Something a junior high math teacher told me once when someone was complaining about having to learn algebra that has always stuck with me:
“You’re not here to learn, you’re here to learn how to learn.”
I’ve always felt that was probably the truth, the most important thing you take out of an education isn’t the specific way to solve a math problem, the interaction between electron’s valence shells, the reasons for the War of Jenkins Ear, but the ability to turn information into learning and understanding all on your own. The thing about not understanding zero is that it actually took a long time for people to conceptualize zero. A first grader today is no more innately intelligent than an ancient Egyptian or ancient Greek child, but by and large the majority of our children will understand stuff like that at a young age. Just because it happens for most children doesn’t mean it’s a super easy thing to do or impart, it requires a ton of patience and effort. There’s a reason society has by and large farmed that work out to professionals instead of leaving it to parents.
That’s another thing I think would make it hard for engineers. At the professional level, when you’re interacting with non-technical staff you’re still working with people that already know how to think for themselves and “how to learn.” Children don’t know how to learn for themselves, and that makes it a lot harder to explain something like the concept of zero to a first grader than it is to impart a generalized understanding of “heavy” technical information to a non-technical user.
In my experience though, lots of technical staff go through their entire careers without advancing too much in a company and without ever becoming part of the sales force or doing much customer interaction. There’s a big difference between “the most successful engineers” and “engineers” and we weren’t talking with high specificity. I never said “an engineer could never teach”, certainly some could. I just said most people that go into college to pursue engineering are not the same people who would have any interest or special aptitude in becoming teachers. Definitely no special aptitude at teaching above and beyond that of people who have actually gone into teaching.
We can also add that even the dumbest customer isn’t going to set the trash can on fire, hit you in the back of the head with spit balls, vomit all over the floor, or any number of other crazy things little kids can get into. Even in really nice schools, five or six straight hours a day with kids over 30 years, most teachers probably have a stack of insane stories about things kids have done. Dealing with that stuff is part of the job, too.
How many people go for MBAs? MDs? Law degrees? Do they all have an aptitude or interest in the field? Or are they influenced by the expectation of good pay and the degree on the wall?
A lot of those engineering students would reconsider their career choice if teaching offered a similar income to engineering.
That goes back to Kristof’s original comparison with other countries.
In Korea, at least, it’s relatively difficult to get a teaching position, at least at the high school level. You’ve actually got to be pretty well academically credentialed. There’s also a high social value to being a teacher and the pay is good. When the motivations are in place (high pay, socially high position, stiff competition, etc), people will find they can learn to deal with not having their “dream” jobs.
In my parents’ Korean influenced understanding, there’s not too much extra value in going to the best high school or having the best teachers because as long as the student is good, the education will be “good enough” to get the kid into college. That’s obviously not true here. There aren’t many suburban families who’d be willing to send their kids to an inner city or rural school.
Beyond that, they actively encouraged me to become a teacher because of the high pay and high social standing - until they learned those aren’t true in the US. Then, it was law or medicine (until I turned them down on those), which were the social and economic equivalents in the US at the time. My cousins in Korea have all entertained notions of going into teaching. Only a few actually managed it vs going into industry, and they’re considered successes. Can we say the same about people who want to go into teaching in the US?
I’m going by anecdote here, but in my experience every person I personally knew that went into engineering did it because it was what they wanted to do. I’d say that isn’t necessarily true for other fields.
I knew a lot of people who wanted to be accountants because of the perception that accounting paid well, not for any love of double entry bookkeeping.
Something to keep in mind is a lot of engineers I’ve known were actually civil engineers in the military, and thus it’s highly unlikely they were motivated primarily by pay because civil engineering in many places isn’t much more lucrative than teaching, and in the military very few jobs are lucrative.
I’m not sure how easy it is to quantify but I’d generally say engineering undergrads by and large are doing it out of a desire to do something they think they’d be interested in and enjoy. People that go to school and just pick up a vaguely “business” related undergraduate degree (management, marketing, even accounting to a degree) I think are probably mostly unsure about what they want to do and just were following a path that they thought would at least give them financial rewards. A lot of lawyers are probably profit motivated, but one thing I will say is that both law school and medical school are good at weeding out people who don’t really want to do the job. Being a lawyer or being a doctor really isn’t that fun for most people, and the pre-requisite education is fun for even less people, getting into medical school is extremely difficult and getting into law school is fairly difficult. Since teaching requires typically a 5-6 year commitment (a lot of States have program now where you go 5 years and graduated with a bachelor and master’s degree) of education without rigorous admission standards it’s not really comparable. If you boost teacher pay you might attract more of the people who decide they can’t quite make it as doctors or people who decide they can’t quite cut it as lawyers. But you’ll never get the top 50% of law school or medical school students wanting to be teachers, those people are dedicated for one, and for two society will never value teacher’s as much as the top 50% of doctors.
