I have no idea what kind of point you think you’re making. You’re kind of slow, huh? Your mama fucked your uncle?
To be fair, I don’t categorize it as a right-wing vs left-wing problem… and I think it was a little misleading that you quoted me along with the others. I just think it’s an American problem, where we tend to shift blame away from ourselves onto others whenever possible. Parents who coddle their children don’t want to admit that their little darlings aren’t doing enough to succeed, so they blame everyone but themselves and their children.
I hated teachers long before hating teachers was cool.
I have nothing against how much they are paid or the ‘fact’ they have summers off. I do have problems with them being incompetent, cruel and bigoted. That is my main experience with teachers.
In the future, I’d recommend storing your sarcasm in a clean, air-tight container well away from your gibberish to avoid this kind of contamination.
Oh, bullshit.
What I’VE noticed is that teachers are the only ones NOT ALLOWED to complain. Read the mini-rants or the work-related rants threads on here - EVERYBODY bitches about their jobs sometimes. Stupid customers, stupid pointy-haired bosses, stupid cow-orkers - we’ve all got 'em.
But when teachers bitch, the automatic response from the usual suspects seems to be “shut up! You get paid good, and only work 9 months out of the year, and only work until 3 p.m.! You signed up for this, what are you bitching about?”
Teachers, like every other working person on the planet, can 1) like their job, 2) recognize the positive aspects of their job, and 3) still have the right to bitch about the unpleasant and difficult aspects of their jobs.
I swear to Og, I’m going to start responding to every single work-related rant on this board with “shut up with your woe is me attitude, you signed up for this, you get a decent salary, you don’t really work, why is that [sysadmins, customer service reps, lawyers, bus drivers, whatever] are always the ones who are complaining about their jobs?”
Well, it seems to me you do. Analogizing teaching to widget-making, and referring to the partners (students and parents) as “customers” is part of the problem. There is nothing remotely appropriate about dragging in performance measures that are appropriate in a Fortune 500 (or assembly line) to education. We’ve tried since Dewey to boil down teaching to a science - and while there are some approaches that are codified and do seem to work, the bottom line is that teaching is an amalgam of pedagogy, motivating students, building community, challenging mediocrity (from students, parents, colleagues, and administrators), and accountability. Great teachers have to have an immense amount of creativity and courage to pull off their jobs well. The skill set is more varied than virtually any job out there.
The funny thing is, I’ve seen brilliant teachers who know a community and a certain age group so well, and when one variable changes, invariably they struggle as well. I attended and taught in “at-risk” schools, and it just takes a different skill set and swagger to be effective in that setting compared to one where every kid comes to school well-fed from mostly stable homes. (Having said that, if I ever returned to the classroom I would stick to working in inner-city, at-risk schools. It’s what I know, and what I had proficiency doing.).
The summers… well, as a first year teacher paying for my certification classes out of my paycheck, I worked. The second summer I spent doing a considerable amount of professional development - to get better at my job, on my time. And that’s what most early career teachers that I knew did. The more established teachers might have more freedom, but even the vets I respected went to workshops and courses to learn new techniques, etc.
Unfortunately, teaching is still perceived as a largely feminine, easy job that Moms can do while their kids are at school, while enjoying afternoons and summers off. Of course, this is not the case; but my experience is that you hear very few people who have actually taken care of or taught children complaining about the ease of a teacher’s job.
And historically, there have been issues with some tenured teachers being poor teachers (I had about one per grade vs. the other six or seven teachers that were completely competent or above). So that stereotype remains as well.
Hi, drewtwo99. I agree with you. I work in educational publishing and have done so for about a decade now, and even in that time the respect for teachers has really dropped. I don’t know how to solve it, but I know of at least two factors that are involved that many people don’t think of right off the bat:
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Until about the 70s or 80s, teaching was one of very few careers available to smart women. (Nursing and secretary-ing were two more.) Now that most careers are more or less open to women, smart women are distributed more widely, and only those people who are extremely motivated to teach stay in the field. Smart men and women are constantly reminded that they have other options. The ones that stay behind are suspect: are they motivated because they really love teaching, or because they’re not good enough to do anything else? Because if they reeeeeaally love teaching, they’d do it for free, right?
