You are such a clown.
Regards.
Shodan
That’s not true. I did respond once, and more or less that was my piece. Because what it comes down to is you say your principal isn’t qualified to evaluate your performance, and I have no way to know if that’s true or not.
If you want, I’ll address the broader point. The idea that the administration and principals don’t support teachers and are unable to properly evaluate teachers is a common complaint. Yet virtually every principal is a former teacher. It doesn’t make sense. It just doesn’t make sense that someone with experience as a teacher is going to turn into an incompetent ogre as principal. When a principal says a teacher isn’t doing so hot, I’m inclined to believe them.
Just like in so many other areas, far too many parents have pushed the sole responsibility of educating their children off onto the schools, and so they don’t pay any attention to what is going on, even if Susie Speshul Snowflake is even going to school, until the bad grades roll out. How is it that these parents are getting away with blaming teachers for not doing the parents’ jobs?
Then on top of that the parents bitch and moan about how bad the schools are and want to throw more of (other people’s) money at them, as if that has ever made a difference in the past. Someone needs to find out just where all of this money is going - the state of California sends over a billion dollars to the schools each year, since 1984 (well, not a billion each year since then, but you get the idea). Plus a good chunk of our property taxes go to the schools. Etc, etc. Yet when I was still working, four years ago, most of our younger employees had terrible reading/writing/math skills. Getting rid of No Child Left Behind would probably help a lot, and not mainstreaming all of these kids that need a bunch of extra help would too.
Oh, and Dio? Yer an idiot. Someday you will learn that just because your experience is X or the way you live is X doesn’t mean that Y is invalid in either case. There is a whole alphabet out there for you to experience - give it a try some day.
Huh? So you’re saying that if I want to find a good teacher, I should look for someone who isn’t particularly skilled in the subject at hand?
Yes, I’ve encountered skilled people (musicians, programmers, farriers) who didn’t teach their skills very well. But that’s because their communication skills weren’t great, or because they weren’t good at analyzing what they did (performance, coding, hoof trimming) in order to break it down to so they could explain it step-by-step. It had fuck-all to do with whether they were skilled or talented in their field.
You are saying that students’ desire to learn is unrelated to the quality of the teacher?
I should have said “naturally good”, but yeah. The best teachers are typically the ones that struggle through a subject, yet still have a certain level of competence.
For some students, yes. Some students are going to learn the material no matter how it is presented. Others are not going to learn the material no matter how it is presented.
A good teacher can make some of the students want to learn more, and inspire them to go into a particular field. Other students under the same teacher will not learn squat, be it due to lack of parental efforts, genetics, behavorial issues, natural ablilty, or just plain lack of give-a-shit.
A teacher cannot MAKE a student learn. A teacher presents a student with an opportunity to learn. The choice to make use of that opportunity is completely, totally, 100% up to the student.
Yup. If parents took more of an active effort in educating their kids things would be different. But really, all people want is someone to make their kid into a successful member of society. Kids are treated as commodities by some school systems (not the teachers’ faults).
These are our children. Not some cookie-cutter one size fits all built on the assembly line Brave New World product.
Where is this mythical district where I can make $60k and work 6.5 hours a day with three months off a year?!
Here, we work August-June (some had to start the last week of July, actually…) and have training/meetings/enrichment/etc. over the summer. A starting salary is between $34-37k. Hours are 7:30am to 3:30. That’s an 8 hour day, not including the extra stuff we put in to make sure our students may actually learn something. We have to plan and design curriculum…most teachers I know are putting in 60 to 70 hours a week.
I work in an alternative school program (part time, unfortunately, as the district just isn’t hiring), and I can assure you that none of us are getting $38/hr. A principal down the street, however, can make $120k with a $30k bonus for good test scores. The secretary likely makes more than a starting teacher. You can look at the Denver Public School’s website or the Aurora website and find postings for school secretaries and principal’s secretaries for salaries that really do only require a 8 hour office day.
I dis-agree, sorta. What makes a difference is the ability of the teacher to motivate the student to learn. The first step is usually finding a way to make the material relevant and accessible to the student. Then you make it interesting. Then the students wants to learn. Most kids, down deep, want to learn and discover new things. But they have been beaten down by environment and bad teaching to the point that some of them give up. These are the kids that need the best teachers.
Then there are the ones that Mother Nature fucked over. Ignorance can be repaired, but in the words of Ron White - “You can’t fix stupid.” The best you can do with those kids is prepare them for a life in politics.
I am a big supporter of teachers, and agree that they get little praise for what they do, don’t make a lot of money, and take a bunch of shit from students and parents.
That said, I went to college with and married a teacher. Her friends were all teachers. I have worked in a business whose customers were K-12 schools. I have spent a hell of a lot of time around teachers.
First off, their college classes (for a B.S. in Education) are a joke compared to most majors. Education is one of the easiest degrees to complete. Secondly, after the first couple of years where they do have to write lesson plans and other things, once they have them done they don’t really have to do a lot of work outside of the school hours again. Some, but not much. My wife didn’t put in nearly the amount of hours in her job as I did in mine.
Looking at my kids school calendar, school starts on August 15th and ends on May 24th. I understand that teachers start earlier and end later than students, but that’s still two and a half months off in summer. They also get the entire week off for Thanksgiving, 11 days at Christmas, seven days for Spring Break, and get more holidays than I do (MLK Day, President’s Day.) They also have five days during the school year when there are no students (Teacher Work Days.)
Yes, they have some continuing ed classes and seminars in the summer and during the school year, but it consists of sitting in a room and listening to lectures. None of the teachers that I used to hang around with ever worked a second job in the summer, they all had spouses who worked.
Let’s face it, teachers have some serious perks that counterbalance the shitty things about the job. Never in my working life have I ever been able to take a two week vacation, let alone two months.
