going to do that in all twenty classes that need the treatment? The second they get called away because someone set another fire in the woods, it's game on in the classroom. At least we almost never actually assaulted staff. Someone I grew up with became a teacher and quit after just a few years. She had a student actually beat her up. I regret a lot about my behavior in school, and reflecting on that has led me wonder why so many students hate being in school so much, and how—if?—we could educate children without making them resent the activity.
- 8note 4y ago
  Send the kid home and fail them for the year? They can try again next year. Well behaved kids are the parents' problem
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    Sounds simple but as a society we have decided not to hold parents and students accountable for their actions. Teachers are left to deal with the impossible burden of raising 30+ kids and fail.
  - nemothekid 4y ago
    A secondary problem is that public schools have essentially transformed into state nannys. 1. You can't send the kids home because both parents are probably working. It's more likely the kid becomes lost forever and it becomes a government problem again once that kid is now living an alternative lifestyle that consumes government resources in other ways (crime, homelessness, or health). 2. Because of the realities of (1) everyone else is now forced to asked why the kid is no longer in school and becomes a failure of the teacher that the kid is not in school. The teacher must now deal with disgruntled parents and administrators for not enduring the emotional abuse and disruption a neglected child causes while also dealing with 20 other students. I think a lot of problems with child education and just be traced back to economic realities of many parents today. Even if you are relatively well off having your kid kicked out of school isn't financially feasible for a lot of families. Even a disruptive child might be the result of absent parents who must be at work to even afford school lunch.
trimbo 4y ago
> 5. What is the current model for education based on? [...] Education is about checking a box on a list of requirements that was developed 150+ years ago. This is very well put. IMO nothing better illustrates how deep-rooted that model is than distance learning in 2020-2021 in the US. That was an opportunity to innovate quickly, and yet no state or district I know of took it seriously. Instead they had students on Zoom for 3-5 hours a day, including 1st-3rd graders, structured as if it was a regular classroom. It served no educational purpose except adhering to the model and requirements you mentioned.
MuffinFlavored 4y ago
How does the education most Americans get K-12 compare to other G20/OECD countries? Unless I'm wrong, we're like #15 or worse in a lot of educational benchmarks, right? What could federal/state/local governments do (other than divert money from wealthy areas into poorer areas) to make American children receive a more "world class" K-12 public education?
- idontpost 4y ago
  Stop squeezing families economically into poverty traps for corporate benefit. Squeezed families can't raise mentally healthy kids.

VirusNewbie 4y ago

Sounds like there are two jobs here: babysitting, and teaching. Both are valuable, though likely that the former isn’t as difficult skill to master.

bobthepanda 4y ago
The problem is usually that in a very disrupted classroom, teaching is going to be impossible, so you do need to have the ability to keep things manageable. If kids start climbing on things and throwing stuff no one is going to pay attention to math.
- andrewprock 4y ago
  There have to be consequences for actions like that. If there are no consequences, then yes teaching will become impossible.
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    I mean, there are. The thing about classroom control is that it is easier to notice early signs and stop the situation from escalating into behaviors that need to go through a whole punishment process (possible student trauma, paperwork for the teacher and administration), and so teaching how to correct things early and keep things controlled is a win-win for the student, teacher, and administration, and also the rest of the class.
jholman 4y ago
As a post-secondary teacher, I spend more mental energy on babysitting than on teaching. It's definitely the harder part for me. I hesitate to imagine how bad it must be in primary or secondary education. Though, it's not really that clear-cut a division. When I worry about how to manipulate students into doing the minimum readings (say an hour a week) for a class that they voluntarily signed up for and paid for, is that babysitting or teaching?