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Our societal expectations of students have ramped up a whole lot. We didn’t really used to believe that every child could or should go to college if they worked hard enough; we left out huge swaths of our population. If you taught migrant workers’ kids who never quite learned English well enough to make sense of math class, no one blamed you, the teacher, because no one really expected those kids to stick with it long enough to graduate. If you taught girls who gossiped all through Organic Chem, no one squalled when they got lousy grades, because girls can’t really do science anyway. I think it’s true that almost every child has potential that a great teacher can bring out, but one teacher can only do that for so many kids. If there are three or four times as many kids you expect to excel nowadays, it seems reasonable that you’d need three or four times as many inspiring teachers educating them. But as a society, we don’t want to hear that – we have this weird myth that teachers should be able to overcome any obstacle, including, apparently, time and space; that all you need to do is place kids in proximity to a great teacher for learning to occur, like photosynthesis. There is this other related myth, that we’re experiencing a recent, disastrous drop in graduation rates, a modern crisis – and certain statistics would seem to support this, but only because we don’t look very closely at the numbers. We forget that there used to be a lot of kids no one even included in the statistics. We forget about all the mainstreaming we do now with kids who didn’t used to be allowed in school at all, and all the unwed teenage mothers who used to transfer to special schools and “homes”, and all the kids who didn’t formally drop out but just happened to move and not register in their new districts. We forget, and blame the teachers.
The problem is, how do you legislate respect?
This is an excellent post! I haven’t ever thought of things like that before, but you make some excellent points.
My issue is that people try to draw parallels between the education world and the corporate world… I hate thinking about learning, discovery, students and teachers as “products, employees and customers.” I think it’s demeaning, and it’s setting up a false equivalency. Human beings are so much more than corporate cogs, and the realm of education should always remain far away from it.
And please, don’t take me the wrong way. I have nothing against corporations operating for profit, etc. I am a capitalist and damn proud of it. But I do not think we should approach optimizing education in the same way we approach optimizing a business. They just aren’t analogous, as cheesesteak pointed out
You’re making my point, idiot. $50K in California is jack shit. It’s a fair salary (and atypical - usually it’s more like $25-30K), but it’s not “well-paid.” They also don’t get three months off for summer. Contrary to popular belief, teachers do not get three months of free time during the summer. They get a few weeks, but they basically work through June and come back aroud the second week of August. Just because school isn’t in session doesn’t mean the staff isn’t working. Ask your friends. You don’t know what you’re talking about.
And I don’t buy for a second that they could both be tenured already. You’re talking out of your ass.
You were expecting respect from high school students? In the early 70’s I watched my high school physics teacher get eaten alive by his students. He completely lost control of the classroom for half the year and basically bowed out of communicating with the class. In the end the grades were decided by a committee of teachers after some hard discussions with a group of interested parents. He was the worst excuse for a teacher I have ever seen and he had been on the job of something like 20 years and went right on teaching after that.
More recently I have encountered some of my kids teachers, only a few, who are nearly as bad. Others who are so wonderful I have to question what planet they come from. They are paid the same as far as I can tell. The schools couldn’t care less about my complaints and/or compliments.
Incidentally, why is fair pay (not exorbitant pay) considered by the public to be some kind of gratuity or largesse when paid to public employees?
What an excellent series of points. I agree 100% that a huge part of the problem is the expectations we put on students these days. Not everyone can or even wants to be a mathematician, engineer, or scientist. Yet we place these graduation requirements on them that they never had to meet before, and the teachers have to miraculously deliver the results.
I love physics. I think it is fascinating, and I am so happy that it is a part of my life. I also like and respect art, but I am not an artist and I do not feel compelled to be able to create art. I sincerely doubt that even if I poured my heart and soul into creating art, that I could ever do anything even half-way good. It’s just not one of my talents.