As a teacher of high school seniors, I know plenty of kids who go into engineering because it’s the highest paying alternative for the math-and-science types. They are HEAVILY steered that way by their math and science teachers and guidance counselors. Now, I am totally willing to believe that many of those don’t graduate as engineering majors–but they more likely switch to CS or MIS or a pure math degree. Those are the kids I’d love to have look at education.
I’ve probably had half a dozen extremely talented kids tell me over the years that they would pursue teaching if it paid better. Boys, especially, even now, feel pressure to make enough to support a family. I’ve had a student ask me “why are you a teacher? You’re so smart!”. And I have to figure that for each of these, there’s plenty of others that dismissed the idea before they even made it to my class, or never discussed it with me.
Well sure. For one thing, it would be self selecting. Many people (not just engineers) would hate to get up in front of a class or any gathering. A lot of engineers around here wouldn’t have the English and speech skills to do it, despite being very smart.
I don’t think a lot of people going into college know if they’d be good teachers or not. I was just saying that you shouldn’t single out engineers as being terrible teachers. I suspect many engineers who would apply would do a good job.
Anyone going into teaching from another career is going to need some training and some experience. However I suspect a 50 year old engineer who has probably raised a few kids is going to have as least as good classroom control as a 22 or 23 year old right out of college. I bet their math skills will be better also.
And no, customers never threw anything at me (at least not physical things) but I also wasn’t a lot older than them and didn’t give them grades. And a lot of things went whizzing over the cubicles at 8 pm many evenings when I was at Intel, sometimes thrown by my boss.
No doubt - but in industry many engineers get burned out either from being laid off once too often, or from working on too many projects which get canceled. They might get enticed into teaching (if they didn’t have to take too big a pay cut) and would be enhanced by their real world experience.
My daughter is now teaching in Germany on a Fulbright. Not full time, special topics, but they seem to like her and are trying to get her back for next year. She doesn’t have an Ed degree. She had some of our neighbors when she was in school here, so has good role models, but isn’t terribly interested in looking at teaching as a career partly because of the money and partly because every teacher in her high school who didn’t make it through into the tenure period got laid off because of our financial disaster. Why should she get into that? And, since we live in a liberal bastion, she hasn’t heard the nasty anti-teacher sentiment that seems to be prevalent in some places. If she grew up with that, it would be even worse.
A lot of the teachers I had as a kid, and a lot of my relatives who were teachers, got into it because when they were growing up teachers were the group who didn’t lose their jobs in the Depression. While I’m sure the women got into teaching in some part from being excluded from other jobs, the men I had were no slouches either. But now I hardly see the benefit except for the love of the profession. In most part we are getting much better teachers than we deserve as a country.
With respect – as someone who knows one or two things about economics – I wish to point out that you are missing the point entirely (perhaps due to your emotional proximity to the particular example). No one here has implied that crime would be eradicated if only we paid police officers enough; the intent is not to impugn anyone or to imply the existence of some army of super-talented cops or teachers just waiting, in the sidelines, for the relevant salaries to rise.
Rather, the point is this:
The aggregate quantity of crime is negatively proportional the “competence” (innate ability, training, desire to excel, whatever) of police officers. This doesn’t have to be a strong relationship, but it must hold somewhat (or we could get away with hiring HS dropouts, giving them no training, and paying them a pittance).
At least a few individuals exist who would be awesome police officers but, because they are generally talented and motivated, have chosen to go into more monetarily lucrative work – to be a doctor, an attorney, an engineer, whatever.
By exogenously increasing the salary of police officers a sufficient amount, we could entice many of the individuals from (2) to become career police officers.
If the hiring process were stringent enough, the policy experiment in (3) would (perhaps only very slightly) increase the average quality of police officer. Thus, by (1), the aggregate quantity of crime would decrease (perhaps only very slightly).
I’m not sure how you could deny this, without implying that – in general – performance is never related to pay.