Of course. A few kids are blockheads you can’t do anything for.
But from my own schooling experience, I would have thought it was clear that for most students and most teachers, there’s a definite correlation. When I was in high school, I had one to two teachers per year, out of six or seven, who were widely acknowledged among the kids to be more interesting, more inspiring, and just better teachers. I don’t know how grades in their classes looked in the aggregate, but I’m pretty sure that the total learning going on was higher. I know I still remember things from those classes, not much from the rest.
That looks like a contradiction to me. What is “mak[ing] some of the students want to learn more,” if not influencing the “choice to make use of that opportunity”?
What SnakesCatLady said.
Anecdote time! I had several teachers that, with the benefit of over a decade’s hindsight and growing the fuck up, I now realise were actually probably quite good teachers. They were engaging, they respected students as people, they tried to make lessons relevant, to help students understand what they were learning rather than just learning by rote, they offered after-lesson tutoring and extra help if you asked for it, and did their utmost to make sure everyone got what they needed.
However I didn’t learn much. Was it because they were bad teachers? No. It was because I didn’t want to learn. I went through a bad patch in my latter years of high school. Standard teenage angst combined with a burgeoning hormonal issue that still plagues me, and a healthy heaping of what I now look back to recognise was the beginnings of my clinical depression rearing its head. I basically said “Fuck you” to the establishment and refused to do anything. Oh I would go to school, but fuck them if they thought they could make me learn anything.
In the end, I got kicked out of school. This was an administrative decision, rather than one by my teachers themselves. But some of the teachers did try. I had just decided that I wasn’t going to let them succeed - and that power is definitely within the student’s hands. You can’t make someone learn if they’ve already decided they don’t want to, for whatever reason.
Just because you were a former teacher doesn’t mean you were a good one or had much experience. I had a principal who spent a year as a reading intervention teacher before coming a dean of students (basically- behavioral stuff) and then became principal of an urban school.
My current boss can’t function without the other (female) teachers helping him out - we call him a helpless work husband sometimes - and he’s shooting for a principal’s license because he wants principal pay. (He’s a director with a teaching license; kind of functions as an admin role.) I love him, but he’s not the type to dedicate extra hours to see that students can access the material…so…it’s not always the best teachers that make principals.
I have another friend who, in his third year of teaching, became a Dean of Students and now does behavioral stuff. No teaching. No take home work. He got an alternative SPED license. He’s also a super pothead, but he does try to do well at work, so who knows?
BUT: The majority of good-teachers-turned-principals I’ve seen are ones that I really wish would’ve stayed on as teachers. One: we lost a good teacher, and two: being a good teacher doesn’t always translate into being a good principal.
Getting a principal license is easy. Getting a principal job requires a few things: sighing about how (all the other) teachers need a kick in the ass, some good pep talk skills, and being part of the right circle/suck up points. And in these parts, it helps if you are male. :rolleyes:
Being a principal is not easy. It requires just as much work as being a teacher…unfortunately, they are not only paid 3x more, but they are treated better and rarely do you see a school district wailing on principals as the reason for school failures.
Not all of us got a BS in Ed. I didn’t a degree in Physics, either. So?
Your wife must have
a) sucked
b) not worked in a hard school/secondary education/anything that requires more sweat on the job and off
It’s still mandatory.
If we didn’t follow the same school schedule as kids (roughly) in the year (and you know we don’t get as long as breaks as they do, right?!), we’d fall over. Clearly you have not one fucking clue how this job works. I don’t care what your wife’s teaching style/job was like.
Just for kicks, I looked up Canadian teacher’s salaries and found this:
Here are the teacher salaries in 2011. I’ll keep it consistent with the previous article: I’m listing the salary I would have within jurisdictions in Canada that I wouldn’t mind moving to - mostly cities. I will do it for a teacher with 8 years experience with a bachelor degree + 2 year teaching degree (this is about what I am). But if you want to check your salary in the given province, the link should point you in the right direction.
Here’s the updated table for the salary scale across Canada:
Province Salary Year Link
British Columbia (Vancouver) $73,972 2011 BC’s Local Collective Agreements (2006 - 2011)
Alberta (Calgary) $87,954 2011 Alberta Teachers’ Association Collective agreements (2006 - 2012)
Saskatchewan $72,435 2010 Saskatchewan Teachers’ Federation Collective Agreement (2007 - 2010)
Teachers in Saskatchewan are currently trying to negotiate another contract.
Manitoba (Winnipeg) $76,547 2010 MTS Collective Agreements
Ontario (Toronto) $83,865 2011 OSSTF Collective Agreement (2008 - 2012)
Quebec (Montreal) $52,435 2011 Montreal Teachers’ Association Collective Agreement (2010-2011)
New Brunswick $72,536 2011 New Brunswick Teachers’ Federation Agreement (2008-2012)
Nova Scotia $75,646 2010 NSTU Collective Agreement (2008-2010)
P.E.I. $64,608 2011 PEI Teachers’ Federation Agreement (2010 - 2013)
Newfoundland $69,994 2011 NLTA Collective Agreement (2008-2012)
(from here)
I don’t have any kids, so am not up to speed on these issues in Canada, but I have never heard the level of rancor towards teachers that is exhibited in this thread.
I will also add that the ‘your planning gets easier after a few years because you can reuse lesson plans’ doesn’t work well in urban or hard to serve schools. You have to adjust your material to your students…and that can change every quarter or semester.
Don’t forget the twenty paid sick days a year ( in Wisconsin).
8 years with a BA + 30 credits = $45,548 in Denver.
Not anymore. And those kids are fn germy. Special Ed is the worst - those parents tend to send kids to school no matter what, plus the general hygiene issues that can arise…