My wife is a high school English teacher. The ongoing joke with teachers is they get 3 months a year off. What other profession gets that, right?
Speaking from experience, she generally brings home work every night (grading, lesson planning, etc). Weekends too. This fluctuates based on time of year (grading a round of research papers, preparing new lessons for a new quarter, etc).
Summers off? Kinda. New lessons and curriculums often have to be prepared for the following year. She's been doing that for a bit already whenever our little guy naps.
The other part of overlooked is the emotional toll. In my wife's case, she's dealing with high school freshmen, juniors, seniors, all who are one hell of a handful most of the time. Last year, she had a class that had her crying more than a few times. The kids were literally trying to make her cry.
But besides all that, teaching is a profession that is charged with preparing and educating our youth for tomorrow. Obviously, teachers go into it knowing this, and often for that very reason. But in my eyes, that's quite a responsibility. There are plenty of better paying jobs out there with less vacation that, at the end of the day, don't make much of a difference.
(For the record, my wife's district actually pays pretty well, so I don't think she's underpaid).
"But besides all that, teaching is a profession that is charged with preparing and educating our youth for tomorrow. Obviously, teachers go into it knowing this, and often for that very reason. But in my eyes, that's quite a responsibility. There are plenty of better paying jobs out there with less vacation that, at the end of the day, don't make much of a difference."
If you ask me, that's all the more reason to increase pay and remove the near absolute job security. (Note: I haven't independently fact checked the job security so if its wrong please let me know). Given how important the job is, doesn't it make sense to align the incentives properly?
For the most part, when I hear people disagree with this, they tend to bring up specific problems with things like No Child Left Behind. Its hard to disagree that using bad techniques to measure teacher performance is a bad idea and I don't have a specific better solution, but I don't think that means we should stop trying.
I agree that it's a good reason to increase pay and possibly remove job security. And yes, once a teacher is tenured, barring any obvious crazy behavior, they are basically guaranteed their job regardless (at least in Chicagoland).
There are pros and cons to that - my wife and I discuss that subject often. I don't like the idea of tenured teachers not taking that responsibility seriously and just slacking off. My wife argues that it helps the good teachers make real change (since they can't before being tenured for fear of being fired).
No Child Left Behind is a big problem if you talk to any teacher. In my wife's district, they will soon be implementing some incentive based teaching practices, where portions of a teachers pay will be tied directly to student performances. And since all high school teaching is geared toward good ACT scores, it will all basically come down to ACT scores (which it does a lot already).
"Speaking from experience, she generally brings home work every night (grading, lesson planning, etc). Weekends too. This fluctuates based on time of year (grading a round of research papers, preparing new lessons for a new quarter, etc)."
That might be true for her. Nonetheless, the plural of anecdote is not data; as I observe in the post: "According to Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data, the average teacher works slightly less than 40 hours per week. If you have better data, I’d like to see it. Note too that people getting teaching degrees at the graduate level get substantially lower GRE scores than those in almost all other disciplines. This will come up later."
I think what makes people question the data is that the average hours of work per week match up pretty well with the time a teacher spends at school, which is insufficient to cover duties like planning lessons and grading papers (see for example any work-to-contract strike).
In any case, the ATUS specifies that its questions are about work done for pay/profit or free for a family business (since teachers typically work more hours than stated in their contract, a lot of work they do is not for pay).
The BLS data being based off the survey question "How much work did you do yesterday" and extrapolating from that, instead of something more direct like "how much work did you do last week". Anyway, Google is loaded with heaps of research into teacher workloads, this line "if anyone has better data, I'd like to see it" is just a handwaving throwaway line.
But if you really do have a problem with anecdotal data, why do things like bring up Bill Gates, who is not only an anecdotal point, but an obvious outlier at that?
Bill Gates is an outlier but that isn't helping your case. A lot of people TRY to become Bill Gates and fail. Those are the people risking a lot. You don't hear much about them though.
Okay, but do you want good teachers, or do you want mediocre teachers? What are your expectations for good teachers? Do you think their pay compensates for their time and effort?
You wife is underpaid. She cares. The guy in the class right next to her is overpaid at the very same salary. He doesn't care. That's the super-hard to solve problem a the center of this debate.
