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Former HS math teacher here. It was the hardest job I’ve ever had. I still have nightmares about being back in the classroom 18 years later. I was easily workin

by dhosek 4y ago

Former HS math teacher here. It was the hardest job I’ve ever had. I still have nightmares about being back in the classroom 18 years later. I was easily working 12+ hours a day doing class planning, grading, etc. not to mention the actual teaching. Returning to programming my pay doubled and my stress level dropped profoundly. Teacher pay should easily be double what it is. (And about that summers off—with the exception of teachers who had non-teaching spouses or those in the back third of their career, everyone worked summer jobs to make ends meet.)

acjohnson55 4y ago
I'm also a former HS math teacher and I 100% agree.
douglaswlance 4y ago
Why do you need to plan/grade ? Why isn't that automated?
- jedberg 4y ago
  Ah, the engineer who thinks everything can be solved with software. To automate grading you first must create a general AI, because if you just do multiple choice exams, you aren't really testing or measuring someone's ability to perform the task, you're just measuring their ability to make a good guess. And some teachers do that. But not the good ones. As for planning, some senior teachers have filing cabinets labeled by day. They just reach into the file and pull out the lesson for "day 82". But any good teacher will realize that they have to customize the learning to that year's kids, and constantly update with new teaching methodologies, new information, etc. And sometimes the school adopts a whole new curriculum, and then you have to start all over.
  - acjohnson55 4y ago
    > Ah, the engineer who thinks everything can be solved with software. Just as a bit of feedback, starting your comment like this may have turned off the original poster to the rest of your thoughts, which I agree with.
    - azemetre 4y ago
      Sometimes we all need to be slapped with a fish in the face in order to see how credulous we are with our biases.
      - acjohnson55 4y ago
        My comment is net -1 right now, and I don't believe I made any assumptions about the person I responded to in the feedback I tried to offer. If people don't think my feedback is useful, that's fine, but if I had started it off with something like "ah, the presumptuous teacher", I'm pretty sure it would be been received even worse. I read the initial comment as asking a naive question, but I think that's great, as long as they are open to answers that contradict their assumptions. People should be able to do that and get earnest answers without backhanded comments. Asking naive questions is a big part of how I learn, personally.
        galaxyLogic 4y ago
        "ah, the presumptuous teacher" . That is a perfect example of bad discourse. Why is it bad? Because it is "Ad Hominem". It attacks the person making the comment, not the reasoning in the comment. https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ad-hominem https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ad-hominem
        acjohnson55 4y ago
        Right, that's my point.
    - closewith 4y ago
      Maybe it will cause the OP to reevaluate whatever absurd worldview led them to posting a ridiculous comment?
      - DiggyJohnson 4y ago
        The point, I think, is that it almost never leads to this outcome. Humans respond very poorly to [perceived] antagonism from anonymous strangers. I know I do, and it’s why I’m working on removing all my snark from internet comments. I’ve also found that you can usually rephrase the snark (“do you really think…?”) into a straightforward question in a neutral tone.
  - sseagull 4y ago
    Also, I will add, there is an element of good teaching that involves building a relationship with your students. Getting personalized feedback (encouragement, small corrections, etc) can mean much more to a student than a simple green checkmark/red x somewhere. Good educators can know when to apply the right amount of pushing or backing off that can help a student succeed. Ideally, of course. Lots of bad teachers out there…
    - KennyBlanken 4y ago
      100% agreed. On the other hand, automated grading would remove a lot of the biases. For example, it's been repeatedly proven that girls get graded higher than boys.
      - adotbacon 4y ago
        Source? Maybe I'm clashing with the specific phrasing since I haven't heard of a bias in the grading itself (i.e. a bias of the teacher), but rather a bias of the system. Schooling as a whole aligns more with girls' strengths as they're more consistent in the day-to-day (ex: organization, planning, homework) whereas boys tend to test better [0]. The weighting of assignments in a particular class could tip the benefit in either direction. I could believe girls 'get graded higher' on written assignments due to generally better handwriting. I had poor handwriting (though recall at least one girl classmate with worse) and certainly received no credit on some correct answers as a result. I imagine a frustrated teacher reading through a chicken-scratch essay might dock some points - whether directly with a note calling it out (also happened to me), discreetly, or subconsciously. [0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/09/why-girls-get-better-grades-than-boys-do/380318/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/09/why-gi...
  - dionidium 4y ago
    > But any good teacher will realize that they have to customize the learning to that year's kids, and constantly update with new teaching methodologies, new information, etc. I mean this seriously: why? High school math is not a rapidly changing field. Sure, you might have to slow down or speed up, depending on the class -- although, is even that true? Is the average student really changing all that much from year to year? -- but that means taking out the file for day 82 on day 87 or whatever. That's not a massive adjustment. The material is unchanging. The students aren't going to be all that different from year to year. What's going on that it seems like common sense to so many people that teaching high school math requires a bunch of novel planning?
