Teaching has a pretty low opportunity for efficiency and innovation. 100 years ago, a teacher could stand in front of 20 3rd graders and teach them arithmetic, the same exact thing will happen tomorrow in 3rd grade classes across the country.
Teachers aren’t presenting calculus to a class of 500 5th graders, and going on to advanced collegiate style subjects in middle school. By the end of high school the goal remained reasonably constant, produce 18 year olds who are literate, know mathematics, are conversant in history and geography, and are prepared to learn the skills they need to have to become useful members of society. Public schools do not turn out doctors and physicists, they turn out capable 18 years olds some of whom may go on to learn enough to become doctors and physicists.
There is also a limited amount of impact that a teacher has. The greatest elementary school teacher of the 20th century isn’t going to create a generation of geniuses, she is simply going to teach her charges (~ 20 per year) more than a “replacement level teacher” and perhaps spur some of them on to better lives. Jonas Salk cured polio.
Teachers are blue collar joe six-packs. Respected, but not highly valued in comparison to other professions.
I’d have to agree with this.
Before high school graduation, my teachers asked me what course am I going to take. I answered that I’ll take up education. That I want to be a teacher. Instead of encouraging me to pursue it they said that I should take up engineering or business administration instead. Now I’ve just finished my first year as a teacher. My co-teachers at school ask me now why I took education and tell me that I’m young and I’d still be able to shift to engineering. I told them that I like teaching and I consider it as the noblest profession. They’ll say that engineering pays higher. So yeah, respected, but not highly valued.
I guess it’s all about the salary. Make teaching a high-paying job and people will start looking at teachers with awe and admiration.
While that’s fasciating and bizarre I assure you it’s really without comparison to most countries.
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Teachers are blue collar joe six-packs. Respected, but not highly valued in comparison to other professions.
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Again, I have to ask; compared to what?
People are making these vague subjective claims that teachers aren’t respected “compared to other professions,” but aside from a select few professions, I don’t know many that people have a huge amount of respect for, or een know exist. We have entire threads dedicated to shitting on HR professionals, running right now. Do people really have a lot of respect for accountants? Truck drivers? CNC programmers? Project managers at the DOT? Of course not.
The average schoolteacher in the USA makes about $50,000. Is that too high or too low? It all depends. It’s higher than the mean or median pay for all jobs. It’s lower than the mean pay for a person with an equivalent level of education in another profession, but teachers (on average) enjoy more benefits and job security, which has to be considered. It also depends what state you live in.
In Canada, where we’re ion the midst of a horrible labor blowup in the schools, teachers actually make MORE than equivalently educated people in other fields, plus all the benefits.
So certainly in my neck of the woods it’s hard to* objectively *demonstrate teachers lack respect. They don’t make as much as doctors, it’s true. Frankly, there’s a reason for that; supply and demand. Doctors are in short supply, teachers aren’t.
The 24/7 means that there is an expection on teachers to work outside their contract hours. I know other professions have those times where they have to put in 10-12 hour days for a week for a big project but for teachers that is an expectation every day of the school year. There is simply not enough time in a day for teachers to do their regular work. Also, unlike most white-collar jobs we need to be at work every day and on-time to boot. There is no being 10 minutes late or taking a coffee break whenever. Even on the days we are gone we need to have the days work prepared.
If you think this is merely an occasional thing in other professions, you’ve not worked any of them.
40-hour workweeks just don’t happen much in professional fields. I can’t do my job between 9 and 5 Monday to Friday and know of not a single person working a professional job who could. I also know more than a few teachers and their workloads seem pretty normal for professional jobs; the job has its hard times, but they aren’t being worked to death.
Look, I know teaching’s hard. But all jobs are hard. That’s why they’re called “jobs.” Being an airline pilot is hard. Being a truck driver is hard. My best friend’s a manager at a big computer company and his job involves seemingly non stop work, to the point that I find it irritating to visit him because he never gets true vacation. Being a maintenance manager in a stamping plant is hard. Owning your own business is crazy hard. Being a nurse is hard. Being a cop is hard. My brother in law used to be an actor on mainstage at Second City; it was one of the hardest jobs I have ever seen done by a person with whom I was closely acquainted. Jobs are hard. If they’re not hard, then they will soon be made hard; it’s just economic reality that you will be pushed to work as hard as possible without actually making too many people refuse to take the job. Teaching is not uniquely, unusually difficult. Nobody is getting it easy.