prepend 4y ago

> teachers work more in 9 months than most professionals I want to understand this more and think we need to measure this well. As a software dev, I’ve always struggled with measuring the amount of work performed and usually disregard measures of intellectual output as misleading measures (eg, lines of code, story points completed, whatever). What makes you think teachers work more in 9 months than a typical professional (engineer, attorney, healthcare worker) does in an entire year? Wouldn’t it then make sense for these teachers to change professions? Or other professionals to teach? Or is everyone just stupid? Or just really dedicated to teaching as a passion? I only have my own experience but I’ve always had a stack of work after hours- training, mentoring, networking. And I assumed all professions have this kind of additional metawork that is unpaid. Is it harder to tutor a student than to mentor someone?

bobthepanda 4y ago
Teachers are changing professions, in large numbers, and have been for a while. TFA discusses that and how districts are resorting to desperate measures to get bodies to teach, like drafting in college kids, cutting school hours, and importing them. You don’t have one student. You have easily dozens, maybe hundreds. There isn’t enough time to actively teach, and grade all their stuff, and figure out the next lesson plan in the eight hour day.
- germinalphrase 4y ago
  FWIW: as a high school English teacher in a wealthy Minneapolis suburb, I had approx. 120-150 students on my roster (depending on what classes I was teaching at the time).
justsocrateasin 4y ago
I'm a software dev as well, coming from a family of educators (dad, mom, brother, all three have taught at some point during their career or for an extended part of their career). The problem I think is that you're examining 'working more' in the context of 'work output'. As a developer, it is very much about 'work output', however as a teacher it is often not. In my moms example, she had roughly 6x50 minute classes a day, with a 10 minute break between each one. So, roughly 6 hours of 'meetings', since those 10 minutes in between were really just prepping for the next class, and oftentimes speaking to students in between too. That in and of itself is draining. This is the schedule of a manager, more or less - 6 hours of meetings where you need to be "on" and can't zone out. The problem is that teachers don't just operate on a manager schedule. They also operate on a maker schedule: designing lesson plans. My mom's other 2x50 minute blocks were designated for a 50 minute lunch break and 50 minutes of planning. But 50 minutes of planning is not nearly enough time to plan two classes that my mom teaches every day. So, no actual lunch break, the lunch break is actually eating while planning. And that's still not really enough time, so my mom would get there an hour early and stay an hour late. She worked 7am-530pm M-F, and since getting behind on lesson plans means you need to put on a movie which puts your kids behind, she often worked 3-4 hours on Sunday to prepare for the week ahead. This is not my mom being an overachiever, or being dedicated to her work, this is her being dedicated to ensuring that she is just doing her job. This is what the job requires. Sure, it does get easier over time as you get to reuse lesson plans. The point I want to drive home is not that working 7am-530pm is "more [time] than most professionals", but rather the quality of work is so much different, and so much harder. Managing a classroom of 25-30 children, middle schoolers in her case, is draining, so much more draining than coding. It is more draining than being a manager, because your team is often 3x as big and significantly less behaved (they're children after all). The cherry on top is that my first job out of college as a developer I was already making $30k more than my mom a year. She had a masters and 10yrs of experience at the time. I am not under the illusion that I am smarter or more qualified. To answer your statement of "I also need to do trainings, mentorings, networking", teachers regularly need to do trainings too. For my mom, these trainings are required - she was required to do something like 20 hours of professional development a year. And they often mentor students as well, as you absolutely experienced during your own education whenever you went to a teacher during their lunch break for help. I don't think tutoring versus mentoring is that hard. Having someone come to you with questions is an easy way of educating someone. The hard part is lesson plans, to think through a year of "how can I distill this knowledge down and transfer it?", which I personally have never needed to do as a tutor. To answer your question of "why don't they change professions?", I think that's rather naive. Not everyone is on the path of trying to optimize financial independence and minimize time spent working. Why do folks go into journalism? Or art, or music? Are those people stupid, because they aren't in software engineering where work is more lucrative and easier? > teachers work more in 9 months than most professionals work in a year I do think this is an overstatement, maybe a little. Maybe not. It depends on the teacher and the subject. I hope these explanations help, growing up I definitely did not realize how hard my "good" teachers worked to provide me a solid education.