    - jedberg 4y ago
      > High school math is not a rapidly changing field Are you sure? Here is a list of 16,000+ papers written about teaching high school math since 2018: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2018&q=pedagogy+upper+grade+math&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2018&q=pedagogy+up... Also, as a teacher, you have to adopt the district standards, which change every few years. Certain areas are removed, others added, some things are more important, some less. Those standards are changing to meet new standardized testing requirements. There is a lot of change happening. Just like in programming. People who learned Cobol still need to learn new languages once in a while, because things change, even though the principles stay the same. It's the same data structures, same algorithms, but yet software engineering is rapidly changing.
      - andrewprock 4y ago
        Most of this change is driven by something other than need. The high school mathematics curriculum is a bit of a funny beast in the US, but it is certainly not the weak point in the system.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - HighPlainsDrftr 4y ago
  - d0mine 4y ago
    Software is a tool that can be used effectively in education (e.g., Khan Academy). Nobody says it is the only tool that you should use. If you are saying that 100% of grading must be manual, it implies 0% effectiveness of Khan Academy (false). In practice, even if just a half of the tests can be automated, it would free the time for teachers to do the work that can't be automated. Software can provide a great leverage.
    - Beltalowda 4y ago
      > If you are saying that 100% of grading must be manual That's not what was said though; I don't think anyone has a problem with some grading being automated (e.g. multiple-choice), and software has been used for decades for this kind of thing. But there are serious limitations to this. If I solve a math problem in the correct way but made a silly mistake in the arithmetic leading to the wrong answer, then this is still a "correct" answer in a way, worth of some points. And grading math is easy; how would you automate the grading of a question like "describe two reasons why the American settlers declared independence"?
- acjohnson55 4y ago
  Planning needs to be responsive to how the prior lessons went. You can't simply pre-plan a whole year and expect those lessons to be effective. Eventually, you can get close to that point, if you are lucky enough to teach the same subject for years. But much like you can't expect a standup comedian to perform someone else's routine effectively, as a teacher, each individual has to figure out what's effective for them. Teaching is dynamic and interpersonal. Grading is not just a matter of right/wrong, even in fields like math, where questions can be given that have one correct answer. It's providing the student feedback on where their misconceptions were that led to an incorrect response. And of course, the most meaningful schoolwork assignments don't have a single correct answer.
  - simonw 4y ago
    This is one of the many things that I find so interesting about effective teaching. Your students are forming a mental model of how something works. Your job is to help guide them to the correct mental model. If their mental model goes wrong, you have to debug it: you need to figure out exactly what they've misunderstood (which could be anything, and could be from years before your lessons with them started) and help them correct. Here's a really good detailed write-up of this idea: https://teachtogether.tech/en/index.html#s:models https://teachtogether.tech/en/index.html#s:models
    - acjohnson55 4y ago
      Yep, done correctly, it's a lot like debugging. Although, maybe in reverse. When I'm debugging, I'm trying to learn from the infallible machine how my assumption of how my own code works is incorrect :)
thayne 4y ago
My mother is a teacher, and she often has to do work during the summer to prepare for the next year, even though her pay is based on her getting the summer off. Not to mention that she is required to do additional training during the summer, sometimes at her own expense.
- vuln 4y ago
  Interesting. Every public city school system that I’ve attended and participated in gave the teachers the choice of 10 months of pay or 12. Seemed like every tenured teacher took the 12 month while the younger teachers took the 10 month. This might be because of age and financial security. The tired teachers don’t want to pick up a summer job. While the younger bunch picks up jobs as bartenders and servers and probably clear more in 2 months than the whole year as a teacher. One Friday evening I went out with some friends and ended up running into my son’s 6 grade teacher pouring body shots on themselves for the patrons to enjoy. Maybe that’s the way it works in a “resort” town.
  - ngetchell 4y ago
    They don't pay the teachers more if they opt for 12 months of pay over 10. They are still paid for 10 months of work, even if the paychecks are spread evenly.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  I agree. My parents and step-parents are all [retired] teachers, too, and nothing irritated them quite like the "BuT tHeY hAvE sUmMeRs OfF!" crap from people who have no idea what they're talking about. Trust me, we never went on kickass 3 month long summer family vacations. My parents worked their asses off throughout the summer, tying up loose ends from the previous year, working on lesson plans, training, and preparing for the next year.
galaxyLogic 4y ago
