Aw, you guys are the best. Sweet dreams. I’ll be back in the morning to collect any more sweet, sweet bitch tears anyone has.
Yeah, it’s a really adorable schtick you’ve got going on. Clever too. :rolleyes:
Oh thank god he’s gone (Rand Rover). For being in the pit, this has been almost miraculously enjoyable to read and civil, until he showed up.
For those who asked about teaching in Canada, there is no stigma attached to being a teacher in Ontario, or at least not in Northern Ontario. People joke about it, but there’s no real hate.
There have been a lot of great responses since I last checked the thread… and I appreciate everyone’s input. Glad to see it went 150+ replies before it devolved into personal insults! I really enjoyed all the different points of view.
Thanks to those of you who addressed my main concerns and questions I brought up
Also, I wish I had been a teacher in Canada if what keeganst said was true, or taught in a better school district with more support, as another teacher did.
Not all principals are incompetent. I was only addressing ONE particular principal in my unique situation, and never implied that all principals were like that. My lack of support from administration is evidently not the case for all teachers, but it was a problem I heard a lot about so I drew generalizations.
I laughed so hard when I read Lightnin’s response!!! This is my point exactly, to both teachers and non-teachers.
If you don’t think you are paid enough, etc, get out of teaching and get a job that pays better.
If you think teachers are paid too much, quit your job and go be a teacher.
Neither of these will solve the problem of education in the US that we are facing, but maybe it will shut us up long enough to talk about the other issues at hand.
Well, duh, everybody knows that everything that goes wrong during the semester is the teacher’s fault:
Seriously, though, we (in college–I can’t speak for the K-12 teachers) have all had variations on that conversation in the video many, many times.
That hurt. Physically.
My wife is a University Professor. There is a point at which ‘its funny because its true’ becomes ‘it’s not funny because its so true’…this has crossed it.
Well, I think Rand Rover has very clearly demonstrated that his hatred, at least, is based on class envy. I imagine that if he controlled the salaries of other professions he’d be trying to get them lowered, as well. Because after all, nobody deserves the money more than him.
“It’s not enough that I win- *you *have to lose.”
What’s your evidence for that? I’m sure it’s “your posts.” I’ve never sai anything that woule lkead a reasonable person to conclude that I want anyone else to make less money.
While I could certainly be persuaded that good teachers should be paid more than they are now, there is little evidence that 22 years of experience makes a teacher much better than someone with much less experience. If someone provides that much value then he should be paid that much because he provides that value, be he a new teacher or an old one.
Of course, I don’t know how much demand there actually is for good teachers. Good teachers care. Good teachers make kids work. Good teachers don’t just go through the motions and shuttle the kids on to the next grade. If Junior has been skating along this whole time and suddenly is expected to do all the reading in order to master his physics lessons, well it’s probably just a shitty teacher, right? Good teachers stir things up, and parents (and thus administrators) don’t like that. It’s a wonder that I’m sitting here now with Ph.D in chemistry because I had a grand total of one adequate science teacher before college. His contract did not get renewed because the principal’s intellectually challenged son struggled too much in his class.
Teacher quality has a significant impact on future earnings of the students they teach,* but the whole system is not set up to create, hire, and reward the best teachers and weed out the bad ones. My (possibly untestable) hypothesis is that once we look past the minimum level of competency to get tenured, bad teachers are more likely to stick it out than good ones, since the good ones care more and burn out faster. The hiring pool is already dilute due to the somewhat lackluster quality of the students who enter teaching programs. The regulations that set standards for teacher certification often actually provide a barrier to entry for potential quality candidates. It does take a few years for a teacher to “settle in”, but by the time they do (or don’t) they’re already tenured so the point is moot.
On a side note, and this may warrant a separate thread, I often wonder how necessary and useful teacher training is, given that minimally trained (but smart) college grads often go out and teach with comparable ability to trained teachers (think Teach for American and their ilk).
*Eric A. Hanushek, “The economic value of higher teacher quality”, Economics of Education Review, 30(3), 2011, 466.
I don’t believe you make that much money. If so, it’s due neither to your intelligence nor your personality.
Which suggests that the idea of paying teachers more if they get more education is mistaken.
Regards,
Shodan
Way to feed the troll. Not to single you out, just saying that there was an interesting post right before yours and you went after fucking random bendover.
But not, necessarily, that paying teachers more is a bad idea. Anybody have recent stats on the international incomes of teachers handy? Especially those countries that beat the pants off the US for math & science in standardized tests, please.
Sure - Canadian average teacher incomes ~ 40k
…except teachers.
I was thinking Japan and Singapore, but it’s always nice when Canada shows up.
It was somewhat interesting, but others had taken a shot at RR and I couldn’t resist the temptation to take one of my own.
Back to the OP, I think the Reich wing has declared war on anyone who draws a government check. I don’t think teachers are singled out more than firemen or civil servants. I don’t think teacher unions are a bigger target than the UAW or the AFL-CIO. The right hates government, the right hates unions. Whether you’re in one group or both is immaterial, if you’re in either, you’re The Enemy.
Oh, yes there are. Primarily when it comes to supervisors and the performance of their subordinates. You run a sales office, you are judged on the sales that your team makes, not the quality of your meetings, or the rapidity in which you process your paperwork, or your ability to implement novel management techniques. Even if your salesmen are fully commissioned, it’s the manager’s job to assign the right work to his people, deploy their efforts effectively, and “sell” them on the idea of doing their work, rather than leaving it all up to them.
You also mention a salesman’s metric is sales, and that’s true. However, no salesman is going to continue to get good sales if the other employees of the organization, engineering, assembly, product support, etc, fail to do their jobs adequately. Their sales are dependent on the other folks doing a good job.
Since the entire point of school is to matriculate people who have an appropriate level of knowledge in various subjects, their performance is important. The way my company handles performance pay is to set the total pool of available money on the overall performance of the company, and set my individual piece of that pool on my personal performance. Thus, if I perform exceptionally well, I will get more than my peers, but I may not get as much as last year if the company did worse. In a school, this might be set up as the total available pool being set based on various standardized tests, within a predefined range, but each individual teacher’s bonus based on peer/supervisor review of their work.