Ugh. Thirteen years of higher education; thousands of hours working, writing, publishing; and an almost pathological dedication to what has essentially become glorified high school. In other words, you and your kids suck.
I was thinking it’d be funny if light strand herself resurrected this thread in about 5 yrs. Then we can all imagine the students she’s complaining about now are the offspring of her old students. 
Open enrolment is the norm for 2-yr institutions (like junior or community colleges), but I think it’s still the exception for 4-yr institutions. Then again the line between regular & community colleges has blurred with some of the latter granting bachelor’s degrees, and some of the former having admissions standards low enough to de facto be open enrolment.
No, it won’t, because “better” people don’t want to teach the assholes.
Given your unnecessary personal insult on me, someone you don’t know, I’m guessing you are/ were one of the assholes that stop “better” people teaching.
What? Are you claiming that quality people would never go into teaching, whatever the compensation, because the profession itself is inherently degrading?
I’ve been university lecturing more or less 20 years from being a TA in grad school to full-time professoring. Yep, it’s a lot of work. Yep, I have had my fair share of bozos on two continents in addition to teaching teaching-workshops to international students every summer (being lazy/insolent/a dipshit knows no geographic boundaries). Nope, doesn’t get to me personally, and I wouldn’t give it up.
If I did, I wouldn’t learn such fascinating stuff such as ‘Charlemagne became emperor when he personally scalped and murdered the current Merovingian king and took his place’ (2nd year history major on a final) or reading a paper in which a student completely misunderstood that the Melos in Thucydides’s Melian Dialogue is a place, not ‘this old guy named Melos who was quite cross with the Athenians’ (first year history major on an extended essay/research paper). I can’t wait to see what my third/final year students have for me when they take their final next week.
Dammit now I’m interested in the question.
I won’t deny being an asshole. I’ve worked very hard to get that title. But I was pretty nice to my teachers and only had trouble with very few.
Given the fact that you confessed to leaving school with only the basic qualifications and your inability to recognize that money might just bring some highly motivated people into the teaching profession…well, I just took a small leap in assumed you were a dumbshit.
Having been in the teaching profession long ago before I wisely ran away from it to a real paying job…
Teachers are always in a catch-22.
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Teachers are from the lower part of the college class and not as academically competent etc etc etc - so they don’t deserve more money…which just keeps more quality college grads out of the profession…which means they deserve less money which means…
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If a school performs well then they obviously have an adequate budget. No need to raise it. If the school is not perfomring well then just throwing more money at it it throwing good money after bad therefore they need to show some improvement before they get more money. However, if they show improvement…
What makes me shake my head to this day is the very FIRST project I worked on after leaving teaching was dealing with teachers. The project was in trouble and since I used to be a teacher they put me on theproject to see if I could turn it around.
Within the first 5 minutes I found the problem. The project needed to recruit teachers and these teachers were going to have to put in a significant amount of time and effort. They were ‘compensated’ adequately for this time EXCEPT the compensation was do be donated to a charity in their name.
I questioned this - why not give the money to the teachers and let THEM decide if they wish to donate it to charity? My bosses were shocked, SHOCKED at this suggestion. Why would teachers want MONEY?! Also, wouldn’t you get not very good teachers if you did this (because, of course, a teacher wanting to be PAID for their professional time means they MUST suck as teachers!)
I countered that they don’t do this for lawyers or health professionals (other projects going on) so why are teachers different? Oh well, that’s different. You HAVE to pay lawyers and Doctors for their time you silly boy!
My bosses thought about it and let me make the change. Within days we had all the teachers we needed for the project.
They MUSt have been sucky teachers though. MOney…ICK! PHOOEEY! :mad:
I said that I left school with only a basic qualification because the teachers were useless. However, it was one of the top private schools in my country ( not the US ) and the teachers would have been paid much more than those at public schools, which takes me back to my premise that paying teachers more does not guarantee that they will be any good at teaching children.
There are ways to get great teachers, but that’s a whole different thread.
If I were a dumbshit, I doubt I would have gone on to have successful careers in two completely different occupations.
As for you, you are very rude.
Yeah yeah, first page, phouka posted this years ago, whatever. Phouka is still around so I feel vindicated replying.
I disagree, Professors are not, necessarily, primary educators, nor should they be ideally or morally. Different professors have different teaching loads, at my (former) university, in both departments I regularly attended classes from some taught a lot of classes because they liked to, some taught a lot because it was in their tenure contract, and similarly some were only required to teach a class every one or two years, if ever (this is especially true of department heads, who are also professors) – some only taught graduate level courses, where are often closer to discussion groups on cutting edge topics (closer to guided research than teaching).
It really depends on the focus of the university, and faculty. It was expected of most students to either get an outside practical internship, (if you wanted to get a job out of college), pursue independent study, or do research with a professor in order to get the most out of college. Which isn’t to say we had bad professor-level teachers (as opposed to adjunct or lecturer faculty), a few were bad, but most were fine. It’s just that if you’re at a research 1 university, I don’t think it’s right to play the “professors are TEACHERS” card, especially not when the terms of their tenure or employment contract specify otherwise.