Teacher's job is no doubt stressful. Therefore I think we must invent new ways of automating the teaching, amplify the powers of a single teacher. That way there will be enough teachers to provide for every child. Not sure how to get there. But what about the adult population? I think large swaths of it are in need of more education. Math literacy, evidence-based evaluation of propaganda. Large portion of US population believes last election was stolen.
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  Or, and hear me out: we could cut our military budget (which is larger than the next ten or so countries combined, both total and per capita) and start tipping the corporate tax share back towards the ~%50 it was sixty years ago and magically be able to: * pay teachers a fair wage * hire enough teachers, assistants, and admins so that teachers don't have to work at least another half a workday 'off the books' * fund schools well enough that teachers don't have to pay out of pocket for basic supplies like chalk and paper * feed our children a proper meal at lunch by default, instead of making them pay for a crappy meal (unless their busy parents jump through hoops to prove they're poor enough) One of the strangest things for me as a private school student coming from the public school system was being able to go into the lunch line, get what food I wanted, as much as I wanted, and not have to pay for it. No worries about losing the lunch money I'd been given, getting beat up for my lunch money, etc.
  - galaxyLogic 4y ago
    I'm not familiar with US Private vs. Public schools so which one requires you to pay for the lunch? In many countries in Europe there are only public schools.
    - cwmma 4y ago
      A public school in America (but not in England) is a state run school which may or may not have free lunches (it's often income related), Private schools are ones you pay to go to and tend to charge for food or order out for food.
xhevahir 4y ago
I've wondered if the onerousness of lesson planning is due in part to the extremely fragmented nature of American education, where every school district formulates its own curriculum. I'd be curious to know what it's like for teachers who teach a standardized, national curriculum like France's.
- dhosek 4y ago
  I don’t know, although there are some rigidly standardized curricula in use in the US. One is in military base schools—since kids might move from virtually any school in the system to another, the curriculum has been designed so that, e.g., every Algebra I classroom covers the same material on the same day and every Freshman English class is reading the same book at the same time. The other case is the Integrated Math curriculum which specifies lesson plans on a daily basis. I have no direct experience with either.
ltbarcly3 4y ago
Well then there was my math teacher in HS, who made me grade the homework during her planning period while she sold Avon to random people who came into the school and met with her in the math teachers' office. Not all teachers even try to do their job.
sicp-enjoyer 4y ago
Do you think you are someone who is good at setting healthy boundaries with your job and employers? Or are you someone who naturally wants to help out a lot and gets pulled into more than you can handle? The teachers I knew who worked until old age had developed systems to make their jobs sustainable and predictable, while younger teachers tended to scramble with new programs and initiatives.
ALittleLight 4y ago
I will never understand why teachers both do lots of extra work and complain about it. Teachers aren't slaves. If your job requires you to work 12 hour days quit and do something else. If you like working that hard, then why complain? Plus, my own experience in the public school system as a student tells me not all teachers are working 12, or even 8, hour days. Again, if you want to be a good teacher - why complain that it's hard? Just be the best teacher you can with eight hours of work. It's not like teachers are fired for being bad.
- orestarod 4y ago
  What happens if no one complains, nothing changes as a result, and everyone just quits instead? You get the current situation, which has not even developed fully. Most of what you take for granted is because someone at one point in time complained about how things were and tried to change them. If you are good enough, force change, just quitting it is an acceptance that you lose your battle and you go on to select another, easier battle, in the hopes you won't lose that too. Nothing wrong with quitting, but I do find it wrong to smear those who complain about wrong things.
  - ALittleLight 4y ago
    I've been hearing teachers complain about this kind of thing my entire life. To me, it seems like complaining isn't working. If anything, the issues teachers are facing are getting worse. This is because, I imagine, administrators know they can ignore the complaints and still get the output from the teachers at the given pay. If complaints don't hurt administrators, then they won't motivate change. I think complaints can be useful in identifying a problem, but if your complaints have been made, just continuing to complain doesn't do anything. On the other hand, quitting, does two useful things. First, it takes you out of a bad situation letting you move on to a better one faster. Second, it helps brings the problem to a head. The administration can ignore teachers complaining, they cannot ignore teachers quitting. At some point they will have to resolve the issue.
- dhosek 4y ago
  >It's not like teachers are fired for being bad. They are. The exception tends to be at the poorest schools where the principals have trouble hiring and keeping teachers. When I was interviewing for teaching positions, I met with the principal for a school in South Central L.A. and the only question he asked me as, “do you promise not to quit before the end of the school year?” Elsewhere bad teachers are fired, sometimes even in the middle of the school year.

