Interesting, I heard that their great education system was partially the result of hitting rock bottom. They were doing really badly and the government put in a huge effort to up the prestige and training of teachers.
Unfortunately I can’t see the link, I get “page not found”… 
But I think that teaching (and nursing, and practicing law, and doctoring) are different from line cook or accounts receivable clerk in the sense that they aren’t entry level jobs. The administrative level above them is fundamentally different. It’s Peter Principle at it’s strongest.
I guess I feel like if someone is still at an entry level office job after 25 years, that job is probably not their passion; I suspect they have something else that defines and motivates and shapes them. But it often is for teaching.
I think this is a problem, but part of it is the problem that I was talking about: when admin doesn’t respect the profession, and thinks teachers are fungible, hiring becomes a quick, annoying chore, the smallest part of their job, and they just look at the ten resumes on their desk, interview the top two, and hire the best of those. When you think of a great teacher (or a potentially great teacher) as a valuable commodity, you have a very different approach. I interviewed at an exclusive private school once–the sort of place where tuition is $20K+ for first grade, and teachers retire making six figures. The interview took place over two days–I talked to over a dozen different people, all of whom made big chunks of their very busy day available to me. I had to observe a class, teach a class, have dinner with one set of folks, have lunch with another. Finding a new teacher was clearly a big deal to everyone, and it was worth the time to find the perfect one.
Ask your mom how they interview new teachers: I bet it’s not like that. I bet it’s like what we do: one round of interviews, and settle for whoever. Because what does it matter? The principal’s job is to make the school succeed despite the teachers, not because of it.
From my primary education days I remember the really good teachers the most because they had a lasting impact on my life. Then I remember the teachers that were either incompetent or huge assholes (now, some good teachers were miserable people, so these aren’t all clearly distinct groups.) My best science teacher in High School was a miserable, hateful human being. But he was an amazing educator, he was just rude and miserable to deal with.
My least favorite teacher combined meanness with incompetence. She was the wife of a local CPA (this was in a small town where being the town CPA carried some weight) and you could tell she basically considered herself above the job she held. She was a heinous bitch who taught 12th grade economics and actually knew nothing about economics at all. She allowed no discussion of anything in her class and made us do worksheets and questions out of the book every day.
I also remember a 9th grade art teacher who was also the basketball coach, he weighed about 325 lbs and literally slept through class 75% of the time. His block was basically a “free block” to do whatever the hell you wanted.
So for me, I remember the really good and the really bad. The average teachers are the ones I don’t remember much at all.
I was pondering this the other day. I concluded that there was a point in history where the village schoolmarm was whatever literate female they happened to have lying around, instead of being a trained professional. There is a definitely a sense that any random person can teach kids their ABCs, which does NOT equate to a teacher’s responsibilities in real life.
I also believe that a lot of it depends on a person’s experiences growing up. When I was a child, I had a lot of teachers who were incompetent turds and spent their day pretending to educate a crowd of degenerate criminals. You actually could have replaced them with any random homeless person and the quality would have been about the same. Come to think of it, I’m dealing with a college professor who is like that right now. She pretends to be teaching a Master’s level class but writes like a 12-year old who just found out about MySpace.
On the flip side, I recently had some long meetings with my child’s special ed instructors. I was extremely impressed with their knowledge of various therapies, testing protocols, and ability to navigate a Byzantine labrynth of government programs and requirements. It took a lot of specialized knowledge.
So, yeah, I think some teachers don’t get the respect they deserve. But I could name some others whose diplomas should be rescinded.
I am back in school to get my teaching certification right now (actually I’m almost finished, I am in my full time internship right now). But the thing that bugs me most about all of this is what solosam mentions right here. College professors DO get all kinds of respect, but having gone back to school after having taken a 7 year break from academia made me realize that most of them don’t know anything about teaching. This is largely because they aren’t, as far as I can tell, taught how to teach and there is more to teaching than simply knowing your subject. Reflecting back, I had far more excelent teachers in high school than I did when I went to college the first time, and I went to a good school. I am going to a more middle of the road school for my certification and I am slack jawed at how terrible some of the professors are.