You know beans about teaching. Teaching is full of innovation. For example, in today’s classrooms, data tracking allows teachers to see at a glance exactly what concepts, traced through the whole curriculum, a student is having trouble. Teachers can immediately see that Johnny is having trouble with multiplying 8s, and can immediately develop assignments designed to hone in on that specific problem. With testing, modern testing is able to use technology to facilitate authentic testing items that draw on tasks that you may do in real life, rather than the disembodied “fill in the blanks” questions of yore. Technology in the classroom has moved students from being primarily knowledge consumers and in to being knowledge creators, and students can do assignments that have a real world impact beyond the classroom. There is so much exciting stuff out there, and so much new cognitive research backing it up, that it’s really a wide open frontier.
The greatest teachers of the 20th century are doing amazing things. They are training thousands of teachers in the absolute best teaching techniques, and moving them away from the busywork that took up much of the school day years ago. They are figuring out how to use technology effectively in the classroom to facilitate learning. They are working on the district and national level to develop top quality curriculum. They are bringing in a new level of rigor that has never been seen before. Their impact is on the system level, and affects countless kids.
In any case, there are plenty of respected professions where the daily work is often fairly routine. Most lawyers aren’t arguing to the Supreme Court every day. Most of them are working on mundane contracts and tax issues. Most doctors aren’t curing polio. Most of the time, they are prescribing basic antibiotics and performing routine procedures. Most CEOs aren’t providing visionary leadership around the clock. It’s a lot of time sitting at routine meetings.
But now and then they do something spectacular. Teachers do that, too. Every good teacher can identify at least one kid whose life was vastly changed as a direct result of their work. And this stuff can be as life or death as anything else. Teachers can, on occasion, turn around the would-be-gang members, rehabilitate the hopeless kid, guide the bright student who was about to drop out, and provide meaning to the extremely depressed pupil. Indeed, when we had a SDMB thread about which profession had affected people’s lives the most, the two answers were teachers and doctors.
I spent 30 years as a college professor. I’ve taught at very elite colleges, second-tier state universities, and at my local community college. Although I only taught a couple of courses now and then at my community college - and I admit I did so only for the extra cash for holidays, I did notice a trend that is rampant at the community college level but runs throughout every place I’ve worked: students have become consumers of education. I believe that there are a many reasons why students have adopted this stance. However, I have also found it fairly simple to find ways to defeat the consumer attitude. I’ve tried to make my classes fun and to engage my students by making (in my case, history) relevant to them. I also made a rule that I would never respond to questions such as “is this going to be on the exam?”
It does take a fair amount of time to put together a course that will capture your students’ interest. Many professors either can’t or won’t expend this time because their promotions and salary increases are predicated on their research production and on their serving on X number of committees within the college, not on their teaching. Others, especially those who are in state systems wherein their salaries have fallen or remained static whilst their teaching load has increased, seem to have stopped caring. I’m retired, but an acquaintance of mine teaching at a state university has had his salary cut by 10% and his class load increased by two courses a years openly acknowledges that he no longer cares. The straw that broke his back, as he puts it, was finding out that the secretary to the principal of the high school his kids attend makes 125K a year - about 45K more than he does. I understand his frustration.
Teachers at very level are underpaid, often forced to teach to meet state-imposed student tests, or forced to choose between teaching or having a successful career. In my opinion, all of these issues must be mediated if we want better teachers.
This is not objectively true IMO. Teachers are modestly paid they first few years and then normally, over time, ramp up to very respectable middle class and even middle upper class incomes relative to the income demographics of the communities they serve. They also normally have a decent raft of insurance benefits in addition to their salary package. Pointing to the relatively tiny cohort of secretaries of school principals in the US making $ 125,000 a year as evidence of how poorly teaching is paid is absurd.
If the current entrants into education colleges were required to meet the same SAT or ACT scoring standards as those admitted to law and medicine or even business school tracks how many do you think would make the cut?
You know, I hate that these threads always devolve into discussions about whether or not teachers get paid enough or too little or too much, with a thousand comparisons to how hard other jobs are, how much leave teachers get, job security, etc., etc.