by dhosek 4y ago

acjohnson55 4y ago

I'm also a former HS math teacher and I 100% agree.

douglaswlance 4y ago

Why do you need to plan/grade ? Why isn't that automated?

jedberg 4y ago
Ah, the engineer who thinks everything can be solved with software. To automate grading you first must create a general AI, because if you just do multiple choice exams, you aren't really testing or measuring someone's ability to perform the task, you're just measuring their ability to make a good guess. And some teachers do that. But not the good ones. As for planning, some senior teachers have filing cabinets labeled by day. They just reach into the file and pull out the lesson for "day 82". But any good teacher will realize that they have to customize the learning to that year's kids, and constantly update with new teaching methodologies, new information, etc. And sometimes the school adopts a whole new curriculum, and then you have to start all over.
- acjohnson55 4y ago
  > Ah, the engineer who thinks everything can be solved with software. Just as a bit of feedback, starting your comment like this may have turned off the original poster to the rest of your thoughts, which I agree with.
  - azemetre 4y ago
    Sometimes we all need to be slapped with a fish in the face in order to see how credulous we are with our biases.
    - acjohnson55 4y ago
      My comment is net -1 right now, and I don't believe I made any assumptions about the person I responded to in the feedback I tried to offer. If people don't think my feedback is useful, that's fine, but if I had started it off with something like "ah, the presumptuous teacher", I'm pretty sure it would be been received even worse. I read the initial comment as asking a naive question, but I think that's great, as long as they are open to answers that contradict their assumptions. People should be able to do that and get earnest answers without backhanded comments. Asking naive questions is a big part of how I learn, personally.
      - galaxyLogic 4y ago
        "ah, the presumptuous teacher" . That is a perfect example of bad discourse. Why is it bad? Because it is "Ad Hominem". It attacks the person making the comment, not the reasoning in the comment. https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ad-hominem https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ad-hominem
        acjohnson55 4y ago
        Right, that's my point.
  - closewith 4y ago
    Maybe it will cause the OP to reevaluate whatever absurd worldview led them to posting a ridiculous comment?
    - DiggyJohnson 4y ago
      The point, I think, is that it almost never leads to this outcome. Humans respond very poorly to [perceived] antagonism from anonymous strangers. I know I do, and it’s why I’m working on removing all my snark from internet comments. I’ve also found that you can usually rephrase the snark (“do you really think…?”) into a straightforward question in a neutral tone.
- sseagull 4y ago
  Also, I will add, there is an element of good teaching that involves building a relationship with your students. Getting personalized feedback (encouragement, small corrections, etc) can mean much more to a student than a simple green checkmark/red x somewhere. Good educators can know when to apply the right amount of pushing or backing off that can help a student succeed. Ideally, of course. Lots of bad teachers out there…
  - KennyBlanken 4y ago
    100% agreed. On the other hand, automated grading would remove a lot of the biases. For example, it's been repeatedly proven that girls get graded higher than boys.
    - adotbacon 4y ago
      Source? Maybe I'm clashing with the specific phrasing since I haven't heard of a bias in the grading itself (i.e. a bias of the teacher), but rather a bias of the system. Schooling as a whole aligns more with girls' strengths as they're more consistent in the day-to-day (ex: organization, planning, homework) whereas boys tend to test better [0]. The weighting of assignments in a particular class could tip the benefit in either direction. I could believe girls 'get graded higher' on written assignments due to generally better handwriting. I had poor handwriting (though recall at least one girl classmate with worse) and certainly received no credit on some correct answers as a result. I imagine a frustrated teacher reading through a chicken-scratch essay might dock some points - whether directly with a note calling it out (also happened to me), discreetly, or subconsciously. [0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/09/why-girls-get-better-grades-than-boys-do/380318/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/09/why-gi...
- dionidium 4y ago
