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>" I'm much more concerned about the uneducated person who works as a day laborer and doesn't have the opportunity to pursue a career that might result in a sec

>" I'm much more concerned about the uneducated person who works as a day laborer and doesn't have the opportunity to pursue a career that might result in a secure retirement." She felt she was pursuing a career that might result in secure retirement. She was an educated person who was doing what we want educated people to do in our society: teach other people what they know. >I feel bad for the lady and all. No, It doesn't really sound like you do.

rayiner 13y ago
> She was an educated person who was doing what we want educated people to do in our society: teach other people what they know. We apparently don't value teaching French very much, and I can't really argue that we should value it more. > No, It doesn't really sound like you do. I certainly do. But what really irks me about this piece is that we're supposed to feel particularly outraged because this woman belonged to our class (educated professional). And that rubs me the wrong way.
- Xylakant 13y ago
  > We apparently don't value teaching French very much, and I can't really argue that we should value it more. I don't understand that statement. Why should we not value teaching more? Anything we, as programmers, do relies on knowledge. It was taught to us at some point, by people who taught us, by people who wrote books, by examples put out on the internet by somebody. By our math teachers who laid the foundation for a logical understanding of code. By the philosophy teachers who taught us logic. Teaching is the most important way of shaping ours and other peoples minds, so why is it hard to argue that we should value teaching higher? Is teaching french less "valuable" than teaching english or C or Fortran or Prolog just because it's french? Is it all of a sudden less work because it's just "french", a pesky natural language that's hardly understood by computers and only spoken by a handful of people that happen to have invented the croissant? Shouldn't be all teaching be paid sufficiently, so that teachers will enlighten your kids or your friends kids, handing off the knowledge of mankind to the next generation? I, personally have no problem arguing that learning french, just as learning any other language expands your mind, shapes and improves the way you think and thus teaching it is one of the more valuable services that people can provide.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    Wait a minute. We do value teaching more; you haven't read a story about a high school teacher dying in poverty, because high school teachers get above-median salary, health insurance, and defined-benefit pensions. This woman didn't simply choose to be a teacher. She chose to be a very specific kind of teacher, and the kind she chose to be was not a well-compensated kind.
    - Xylakant 13y ago
      I don't think that we _do_ value teaching a lot if 75% of all teacher at that given school are the low-paid kind of teachers that earn about 50% of the median salary. Also, if three quarters of all employed teachers at that school are the low-paid kind, I don't think that there's much choice involved.
      - tptacek 13y ago
        We don't value adjunct professors, I agree. But anyone with the credentials to be an adjunct professor could, presumably, get a well-compensated job teaching somewhere else. The expectation as I understand it in academia is that you're supposed to move on from adjunct professorship when it becomes clear that you're not getting tenure.
        patio11 13y ago
        So, not quite so much there. Adjunct professors are, by definition, not on the tenure track. You're thinking, perhaps, of associate professors, who receive wages which are roughly commensurate with e.g. high school teachers but are frequently fired after 7 years (denied tenure). Adjuncts are a permanent academic underclass, in just about every sense of the word. (The one glimmer of hope, for adjuncts who have an MA but not a PhD, is to finish their PhD and then get an associate professorship afterwards. If you're a PhD and an adjunct, your career as an academic is functionally over.)
        Xylakant 13y ago
        This is the assumption. However, reality begs to differ. In a place where 75% of the teachers are adjuncts and more and more tenures are replaced by adjuncts, that assumption does not hold. Teaching as an activity is in general valued by society, but that doesn't seem to pay of in appropriate wages for a large part of the teaching workforce. I think that's a sad state.

rayiner 13y ago

> She was an educated person who was doing what we want educated people to do in our society: teach other people what they know. We apparently don't value teaching French very much, and I can't really argue that we should value it more. > No, It doesn't really sound like you do. I certainly do. But what really irks me about this piece is that we're supposed to feel particularly outraged because this woman belonged to our class (educated professional). And that rubs me the wrong way.

Xylakant 13y ago
> We apparently don't value teaching French very much, and I can't really argue that we should value it more. I don't understand that statement. Why should we not value teaching more? Anything we, as programmers, do relies on knowledge. It was taught to us at some point, by people who taught us, by people who wrote books, by examples put out on the internet by somebody. By our math teachers who laid the foundation for a logical understanding of code. By the philosophy teachers who taught us logic. Teaching is the most important way of shaping ours and other peoples minds, so why is it hard to argue that we should value teaching higher? Is teaching french less "valuable" than teaching english or C or Fortran or Prolog just because it's french? Is it all of a sudden less work because it's just "french", a pesky natural language that's hardly understood by computers and only spoken by a handful of people that happen to have invented the croissant? Shouldn't be all teaching be paid sufficiently, so that teachers will enlighten your kids or your friends kids, handing off the knowledge of mankind to the next generation? I, personally have no problem arguing that learning french, just as learning any other language expands your mind, shapes and improves the way you think and thus teaching it is one of the more valuable services that people can provide.
- tptacek 13y ago
  Wait a minute. We do value teaching more; you haven't read a story about a high school teacher dying in poverty, because high school teachers get above-median salary, health insurance, and defined-benefit pensions. This woman didn't simply choose to be a teacher. She chose to be a very specific kind of teacher, and the kind she chose to be was not a well-compensated kind.
  - Xylakant 13y ago
    I don't think that we _do_ value teaching a lot if 75% of all teacher at that given school are the low-paid kind of teachers that earn about 50% of the median salary. Also, if three quarters of all employed teachers at that school are the low-paid kind, I don't think that there's much choice involved.
    - tptacek 13y ago
      We don't value adjunct professors, I agree. But anyone with the credentials to be an adjunct professor could, presumably, get a well-compensated job teaching somewhere else. The expectation as I understand it in academia is that you're supposed to move on from adjunct professorship when it becomes clear that you're not getting tenure.
      - patio11 13y ago
        So, not quite so much there. Adjunct professors are, by definition, not on the tenure track. You're thinking, perhaps, of associate professors, who receive wages which are roughly commensurate with e.g. high school teachers but are frequently fired after 7 years (denied tenure). Adjuncts are a permanent academic underclass, in just about every sense of the word. (The one glimmer of hope, for adjuncts who have an MA but not a PhD, is to finish their PhD and then get an associate professorship afterwards. If you're a PhD and an adjunct, your career as an academic is functionally over.)
      - Xylakant 13y ago
        This is the assumption. However, reality begs to differ. In a place where 75% of the teachers are adjuncts and more and more tenures are replaced by adjuncts, that assumption does not hold. Teaching as an activity is in general valued by society, but that doesn't seem to pay of in appropriate wages for a large part of the teaching workforce. I think that's a sad state.