Edit: I also wish to note that this says nothing about whether it would actually be “worth it” in some sense to pay police officers or teachers more. It very well may not.
I should’ve responded to this earlier, but honestly, it’s so weird to me that I’m not sure what the proper response is. At best, your link points to serious regional variance. Here in my NC district, ALL elementary teachers work an 8-hour day, from 7:30 until 3:30, at minimum. Nobody has a 6.5 hour workday. Yeah, I have a half-hour lunch; usually about 10 minutes of that is spent eating, with the rest spent making copies and moving materials around the room and such; this duty-free lunch is a new innovation from previous years, when I spent lunch supervising students. Atop that mandatory 8-hour day is the time that teachers spend planning and assessing and conferencing etc. after hours; when I leave at 4:30 every day, the parking lot is generally about a quarter full. And then there are the meetings, which average about an hour a week, I think.
Maybe our school district is really harsh in terms of the working hours, I dunno. But that document has no relevance to my work life.
cite please. Emphasis on the words “pretty finally and completely”
Maybe not the families you know. Its not that they couldn’t prepare a bag lunch for their kids on the stuff they buy with food stamps, in many cases, they won’t and in other cases, the $2 (or whatever they charge for lunch nowadays) is in fact a financial burden, or the lunch prepared at home may not be particularly nutritious.
I keep hearing this as if to say that teachers aren’t important in education. If the effects of teaching on education are so negligible then why are we busting our humps to bust up unions and fire crappy teachers?
Do you have a cite that the influence of good teaching is negligible?
Here is a cite that indicates that teaching quality makes a difference.
I don’t know how credible the article is but it cites a study published in Science.
Good parents (or even mediocre parents) are a necessary but not sufficient element of good education. If your point is that all these inner city teachers are already good enough to provide a good education if only the parents would get their act together, well, maybe but that doesn’t nuetralize the effect of good teachers, it merely mutes it a bit. As long as kids have food in their tummies and are free from disruption (a lot of kids that get abused at home are very disruptive in class), they can help the ones that can be helped.
I think this is something that we have trouble with in this country. In Asian countries, the most popular kid in school is the kid with the best grades. The teachers treat them better, other parents try to get their kids to hang out with them, everyone in teh community praises tham and hold them up as examples for all the other kids to follow. There is a tacit acknowledgement that this is the kid who will be employing all the other kids at the school. Its a matter of society’s priorities.
The athlete is seen as someone who will end up filling your gas or joining a gang. And its not like there is no value put on sports its just that there is a recognition that one out of hundreds of athletes will make a living as an athlete, the rest will have nothing but the strength of their backs to offer to an employer.
Somewhere along the line, America has convinced itself that athletics and physical prowess is more important than academics and intellectual prowess, I’m not sure where that is going to lead us.
True here also. When the district was going to move one elementary school from the area of the “good” high school to a still good one, but with lower test scores, the Asian parents here had a near riot. This despite the fact that the physical plant of their high school was not as good as the other one, and the teachers were of roughly equal quality.
In the high school my kids went to, which is the oldest and best connected politically, I was on the advisory committee for a new principal. We had a smaller Asian population than the “good” school, and the other parents were mostly white. When I said that the most important criterion for the new principal was support of academics, they looked at me as if I were crazy. Sports were far more important. The one who got chose finally got into trouble for pissing off the parents of the athletes. Her other sins mattered little.
You know better than that. People may not be getting their teacher certification because they don’t want to teach or they don’t think its worth spending a year getting certified to teach.
When there is a high attrition rate, you tend to lose more of the better quality teachers who can go on to do other more rewarding things. So you end up with a stock of teachers who stay in teaching because they have a passion for it or because its not worth the effort of finding another job or another career, the juice simply isn’t worth the squeeze for them.
When you have a glut in supply because everyone is firing, they aren’t firing their best teachers, they tend to fire their less experienced lower quality teachers so you can’t really be opportunistic in a bad economy and pick up all those wonderful teachers taht have just been laid off.
In this way we never accumulate the stock of good teachers that we need to meet our needs. That is the problem with high turnover in an industry, you never develop that stock of talent. In the burger flipping industry, its no big shakes because the learning curve is so incredibly low so you can replace a 5 year vetyeran hamburger flipper with a newbie without really losing too much productivity. This is not the case in teaching. For the same teacher tracked over time, their teaching results tend to improve over time.