  > But any good teacher will realize that they have to customize the learning to that year's kids, and constantly update with new teaching methodologies, new information, etc. I mean this seriously: why? High school math is not a rapidly changing field. Sure, you might have to slow down or speed up, depending on the class -- although, is even that true? Is the average student really changing all that much from year to year? -- but that means taking out the file for day 82 on day 87 or whatever. That's not a massive adjustment. The material is unchanging. The students aren't going to be all that different from year to year. What's going on that it seems like common sense to so many people that teaching high school math requires a bunch of novel planning?
  - jedberg 4y ago
    > High school math is not a rapidly changing field Are you sure? Here is a list of 16,000+ papers written about teaching high school math since 2018: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2018&q=pedagogy+upper+grade+math&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2018&q=pedagogy+up... Also, as a teacher, you have to adopt the district standards, which change every few years. Certain areas are removed, others added, some things are more important, some less. Those standards are changing to meet new standardized testing requirements. There is a lot of change happening. Just like in programming. People who learned Cobol still need to learn new languages once in a while, because things change, even though the principles stay the same. It's the same data structures, same algorithms, but yet software engineering is rapidly changing.
    - andrewprock 4y ago
      Most of this change is driven by something other than need. The high school mathematics curriculum is a bit of a funny beast in the US, but it is certainly not the weak point in the system.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - HighPlainsDrftr 4y ago
- d0mine 4y ago
  Software is a tool that can be used effectively in education (e.g., Khan Academy). Nobody says it is the only tool that you should use. If you are saying that 100% of grading must be manual, it implies 0% effectiveness of Khan Academy (false). In practice, even if just a half of the tests can be automated, it would free the time for teachers to do the work that can't be automated. Software can provide a great leverage.
  - Beltalowda 4y ago
    > If you are saying that 100% of grading must be manual That's not what was said though; I don't think anyone has a problem with some grading being automated (e.g. multiple-choice), and software has been used for decades for this kind of thing. But there are serious limitations to this. If I solve a math problem in the correct way but made a silly mistake in the arithmetic leading to the wrong answer, then this is still a "correct" answer in a way, worth of some points. And grading math is easy; how would you automate the grading of a question like "describe two reasons why the American settlers declared independence"?
acjohnson55 4y ago
Planning needs to be responsive to how the prior lessons went. You can't simply pre-plan a whole year and expect those lessons to be effective. Eventually, you can get close to that point, if you are lucky enough to teach the same subject for years. But much like you can't expect a standup comedian to perform someone else's routine effectively, as a teacher, each individual has to figure out what's effective for them. Teaching is dynamic and interpersonal. Grading is not just a matter of right/wrong, even in fields like math, where questions can be given that have one correct answer. It's providing the student feedback on where their misconceptions were that led to an incorrect response. And of course, the most meaningful schoolwork assignments don't have a single correct answer.
- simonw 4y ago
  This is one of the many things that I find so interesting about effective teaching. Your students are forming a mental model of how something works. Your job is to help guide them to the correct mental model. If their mental model goes wrong, you have to debug it: you need to figure out exactly what they've misunderstood (which could be anything, and could be from years before your lessons with them started) and help them correct. Here's a really good detailed write-up of this idea: https://teachtogether.tech/en/index.html#s:models https://teachtogether.tech/en/index.html#s:models
  - acjohnson55 4y ago
    Yep, done correctly, it's a lot like debugging. Although, maybe in reverse. When I'm debugging, I'm trying to learn from the infallible machine how my assumption of how my own code works is incorrect :)