I think we should all get a few months off a year. I wish the people complaining about teacher "vacation" benefits would instead demand more vacation time for themselves.
The proposal considers issues of pay, but crucially it also considers issues of other working conditions, including the issue of whether working teachers who do better quality work than other teachers are recognized for that achievement.
Very interesting -- thanks for the reference! Will read through it this evening. I sincerely hope it proposes good methods of improving teachers, ones other than the horribly flawed method of judging teachers based on student test scores.
> "The first time you teach a class, it’s incredibly hard and time consuming, but the difficulty drops like a logarithm to a relatively low plateau after you’ve done it a few times. This appears to be reflected in data."
I'm not entirely sure if this is a good reflection of the teaching role, or at least what it should be. Also, this statement to me gives the impression that teaching is a fairly static or fixed process -- once you've done it a little, your subconscious can take over. Sadly one can get by with that mindset (and unfortunately I've had plenty of teachers who act like they believe this), but any good teacher would be saddened by this. Proper teaching is so much more than just knowing the subject, or the routine. The amount of effort and thought involved in skillfully and effectively teaching any idea or concept to a wide range of different people with different backgrounds and knowledge and world views isn't a task that I believe can become automatic. Good teaching involved understanding your students and understanding where they're coming from and what they know, and tailoring everything you do to get each individual student deeply involved in the subject at hand. That's no easy task, even for seasoned teachers!
I'm not suggesting you necessarily are part of this mindset, however sadly so many in the US have such an obscured view of what teaching truly is. In my opinion, that is one of the core problems with education in the US.
> "Note too that people getting teaching degrees at the graduate level get substantially lower GRE scores than those in almost all other disciplines."
Sorry I don't understand -- what's your point with this, what is this supposed to prove, or how does this contribute to the argument?
As another graduate student who teaches, I can confirm jseliger's claim.
Teaching difficulty drops of insanely fast. Don't think of it as making the task automatic, but rather having familiar territory off of which to base the things you say.
After one semester teaching a class, you discover what ideas the students tend to find most confusing and what types of errors are the most common.
Having leftover notes from the last time you taught saves you you most of the planning work, too.
Perhaps we need to talk in scales or include some comparators here. I completely agree that difficulty does drop some with more subject knowledge, teaching experience, and familiarity with the subject and types of questions and students, but by how much really? To me it sounds like it's being suggested that teaching becomes "easy"? Effortless? Not necessarily mentally taxing? Not necessarily time consuming? I can't see how one could _effectively_ teach and think this.
Again, I don't see teaching as simply "transferring" facts/knowledge. Students can test well and have no conceptual understanding whatsoever. Or, students can show understanding but have underlying mental models untouched (making them even more confused than previously). Both of these cases are failures.
The book "What the Best College Teachers Do" has amazing insights on how involved, dedicated, knowledgeable, and wise very successful and effective teachers are. The amount of thought and effort they put into their courses is staggering, so I'm approaching this discussion from that frame of mind, rather than what the average teacher (or student teacher) does.
"To me it sounds like it's being suggested that teaching becomes "easy"? Effortless? Not necessarily mentally taxing?"
I doubt teaching will ever be "effortless," at least if you're any good or aspire to be any good, but the idea that you have to spend five hours of prep (or some ridiculous number) for every hour of class; I probably spend ~15 minutes prepping for a 50 – 75 minute class if I've already read the material a couple times, have a loose lesson plan, and, as one of the above posters mentioned, know where the likely trouble spots are going to be.
If you're good or want to be good, I don't think you ever just phone it in. But these stories of hero teachers spending 12 hours a day, every day working to prep for class sound highly improbable to me, based in part on experience and based in part on the aforementioned BLS data.
Teaching can also be hugely mentally taxing while you're in the classroom. That's when I'm most on my toes and most ready to follow where the class goes; if a bunch of people want to discuss a subject, or unexpected questions arise, or whatever, you have to be ready to roll with it. Those are often the most satisfying classes. Most of the time I go in with a loose plan that'll cover whatever I'm shooting to cover that day, and if the class goes in another direction that's still productive, I'm ready to roll.