If someone had told me that I need 4 years of art and 4 years of theater in order to graduate high school, I would have begrudgingly done it, but I would have felt jaded about it the entire time. This is how math and science is for students today. Why are we forcing them into these classes that they aren’t interested or capable of succeeding in? It’s just not fair to anyone, especially the students. I agree in a balanced approach to education, and allowing students all sorts of opportunities. But not everyone is going to enjoy physics or calculus, and they shouldn’t be forced to take it to graduate high school.
Now this, I strongly disagree with. A well-rounded education involves students taking a wide variety of classes in a wide variety of subjects, not just “what students want to take.”
I see this attitude in my college students - they don’t believe that they should have to take any course that sounds boring to them, or that’s not directly related to their supposed eventual career. However, life changes, interests change, what sounds boring might end up being a new hobby or career path. Students sometimes don’t know where they’re going to end up, and exposing them to a wide variety of intellectual arenas can only help.
ME TOO! And I’ve seen far too much of it. I just composed a letter to my daughter’s teacher this morning, trying my best to be cool and level-headed while raging inside over an incident that simply should not have happened if she was watching her class. She is clearly incapable of dealing with a child with special needs (autism with a severe language impairment) so she simply decided to have her suspended to get her out of the classroom.
On the other side though, my brother has been a high school history teacher for about 20 years now, and he’s never been happy. I don’t know why he’s stayed in the profession, honestly unless it’s just because he loves the kids. He’s brilliant, well-spoken and qualified to move on to other careers. He’s been offered a principal position but he says that couldn’t pay him enough for that amount of bullshit. I know it’s tough to be a teacher, and I imagine it’s even tougher in an inner-city school where you regularly have kids coming in to 10th grade history classes who can’t even read and don’t really give a shit because they’re already working to support their two kids. Worse, they allow any student to take AP classes instead of testing them in like they did in years past, so he has full loads of kids who have no business taking a college level course. And of course HE gets the blame if the kids don’t pass his class.
It is a mess. I would never dedicate 20 years to a company where I was treated so poorly.
Fuck no, they dont get a lot of time off? Are you high right now?
To be clear, I emphatically believe that most students are *capable *of succeeding in most subjects, and I don’t necessarily agree that we should return graduation requirements to their older, lower, squishier state. I think every student should be required to have a little math and science, and art, too, though I would agree with you that balance may be lacking. But I do not believe that it’s reasonable to expect these very much higher standards to be met without a correspondingly higher investment in teachers and class time.
Part of a teacher’s job is dealing with unhappy parents and students. Look at it from their perspective. For a parent, this is their kids life and future. If their kid isn’t doing well in school, it reflects poorly on them as a parent. It’s a lot easier to lash out at the teacher than to admit little Timmy is a dumbass and well spend his life shoveling shit. And the kid just knows that he is going to get in a trouble. If you can’t deal with that, you can’t deal with a significant portion of your job.
Your principal wasn’t able to comprehend if you were teaching Physics well? That statement, along with your other claims of qualifications sticks out. People who are good at something generally aren’t good at teaching it to other people. You aren’t teaching relativity here. You’re teaching basic physics. If a Principal can’t understand your teaching well enough to evaluate, what do you expect a high school kid to do with it?
More importantly, you were a teacher for two years. That’s an awfully short time to evaluate anything. Maybe you were a great teacher, and maybe you weren’t. I don’t really know. But I don’t seem to see a lot of introspection.
I would seriously doubt that most teachers could match their earning potential in the open market. But other than that, it’s nice that you acknowledge that there are a lot of benefits to being a teacher. Contrast that with Diogenes or the NEA:
You know who else has summers off to work a second job, keep their credentials up to date, or advance their career? That’s right. No one.
Yeah, earning college hours at their own expense in order to receive thousands of dollars more a year when they graduate. You know who else gets to do that? That’s right. No one.
Fuck no, they don’t get a lot of time off. They get a lot of time out of the classroom that they have to work in order to be effective while they’re in it.
No they don’t. That is a myth.