thayne 4y ago

My mother is a teacher, and she often has to do work during the summer to prepare for the next year, even though her pay is based on her getting the summer off. Not to mention that she is required to do additional training during the summer, sometimes at her own expense.

vuln 4y ago
Interesting. Every public city school system that I’ve attended and participated in gave the teachers the choice of 10 months of pay or 12. Seemed like every tenured teacher took the 12 month while the younger teachers took the 10 month. This might be because of age and financial security. The tired teachers don’t want to pick up a summer job. While the younger bunch picks up jobs as bartenders and servers and probably clear more in 2 months than the whole year as a teacher. One Friday evening I went out with some friends and ended up running into my son’s 6 grade teacher pouring body shots on themselves for the patrons to enjoy. Maybe that’s the way it works in a “resort” town.
- ngetchell 4y ago
  They don't pay the teachers more if they opt for 12 months of pay over 10. They are still paid for 10 months of work, even if the paychecks are spread evenly.
ryandrake 4y ago
I agree. My parents and step-parents are all [retired] teachers, too, and nothing irritated them quite like the "BuT tHeY hAvE sUmMeRs OfF!" crap from people who have no idea what they're talking about. Trust me, we never went on kickass 3 month long summer family vacations. My parents worked their asses off throughout the summer, tying up loose ends from the previous year, working on lesson plans, training, and preparing for the next year.

galaxyLogic 4y ago

Teacher's job is no doubt stressful. Therefore I think we must invent new ways of automating the teaching, amplify the powers of a single teacher. That way there will be enough teachers to provide for every child. Not sure how to get there. But what about the adult population? I think large swaths of it are in need of more education. Math literacy, evidence-based evaluation of propaganda. Large portion of US population believes last election was stolen.

