This is, obviously, an unjustifiably discriminatory and sexist attitude on the part of people trying to discourage men from entering traditionally female-dominated professions.
It should be noted, though, that many men in such professions do tend to have the compensatory advantages of the “glass escalator” phenomenon.
People are often skeptical when I tell them that my elementary and junior high principals, years that spanned the 1970s, were always women, and not young women like they almost always are nowadays. Men are also less likely to interrupt their careers than women are. My elementary school also had several male teachers, and one of them was in a wheelchair.
That said, the “single mom” statement is the inverse of what women who once entered male-dominated professions often heard - “You’re just taking a job away from a man who will need it to support his family” - and it’s just as bad an attitude.
Is that really a problem? How many teachers have that constraint? I would bet that more people THINK it is a problem for others but like most woke issues, it affects a very small number.
I believe it would have been in the 1940s. He was a sickly orphan who ended up in the hospital. A nurse from off the reservation adopted him. I knew him as a marketing manager in silicon valley.
Since ‘woke’ now means (so far as some conservatives care) ‘literally anything that respects the fundamental humanity of all people,’ I suppose it might be an issue for some teachers.
I’m curious what system they were using for subs. Back when I was subbing, every morning I’d log in to a website (which didn’t know my gender or size), usually see a list of openings at various schools, pick out the one that I thought was the best fit for me (which depended on school, subject, and grade level), and then head to that school. Or occasionally, if there were no listings or all of the listings were jobs that I considered unacceptable for some reason or other, I’d just go back to bed.
Getting up earlier or checking the listings more frequently might have gotten me better positions, and there was a system where teachers could list specific subs as preferred subs who would get a little more notice of openings, but nothing about the system itself steered me away from any jobs, and I always had the option of just not picking up a job.
I’ve had cases where I was period-covering (subbing for different teachers in different periods), and had almost exactly the same set of students two periods in a row, in different classes. In one class, they were model students, and in the other, they went crazy. Clearly, one of the regular teachers had very effective classroom management and the other less so, to such a degree that it carried over to their classroom even when they weren’t present.
Indeed; even though most teachers are female, most principals and other school administrators are male.
Speaking for myself, I’ve definitely been aware that as a male teacher, I’m in the minority, but I don’t think I’ve ever encountered anyone who was discouraging or unwelcoming of me for that reason. It might (or might not; I don’t know) help that the gender bias is smaller for high school teachers and for math/science teachers. On the other hand, two of my schools have happened to be all-girls’ schools, where the bias towards women is stronger.
I do think, though, that I’ve encountered administrators who expect, given that I’m a male teacher, that I’ll also be interested in coaching a sport, and become less interested in hiring me when they find out I’m not.
I am a school bus driver (we are short of them too). My district is short of English language teachers. I have twenty-five years experience teaching the English language in Saudi Arabia. I have the standard credential for working overseas.
I sent in my paperwork today. I bet you a donut they cannot make me an offer more attractive than my school bus job.
I don’t agree. Factory workers not doing their job harms them and their employer. Teachers not doing their job harms the teacher, their employer, and the students. That changes the dynamic to one most are not willing to take. A factory worker (or similar profession) is generally doing the job for the paycheck (even if said paycheck only barely keeps food on the table). Teachers tend to value teaching, which is why they don’t take other, higher paying jobs they’d qualify for.
Plus striking is much more obvious. Not buying supplies looks more like showing up to work but doing a bad job. It’s more akin to the factory worker doing a silent protest, intentionally screwing up or moving more slowly.
That said, I do think I miscommunicated a bit. I’m not saying anything about the way things “should” be. Just a description of the way things are, and why I don’t think your recommendation will work. I don’t think it’s so much fear of being fired as much as it is fear of doing a huge disservice to the students.
This is my 21st year in the classroom, and I don’t plan to go anywhere anytime soon. I largely agree with most of the comments in this thread, but would add a couple other factors:
There is a general sense that teachers are much more responsible for student achievement than they used to be. In some ways, this is a good thing. I do not want to go back to the bad old days when teachers just sorta did what they did and if a child made choices that compromised their education, well, so bad so sad but not really the responsibility of anyone in the building. In that model, a teacher presents information and assigns grades. Some teachers did more, sometimes a lot more, but they weren’t expected to. And, frankly, a lot of kids who could have had much happier, more productive lives fell through the cracks early and slid into an irrecoverable slide. But twenty years ago, a series of studies showed that the “value added” by a good teacher was actually amazing: the average amount of improvement under a “good” teacher amounted to literally more years of education per student. It was a really important thing, to quantify what good teachers do.
But then they fucked it all up. Instead of deciding “wow, some teachers are really good, how can we leverage that”? , the lesson was “Wow, so many teachers suck so bad. How can we make them better?” and because quantifying was the New Hotness, it became about measuring student achievement with tests and creatin a culture where the outcome of those tests were seen as 100% the result of good teaching. And again, data is important. Without data, you can have a school that looks good to involved parents–because their kids have the good teachers–but where poor kids are shuttled to a portable and learn nothing. And looking at data can make you a better teacher, no doubt. I use data a lot to inform my practice.