I come from a family of teachers, most specializing in early education. However, below are a couple of anecdotes illustrating why I don’t hold some teachers in the highest regard. Maybe these are just anomalies, but based on the sample of teachers I had while in school and the ones my kiddos have run into more recently, I doubt it.
Back in college where I was majoring in mechanical engineering, my sister was one year behind me at the same university studying early education. I had been up all night the previous night debugging the 1,000+ lines of code needed to model a 6-degree of freedom robotic arm for my robotics class. The next day, I got a call from my mother (also a teacher) concerned for my sister because she was very stressed out as her “Seasons of the Year” bulletin board was due in a couple of days. This was her big final project for one of her education classes. Seriously anyone with half a brain could bang that out in a couple of hours top, yet this seemed like a reasonable cause for concern for both my sister and my teacher mother.
I also noted that many of the education majors that I hung out with really struggled with classes outside of the College of Education. These were folks that were pulling mostly “A’s” in their education classes, but struggling just to pass basic Gen-Ed classes.
A few years ago, my teacher sister was considering opening her own Montessori school and needed my help estimating some of the costs needed to get started. I can’t remember the exact calculation, but we needed to calculate 60% of some number, so I handed her a calculator. She looked at me funny and handed me back the calculator and told me that she hadn’t done any math since her Sophomore year of High School and had no idea how to do the calculation…… this women has a Masters in early education yet can’t do a simple math calculation that your average 6th grader should have no trouble with.
What this thread needs is a bit of data. It’s amazing how many people simply accept a false premise and run with it.
Forbes has “Teachers” listed as #5 in the most respected profession category.
So, for the US, I thin the OP is grossly mistaken.
Looks pretty similar to the US.
Ok, since you are doing our data gathering, how is Forbes creating the list? I don’t want to take it as face value just because it is Forbes. I have anecdotal evidence that people don’t has as much respect for teachers in my neck of the woods as they do for other white collar professions, but anecdotes aren’t data, so I would like to see more.
My kneejerk reaction though is that teaching is the type of thing that people claim to respect when given a survey and then they turn around and say"those who can do those who can’t teach" or “teachers are over-payed. After all they only work 8-3 with summers free” That sort of thing. The desire to cut teacher salaries is particularly strong in my current location. I had someone who is a career administraitve assistant complain to me the other day that her grandchild’s first grade teacher made more money than she did (all teacher salaries are public record here), never mind that the woman had been teaching first grade for 25 years and had a masters degree while the admin didn’t go to college. After all “how hard is it to teach kids the alphabet?” So, when surrounded by people with these opinions I might be forming a bias of my own.
I would say teaching is not well respected. This Huffington Post article has a Jon Stewart clip showing some Fox on-air personalities pointing out that teaching is only a part-time job, they’re paid too much, and should have their benefits and pay cut http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-wallis/jon-stewart-and-the-sheer_b_831604.html. Not to mention the proposals to just flat out fire all the teachers, as if there is a giant, untapped pool of great teachers somewhere. As well as the demands that teachers must have 100% sterling, unimpeachable character. I would say it all adds up to teaching being one of the most kicked-in-the-teeth professions out there.
I can’t get inside the heads of the posters here, but I think there is a great deal of difference between respect for a person doing a exhausting, distasteful, or dangerous job that needs doing, and the respect for a person doing a job that requires extensive training and highly advanced skills. I would be inclined to divide the forbes list as follows:
“I could never be a (Profession)” = “I don’t have the skills to be a (Profession)”
“I could never be a (Profession)” = “I couldn’t deal with the working conditions of (Profession)”
Some of this is based on my personal experience- when people tell me “Wow, I could never [be an engineer]” I feel like they are commenting on my abilities, certainly their tone sounds more admiring than people who tell my wife “Wow, I could never [teach high school students]”
I will post my thoughts about why teachers don’t make the first list when I have collected them.