KennyBlanken 4y ago
Or, and hear me out: we could cut our military budget (which is larger than the next ten or so countries combined, both total and per capita) and start tipping the corporate tax share back towards the ~%50 it was sixty years ago and magically be able to: * pay teachers a fair wage * hire enough teachers, assistants, and admins so that teachers don't have to work at least another half a workday 'off the books' * fund schools well enough that teachers don't have to pay out of pocket for basic supplies like chalk and paper * feed our children a proper meal at lunch by default, instead of making them pay for a crappy meal (unless their busy parents jump through hoops to prove they're poor enough) One of the strangest things for me as a private school student coming from the public school system was being able to go into the lunch line, get what food I wanted, as much as I wanted, and not have to pay for it. No worries about losing the lunch money I'd been given, getting beat up for my lunch money, etc.
- galaxyLogic 4y ago
  I'm not familiar with US Private vs. Public schools so which one requires you to pay for the lunch? In many countries in Europe there are only public schools.
  - cwmma 4y ago
    A public school in America (but not in England) is a state run school which may or may not have free lunches (it's often income related), Private schools are ones you pay to go to and tend to charge for food or order out for food.

xhevahir 4y ago

I've wondered if the onerousness of lesson planning is due in part to the extremely fragmented nature of American education, where every school district formulates its own curriculum. I'd be curious to know what it's like for teachers who teach a standardized, national curriculum like France's.

dhosek 4y ago
I don’t know, although there are some rigidly standardized curricula in use in the US. One is in military base schools—since kids might move from virtually any school in the system to another, the curriculum has been designed so that, e.g., every Algebra I classroom covers the same material on the same day and every Freshman English class is reading the same book at the same time. The other case is the Integrated Math curriculum which specifies lesson plans on a daily basis. I have no direct experience with either.

ltbarcly3 4y ago

Well then there was my math teacher in HS, who made me grade the homework during her planning period while she sold Avon to random people who came into the school and met with her in the math teachers' office. Not all teachers even try to do their job.

sicp-enjoyer 4y ago

Do you think you are someone who is good at setting healthy boundaries with your job and employers? Or are you someone who naturally wants to help out a lot and gets pulled into more than you can handle? The teachers I knew who worked until old age had developed systems to make their jobs sustainable and predictable, while younger teachers tended to scramble with new programs and initiatives.

ALittleLight 4y ago

I will never understand why teachers both do lots of extra work and complain about it. Teachers aren't slaves. If your job requires you to work 12 hour days quit and do something else. If you like working that hard, then why complain? Plus, my own experience in the public school system as a student tells me not all teachers are working 12, or even 8, hour days. Again, if you want to be a good teacher - why complain that it's hard? Just be the best teacher you can with eight hours of work. It's not like teachers are fired for being bad.

orestarod 4y ago
What happens if no one complains, nothing changes as a result, and everyone just quits instead? You get the current situation, which has not even developed fully. Most of what you take for granted is because someone at one point in time complained about how things were and tried to change them. If you are good enough, force change, just quitting it is an acceptance that you lose your battle and you go on to select another, easier battle, in the hopes you won't lose that too. Nothing wrong with quitting, but I do find it wrong to smear those who complain about wrong things.
- ALittleLight 4y ago
  I've been hearing teachers complain about this kind of thing my entire life. To me, it seems like complaining isn't working. If anything, the issues teachers are facing are getting worse. This is because, I imagine, administrators know they can ignore the complaints and still get the output from the teachers at the given pay. If complaints don't hurt administrators, then they won't motivate change. I think complaints can be useful in identifying a problem, but if your complaints have been made, just continuing to complain doesn't do anything. On the other hand, quitting, does two useful things. First, it takes you out of a bad situation letting you move on to a better one faster. Second, it helps brings the problem to a head. The administration can ignore teachers complaining, they cannot ignore teachers quitting. At some point they will have to resolve the issue.
dhosek 4y ago
>It's not like teachers are fired for being bad. They are. The exception tends to be at the poorest schools where the principals have trouble hiring and keeping teachers. When I was interviewing for teaching positions, I met with the principal for a school in South Central L.A. and the only question he asked me as, “do you promise not to quit before the end of the school year?” Elsewhere bad teachers are fired, sometimes even in the middle of the school year.