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At school my favourite and most effective teachers were those that my older sisters had disliked enough to warn me about. And, with my kids, it repeats; one wi

At school my favourite and most effective teachers were those that my older sisters had disliked enough to warn me about. And, with my kids, it repeats; one will like and learn from a teacher that the other kid struggles with etc. So perhaps it’s about teachers being good and effective for one child but not for another, and few are objectively bad for everyone?

gcanyon 3y ago
I think they're talking about the notorious room in the NYC school system where the dozens of teachers that have been declared unsuitable for teaching in any capacity, but who are unfireable, are forced to log their days. They sit and do nothing, in a barren and unpleasant environment, and the school system hopes they'll quit.
snapplebobapple 3y ago
From my experience, I think it's a minority of teachers probably between 5-20% that are objectively bad for everyone, but that's just my highly guesstimated sample size of one experience upscaled because I think I was in a "good" school district and I assume there are double to triple the number of objectively bad teachers in "bad" school districts. If that assumption is wrong then the number would be closer to 5%. I also upscaled a bit from my experience 20ish years ago because the number of indoctrinated whack jobs pulling insane woke nonsense like getting white students to apologize to black students appears to have risen from zero during my time to some number that is way too high. If I'm wrong, I don't think I'm that far from right here though. I didn't classify my teachers as bad because I didn't like them, I classified them as bad because they failed at teaching the whole class, or they did other criminal things like overbuy pop for student union fundraisers so they could drink the pop for free for the whole year (I should probably thank the teacher that did this since here being so terrible got me to read the teachers union contract and realize why she still had a job, which got me on the road to an economics degree and my current success). The failed to teach thing also seemed to happen disproportionately for the specific reason of seniority protected by the teachers union keeping old teachers, who have checked out, employed for the last decade or so until they could claim full pension. The teachers union keeps all these people employed, harming our kids, by making the firing process byzantine and extremely time consuming and lengthy.

gcanyon 3y ago

I think they're talking about the notorious room in the NYC school system where the dozens of teachers that have been declared unsuitable for teaching in any capacity, but who are unfireable, are forced to log their days. They sit and do nothing, in a barren and unpleasant environment, and the school system hopes they'll quit.

snapplebobapple 3y ago

From my experience, I think it's a minority of teachers probably between 5-20% that are objectively bad for everyone, but that's just my highly guesstimated sample size of one experience upscaled because I think I was in a "good" school district and I assume there are double to triple the number of objectively bad teachers in "bad" school districts. If that assumption is wrong then the number would be closer to 5%. I also upscaled a bit from my experience 20ish years ago because the number of indoctrinated whack jobs pulling insane woke nonsense like getting white students to apologize to black students appears to have risen from zero during my time to some number that is way too high. If I'm wrong, I don't think I'm that far from right here though. I didn't classify my teachers as bad because I didn't like them, I classified them as bad because they failed at teaching the whole class, or they did other criminal things like overbuy pop for student union fundraisers so they could drink the pop for free for the whole year (I should probably thank the teacher that did this since here being so terrible got me to read the teachers union contract and realize why she still had a job, which got me on the road to an economics degree and my current success). The failed to teach thing also seemed to happen disproportionately for the specific reason of seniority protected by the teachers union keeping old teachers, who have checked out, employed for the last decade or so until they could claim full pension. The teachers union keeps all these people employed, harming our kids, by making the firing process byzantine and extremely time consuming and lengthy.