As Jragon’s article suggests, I think it’s hard to argue that primary teaching was ever a high-status profession. Historically, it was a low-paid, working-class, and often itinerant job. As for status, FWIW, Victorian fiction consistently portrayed (male) teachers as charlatans, martinets, and washouts. Arguably, this reflects the fact that children themselves have generally been low-status., needing to be warehoused more than educated.
Those articles also illustrate the difficulty of evaluating and replicating successful educational methods. Finland doesn’t do much testing, and its students excel. East Asian nations test their students out the hwa-tsu (and recruit their teachers from among the highest-testing graduates), and they excel.
I think the status must differ per country. I don’t know that much about the history of education in the US or other countries, but I know a bit about the Netherlands.
There was certainly a time here when the male village schoolteacher was well respected, certainly the late 19th to early 20th century. I think during that time in the US there were already many female teachers, so the situation is very different. As I mentioned, in the Netherlands at that time there would be the vicar and schoolteacher in each village, who were the “men of learning”. They were perhaps the most respected men in the village.
I can tell you that nowadays teaching is pretty much the lowest status job you can have here. One step up from bin man, but you’re basically considered stupid by default. And it’s definitely a woman’s profession.
Here’s a link to the Forbes article. It’s a Harris poll.
There could be some conflating of the “conceptual teacher” with the “real teacher” in people’s minds, but that’s what the data shows that I found. If someone has better data, it would be interesting to see. At this point, I’m more convinced by the data rather than anecdotes.
I’m far more convinced by what people do than what they say. Also, note that the poll didn’t ask people whether THEY viewed teachers with respect. It asked if they thought the profession had “prestige”. I can certainly acknowledge that a job carries a great deal of prestige without respecting the people or the profession myself.
15 year teacher in middle and high school and college.
Students failing to learn is acceptable by the public. However, failure for students to learn is failure to teach and is therefore not acceptable.
I teach math. How many times have you said around your child that “math is hard” or “I was never good at math”? I have heard parents, teachers and administraors all say this in front of their students. The reaction when so many students are failing classes and doing poorly on test is to blame the teachers and schools. Teaching and learning are not reciprocals of each other and believe it or not teachers actually do teach the difference between adverbs and adjectives or how to add fractions. Why the assumption that teaching is the problem and not lack of learning.
Our system is antiquated and so we are not doing the job we should be doing.
The American education system was developed over 100 years ago by John Dewey so that graduates could run a farm or men could run a small business and women could be secretaries. Mere literacy was an acceptable outcome. Ask yourself this, why do we focus so much on academics writing (5 paragraph essays and research papers, algebraic rules and geometric proof writing) instead of functional skills such as writing a resume or discrete mathematics. Specifically to the OP, teachers are seen as teaching students non-functional skills and as such not contributing to a students “real” education. When the custodians union in LA wanted a raise from $10/hr (this was in late 1990s) there was wdespread support. Teachers campaigning for better working conditions and yes a slight pay increase were told we were sucking off the public tit. Shows you that the person that empties your office trash can at night and quickly mops your bathroom floor is considered an asset to the public while teaching about the Fall of Constantinople is apparently a drain.
You have no clue what we do.
I’m sure most adult remeber their school days as the teacher lecturing for 52 minutes while you dutifully wrote down everything in you notebook and worked hard to get a B. Papers were magically graded and no teacher ever had to write lesson plans or prepare for a lab and of course the rare occassion absence for a conference was alway a fun day because you got fun worksheets that (also magically) appeared out of nowhere.