It’s really very simple: those districts who have a surplus of qualified applicants–where they are turning away not just bodies with teaching certificates, but people who would do the job well–in those districts, teachers are overpaid.
In other districts, where either they can’t fill positions at all and rotating subs keep the seat warm, or where they hire people they know are incompetent or otherwise unqualified because that’s all they can find, then teachers are underpaid.
All that matters is if you can get the kind of people you want for the money you are willing to pay and the terms of employment you offer. If you can, it’s fair. If you can’t, it’s not enough, and you either need to change the pay scale, or the working conditions. It really doesn’t matter if the right kinds of people “should” be happy to make that kind of money: if they can’t be found, it’s not right.
I see your supply and demand point, but the issue comes up repeatedly because of the constant refrain that teachers are, in general, underpaid when in fact taking salary and benefits into account they are paid quite adequately in most circumstances relative to the income demographics of the surrounding area.
The second argument that then usually gets introduced is that comparing degree level to degree level they are poorly paid relative to other professionals with masters and PHDs. This then takes us into the relative difficulty required in getting an Education Masters and PHD vs getting those degrees (or equivalents) in other, better paid professions like law, medicine and business.
The bottom line is that you are correct in the end it’s supply and demand.
I wasn’t using commodity as a term of art. There was nothing in the context to suggest that I was. I was using commodity in it’s broader sense to mean “something of use, advantage, or value”. Words have different meanings in different contexts. This is how language works.
Astro, I will cop to the fact that some teachers whine too much, as if no one else has jobs that suck. But I grow frustrated when people bitch about how lazy, stupid, incompetent, and pathetic teachers are and in the same breath complain that they are overpaid. If it were really such a great gig, half of new teachers wouldn’t leave the profession after five years. If it were such a good gig, education departments wouldn’t be the least competitive programs in schools. It’s like people think the population of teachers is settled. But it’s not. We get the teachers we are willing to pay for.
I think I have a good perspective regarding the respective workload of teaching as compared to other professions. I’m currently an engineer working as a project manager. Back when I was in the Navy, though, I taught chemistry and physics for several years at a military school.
As an engineer, my typical workweek is about 45-50 hours/week. This is an absolute cakewalk compared to when I was teaching, especially my first year. As a new instructor, I had to put together lesson plans, write all my tests and quizzes from scratch, and grade everything in a timely fashion. I worked from 7 a.m. in the morning to 1 a.m. at night during the week, and most of the day at least one day on weekends. I easily worked 70-80 hours/week that first year. It was truly a ridiculous workload, IMHO, and I only had 3 classes (with one prep) with a total of 75 students or so. I have no idea how new teachers at schools with 6 classes to teach and multiple preps do it.
Now granted, in subsequent years, my efficiency greatly increased, and I could build upon past years’ work. Nevertheless, the grading workload never decreased, and I found myself still spending time revamping lesson plans as I learned what worked and what didn’t. I probably got down to a 60-70 hour/week workweek by my third or fourth year teaching.
(I will say that at least part of this was my own personality. I had very high standards that I set for myself, and worked at a school and had a supervisor that gave me a great deal of autonomy. Many other instructors worked like I did, but there were others that did not, and the difference in the quality of their teaching was evident to all.)
All in all, despite the ridiculous workload, I found teaching to be the most rewarding job I’ve ever done. Nevertheless, I also had a family, and when I got out of the Navy, it came down to simple economics. Going from teaching as an active-duty naval officer to a public high school teacher would have involved roughly double the teaching load for about half the pay I’d been getting, or I could work as an engineer for roughly the same pay as a naval officer. I chose engineering. Nevertheless, I still envision the possibility of teaching again someday.
Being a teacher *in the United States Navy *may not be the same thing as being a teacher in a normal elementary school. I worked damned hard when I was in the service, too.
I blame the GOP. They have done a lot of anti-teacher, anti-post office, anti-union stuff as the unions donate to the Democrat party. Thus, the GOP wants to hurt them, and as much as possible crush them.
Look at this crazy new move where the GOP made the USPS come up with a completely unrealistic way of funding future benefits, thus the USPS is having to reduce service. It’s no coincidence that UPS and FED-EX donate heavily to the GOP.