But instead of using these things as tools to find good teachers and leverage their expertise, it instead created this idea that if you buy the right curriculum, develop the “best practice” and then make every single teacher do it, all data will be good. And if the data isn’t good, that’s the teacher’s fault. I mean, the program you bought is worth a lot more than the teacher, so clearly it’s not the problem. Also, the data went from a way to see what kids were learning to the final goal in and of itself. So suddenly if you were a mediocre teacher, or had a situation that made target data impossible (and there are many), or whose data for whatever reason wasn’t an accurate reflection of learning, you’re treated like a salesman who hasn’t made his quota this month. You are treated like a bad person.
Part of the problem is that all the really good teachers I know are really good because they work their ass off. Teaching is a hobby, not just a job. So they stay up late gilding the lily not out of a fear of getting yelled at, but just because they find teaching intellectually interesting. They are willing to throw a lot of shit on the wall and see what sticks, which is a great way to find good teaching practices for a group, but super inefficient. They take a personal interest in the kids, which motivates the kids to want to succeed. But that’s not a fair expectation for the job. For all that I have been that teacher, I don’t look down at the teacher who just wants to do right by the kids for 40 hours a week and not think about it otherwise. That should be enough. But instead, unless you blow everyone out of the water or otherwise make yourself indispensable, you always feel like people are coming into your classroom just looking for a pretext to explain why you suck and are lazy. They found that “good” teachers could make more of a difference and so decided everyone should be like that. What they didn’t realize or care about was that most “good teachers” were doing the job of 2 or 3 people, and if they wanted to provide that for all students, we need schools with a lot more teachers, counselors, school psychologists, and social workers.
Part of the reason the whole “data revolution” went so wrong is that on average, principals are terrible. And, honestly, they are in a classic middle management trap: they are also going to get blamed for any data the district doesn’t like, but they don’t have many tools to control it. But most are just bad at management, and the ones who are tend to end up working downtown pretty quickly (Peter principle still alive and well in education). So people with little training in data OR management OR coaching are trying to do all three. They often don’t understand the data to see what it really means. The antagonize teachers when it wasn’t necessary. They hoard money on the general principle that it’s indulging teachers to spend money on their classrooms.
I guess the TL:DR is that the problem comes from the discovery that some teachers had students with better data. But no one really asked them why, or recognized that what they did to achieve it wasn’t sustainable. Instead, they just decided everyone else needed to find a way to meet that standard.
Better TL:DR: 20 years ago, if you were the teacher who went above and beyond, you were respected and appreciated. Now you are treated like you’ve barely met expectations and also used as the standard for everyone else to meet, even if half of what you did you thought of as your charitable contribution to the world. .
Well stroked.
It’s not just “woke” politics, but parents not accepting their kids got an F grade, and I recently read about a school district where before a teacher can give a failing grade on homework, they have to talk to parent first. And let’s not forget that teachers are being physically assaulted by both students and parents. This ties in with the whole 'self-esteem" fad, where if students can’t make varsity team they want to abolish it, or a school with 12(!) valedictorians so kids don’t feel 'unrewarded" (see Participation trophies). No accountability or responsibility (my kid didn’t do homework because he was playing video games, so don’t punish him)
Again, and maybe this is not universal, but in my experience parents think parents are a much bigger part of a teacher’s day than they really are. There have always been asshole parents. A bad boss will be upset about that, but even then, its not the parents that drive you crazy, it’s dealing with your boss when he/she sides with the parents. Especially when its the same boss who stops in your room for 5 minutes, counts the number of “checks for understanding” they observe, and then marks you down for being behind your desk during class, even though you were taking roll. That’s what drives off teachers.
In my experience, the “wanting to land a full time gig” subs are few and far between. It hasn’t been that hard to get a teaching job in years–unless perhaps you are only willing to work in a very limited set of schools, like the district you live in or the school down the street.
Most subs in our system are either:
Groups one and two are much much reduced right now: retirees who were vulnerable to COVID weren’t in a rush to go back to schools. And with unemployment at 3.5%, people aren’t between jobs much. So we are really dipping deep in group 3 these days. There are things that used to get you quietly removed from the sub list that we now tolerate. Didn’t pass out the test that was left in clear sight on the desk? Sang to the class all period even when they asked for quiet so they could work? Ignored lesson plans to tell the kids stories about how they were going to get rich off an MLM any day now? Gotta roll with it.
Brief swing back to the “what’s the most important factor” discussion. The worst instructors I’ve had at a university were all at the institute of pedagogy. Their expert subject matter was literally teaching, but they were bad at the actual practice.
It’s not just me either. A Norwegian professor of linguistics mentions it in a parenthetical in her novel set in a fictional institute at the university as one of a number of paradoxes.
Agreed. So far as I can tell, the old adage “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach” applies only to the field of teaching: Those who can teach, teach, while those who can’t teach, teach teaching.
And to those who use that adage non-ironically, I reply, “And those who can do neither complain about those who can.”
Epitaph on a Syndic
“No teacher I of boys or small fry,
No teacher I of teachers, no, not I.
Mine was the distant aim, the longer reach,
To teach men how to teach men how to teach.”
A. B. Ramsay
Here’s one being reported on locally. Some teachers are trying to form a union. They are getting actual death threats put under their car’s windshield wipers. Because “unions = unholy evil” to these nuts. Presumably the same group of people who show up at school board meetings screaming nonsense about everything and making threats.
It is getting seriously crazy out there and the schools are one of the focal points of this.
For a classroom teacher or a sub? In New Hampshire subs have to have a 4 year degree but it can be in any subject. I have a BA in English Teaching but that doesn’t qualify me to be an actual contracted teacher.