The truth is that yes we get winter and spring breaks and summer vacation off but unlike you from August through may I work 24/7. I have to bring work home because my prep periods are taken up by meetings or 50 minutes is not long enough to grade 150 tests and plan my lessons and write next weeks quiz. Unlike you, I can’t wake up Tuesday morning with a migraine and call in sick. Yes I have gone to work mildly ill and ended up puking in a wastebasket 2nd period when the upset tummy turned into stomach flu. One of the problems during my first marriage was the wife could never wrap her head around the fact that although I was physically home, the stack of papers on the desk meant I was still at work. And don’t forget the times I have to comfort your child because of her shitty homelife (no offense but according to EVERY teenager their homelife is shitty) or your fucktard of a kid that just refuses to sit down and be quiet so other students can work. Or make extras assignments of sit with your child after school because they are just not getting it and needs some 1 on 1 tutoring.
We teachers are your enemies
So do you think my memories of my son’s 6th grade is about all the great teaching going on? No, it is about the asshole math teacher that made my son cry in class because he “figured the humiliation would motivate him” and when confronted that he didn’t know shit about pedagogy although claiming to be a constructivst yelled at me the I “should read about it to know what I’m talking about!” The principal escorted him out before I could tell him my concentration for an Ed.D IN MATH ED was constructivism. The principal did everything to protect him as well as the board and the superintendent so of course he still works there emotionally abusing students that don’t fit into his engineering (that’s his degree) way of thinking.
Fast-forward to the current school. Long story short but when it comes to 504 plans, they obviously failed their education course “Your Ass and a Hole-In-The-Ground: A Comparative Study.” Do you want to hear about the AP and 504 expert that didn’t know the law OR definitions even though I printed it up for them? How about the teachers whose only input was how well he is doing and doesn’t need a plan then tells me 2 weeks later that as I predicted he was a complete fuckup in their class. What about the response to the 7 legal and procedural errors they made in the meeting all cited under USC and CFR and being told to have him tested for special ed which if you know the difference between 504 and IDEA is a ridiculous statement. Oh and let me add in the staff refuses to actually follow the plan as required by Federal Law. His principal and the district staff are absolutely awesome once they got involved and I cannot sing their praises enough, but while I respect those two individuals, do you think I respect “the teachers” at his two middle schools? And I’m not the only one. If I were to ask my mom about my teachers, I am positive she will remember only 2 - my first grade teacher who I’m sure my mom hopes is being perpetually ass-raped by Satan himself and my junior high dean that totally mismanaged a situation at junior high.
I think we tend to remember good teachers individually and bad teacher as “the system” because good teachers stand out from the crowd while bad teachers and incomptent administrators and crooked districts as then to perpetuate each other and thus while there are good teachers, “teachers” in general are the one that screw you and your kids over.
I have just had my teaching role ended, yet this is despite teaching grown men with literacy and numeracy levels at around L1, and getting them through 2 X L2 vocational qualifications in a week - and I would do this for around 700 learners a year, and this in a prison - so imagine all the mental health issues, personality issues, self harm, drug problems and others besides that confront me in classes.
…and , I certainly did not take any shortcuts, it was encouragement, coercion, inspiration and every other tool in the box that the teacher needs, plus a few others.
Yet despite my colleague and I doing around 75% of the total qualifications for our own establishment (which amounts to around 50% for the whole region) our role was considered too costly.
I started a new job last week, not teaching, I am now a horticulturist, and this pays 23% more than I was making - it seems to our correction facility that horticulture is more valuable than teaching.
I now get prisoners coming to me complaining that they can no longer do the types of educational work that would make them suitable for earlier release, and would I restart my classes please. Presumably society itself believes that if prisoners can avail themselves of education in prison, those individuals are less likely to return and hence will allow them to be released early.
For me I will not go back, I make more money, no longer do I work at home or during vacation, I do not have to worry about Continuing Professional Development, I no longer have to maintain the requirements for retain my practitioner ticket such as by keeping a reflective journal or ensuring lesson plans and schemes of work that will attract an appropriate grading when OFSTED - the educational inspectorate - comes to examine my practice.