stevenwoo 4y ago

A better model for public education exists: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/why-are-finlands-schools-successful-49859555/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/why-are-finlands-s... But in the USA the federal/state separation and other political considerations are so ingrained it would be hard to do this sort of revolutionary change.

acjohnson55 4y ago

> 1. The degree program was decent, although a certificate program would be better for prior professionals if the law allowed it (lower cost, too much wasted time in redundant classes). There are certificate programs in Maryland. That's how I got my Maryland teacher's license. You typically have to be enrolled in an alternative certification program, like Teach For America, Baltimore City Teaching Residency, etc. But there are a bunch of them: https://www.marylandpublicschools.org/about/Documents/DEE/ProgramApproval/MAAPP/Alternative_Preparation_Program_Directory_July_2021.pdf https://www.marylandpublicschools.org/about/Documents/DEE/Pr...

draebek 4y ago

The emphasis on "classroom control" personally doesn't surprise me. If two or three students start refusing a teacher's orders, that teacher is done for the year, and maybe forever at that school. In my middle school, discipline was all but lost in most of my classes. Play cards in class, tell the teacher to shut up. What's she going to do? We stole her phone and keys in first period, locked the doors to the room, and we disconnected the intercom weeks ago. You can send an administrator or a police officer to sit in the class, but are they going to sit there all day, every day, until the end of the year? Are they going to do that in all twenty classes that need the treatment? The second they get called away because someone set another fire in the woods, it's game on in the classroom. At least we almost never actually assaulted staff. Someone I grew up with became a teacher and quit after just a few years. She had a student actually beat her up. I regret a lot about my behavior in school, and reflecting on that has led me wonder why so many students hate being in school so much, and how—if?—we could educate children without making them resent the activity.

8note 4y ago
Send the kid home and fail them for the year? They can try again next year. Well behaved kids are the parents' problem
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  Sounds simple but as a society we have decided not to hold parents and students accountable for their actions. Teachers are left to deal with the impossible burden of raising 30+ kids and fail.
- nemothekid 4y ago
  A secondary problem is that public schools have essentially transformed into state nannys. 1. You can't send the kids home because both parents are probably working. It's more likely the kid becomes lost forever and it becomes a government problem again once that kid is now living an alternative lifestyle that consumes government resources in other ways (crime, homelessness, or health). 2. Because of the realities of (1) everyone else is now forced to asked why the kid is no longer in school and becomes a failure of the teacher that the kid is not in school. The teacher must now deal with disgruntled parents and administrators for not enduring the emotional abuse and disruption a neglected child causes while also dealing with 20 other students. I think a lot of problems with child education and just be traced back to economic realities of many parents today. Even if you are relatively well off having your kid kicked out of school isn't financially feasible for a lot of families. Even a disruptive child might be the result of absent parents who must be at work to even afford school lunch.

trimbo 4y ago

> 5. What is the current model for education based on? [...] Education is about checking a box on a list of requirements that was developed 150+ years ago. This is very well put. IMO nothing better illustrates how deep-rooted that model is than distance learning in 2020-2021 in the US. That was an opportunity to innovate quickly, and yet no state or district I know of took it seriously. Instead they had students on Zoom for 3-5 hours a day, including 1st-3rd graders, structured as if it was a regular classroom. It served no educational purpose except adhering to the model and requirements you mentioned.

MuffinFlavored 4y ago

How does the education most Americans get K-12 compare to other G20/OECD countries? Unless I'm wrong, we're like #15 or worse in a lot of educational benchmarks, right? What could federal/state/local governments do (other than divert money from wealthy areas into poorer areas) to make American children receive a more "world class" K-12 public education?

idontpost 4y ago
Stop squeezing families economically into poverty traps for corporate benefit. Squeezed families can't raise mentally healthy kids.