I also do not have to worry myself about finding new material, constantly scanning the media for relevant items and modifying it into suitable learning materials, I don’t concern myself with the specific requirements of various examination bodies, nor do I have to consider ways I could introduce higher level courses and find ways to justify them by carrying out employer surveys, and finally, I do not have to read the plethora of reports and latest trends from various interested parties from educational academe through to boards of trade evaluations of learning processes etc.
I get more money and much less hassle by growing plants.
That’s quite amazing, because it certainly is not true in any other Western country I can think of. We can whine and bitch all day about teachers not getting enough respect but they aren’t at the bottom of the respect list by any stretch of the imagination. That said…
[QUOTE=Saint Cad]
but unlike you from August through may I work 24/7..
[/QUOTE]
You work nonstop for ten months? How’re you still alive?
I know, it’s hyperbole, but I always get the sense teachers think that their having to work after hours is some sort of unique circumstance. Welcome to the world of white collar professional work; we ALL work after hours.
A few reasons why it lacks prestige from a UK perspective -
The barriers to entry are low. The man in the street thinks that anyone can do it. This is obviously not the case as far as doing the job, but it is the case that anyone with a pulse and two brain cells to rub together can qualify as a teacher.
Teachers like a good moan. Don’t we all, but the profession as a whole has been caricatured as a gang of moaning gets by the UK press and this seems to have irreversibly taken root. It’s like Joe Public can’t see past the facts of great holidays and a good salary. Any compensatory remarks about marking, lesson prep, classroom management just sounds like moaning.
It’s worth pointing out that teaching is a broad church - it can be a very demanding, exhausting job (e.g. primary school, or teaching English in a really rough school) but it can also be a total cake-walk (e.g. teaching A-level maths in a very good school).
Like a lot of heavily unionised professions, there’s a feeling amongst the general public that the job is hiding a submerged iceberg of wasters. This seems to be a particular issue with teaching because it’s such a hard job to quantify performance in. There’s no question that weak teachers can dig in and survive for years in a way that would be hard to achieve in other lines of work. Meanwhile Joe Public’s on his final warning and a personal improvement plan after 6 months under-performance at his private sector job. Oh, and his pension sucks and he gets 10 days holiday a year.
This performance assessment is a big issue I think. Probably every school staffroom knows who the good teachers are but how do you really quantify this? In the UK teachers are assessed by an inspectorate called Ofsted, who visit a school once a year, announced ahead of time. If you were a struggling teacher and were told that someone was coming next month (for a day) to assess your performance, you’d probably get your shit together sufficiently to put on a decent show.
I do some undergraduate teaching and have several family members who teach primary school. I understand and respect the profession. I think the premise of the OP is undoubtedly correct, though, in that there is a real prestige issue with teaching in the UK. You can criticise most professions for one thing or another but teaching seems to get singled out unfairly. It is also particularly vulnerable to a blitz of government interference, with each new education secretary dishing out unwanted, top-down policy that must cause a lot of aggravation.
Well, the bin man thing is a little hyperbolic! But it’s true they are currently considered stupid by default. The PABO, the school all primary school teachers attend, has had really bad press recently. Teachers have been graduating without having any grasp of basic maths or spelling, let alone any other skills. So it is also not without reason, and frankly, it’s pretty noticeable in the teachers you meet (I meet many teachers for work). But these recent scandals certainly mean that teachers are looked down on, and currently I’d say looked down on more than in eg the UK.
ETA: Actually, that’s pretty different from bin men. I think bin men are appreciated, only nobody thinks it’s a fantastic job. Teachers aren’t even really appreciated, they’re just assumed to be stupid failures.
This is part of the issue. While a number of teachers are very bright the barriers to entry in the education colleges themselves are fairly low, and in certain non-technical subject areas in the education curriculum while you do have to do a lot of grunt work the intellectual horsepower required to complete the coursework is fairly modest.
While teachers may be ''respected" the reality is that if you have a sizable cohort of people in your profession who are in the middle to back middle of the intellectual bell curve compared to other professions it will impact how people view the profession.