> "But these stories of hero teachers spending 12 hours a day, every day working to prep for class sound highly improbable to me"
The stories I hear about are the ones of teachers working ~12 hours a day because they teach several different subjects a day and constantly have mounds of documentation the state requires of them on every student. In addition, they have large classes and spend hours and hours grading and providing valuable feedback on homework/projects and exams.
For the sake of the discussion, some sample thoughts about what the "good" teachers think about:
What about considering the larger questions? Why are the students in the course in the first place? Throughout the course, are they being inspired to continue their studies outside of class? Why is the material on the syllabus actually on the syllabus -- what purpose does any of it serve the students? Is this purpose taught in such a way that it is understood by the students? Are they often intrinsically motivated to learn or are most of them just seeking a good grade? How can you structure each activity, lecture, and exam to ensure or encourage students to be intrinsically motivated and care about their learning and development? How can you help students desire the knowledge long-term, rather than just for the course or for their studies...? Are the students learning to think about the subject at a deeper level -- more like the experts? How can you encourage such thinking? Is the learning environment or atmosphere itself safe and welcoming -- encouraging students to ask questions without fear of failure or looking dumb, and is free from stereotypes and negative expectations -- does it encourage free-thinking, discovery, negotiation of meaning -- does the teacher feedback encourage all this? Is the learning functional or is it just leading to correct answers? Do the students to the proper extent have control over their own education/learning? Are the expectations in place to encourage this? Is it thought about what should be expected of the students once they complete the lesson, section or course? What deep mental models does it appear the students have that prevent them from learning to their fullest? How could those be tackled? How can it be encouraged to collaborate on finding answers? How can the course be taught by having the students asking the proper questions rather than being told what to think?... and so on.
Don't forget either that "It gets easier as you get more experienced" happens in all professions. Those people who now find it "easy" are people with skills, and people with skills are worth more money because they do things "easily".
I'd like to see someone approach any other professional and claim she should get less money now that her job comes more easily to her.
I used to teach as a graduate student. It's nothing compared to what actual teachers do. Someone else has set the syllabus and usually has set the lecture notes. There was no teaching work for me to do during my "holidays". And while I didn't mark papers at home, the other grad students who did got paid - something that salaried teachers don't get. Sure, there's a bit of a hump in getting used to standing up the front of a class, but it's only a part of what being a teacher is.
The main article also neatly skips over the risk that teachers do have - excluding tertiary, they have far more job roles than they used to and get sued or abused with monotonous regularity, particularly in regards to their new-found 'nurse' role.
The whole article reeks of "teaching as a profession is just being a glorified graduate student TA" when it's clearly not. It's like a bricklayer saying that there's nothing special to being an architect.
The reason teacher's salaries are set incorrectly is because supply and demand has been pushed out of the equation.
1. some teachers can't be laid off.
2. schools don't get proportionally more money for exceptional work.
3. most parents are indifferent to maxing out their child's education quality.
4. most of the teachers effort must be applied to the hellions and problem-makers. optimization for max output requires removing the bottom 20% that cause 80% of the problems.
If you want teachers to be paid what they are worth, you have to take the Communism out of the school and replace it with that evil Capitalism thing that makes salary tied to how much a worker is worth.
I see how using the word "Communism" can be taken as an insult, I didn't mean it as one. I'm using the dictionary definition of Communism here.
When I think "Communism in American schools", I think of the famous communism quote: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."
I keep hearing from die-hard conservatives that teachers make "exorbitant" salaries with "unbelievable" benefits, and that they are a drain on our society. On the other hand, every single peer/friend I know who went into teaching is pretty much lower-middle class.
When I was in college several of my friends majored in early childhood education.
Without a doubt it has to be the easiest major out there. While I was writing papers, my friends were learning how to make name tags with construction paper and crayons, and learning kiddy songs (this is not an exaggeration).
The problem is that once you get the degree and jump through the hoops, you're in. That's all there is to it
If any idiot can become a teacher, and a bad teacher makes the same a great teacher, then the pay is going to end up as the average of what you'd pay a bad teacher and great one.
Side-note: my mom, who also has a degree in early childhood education, tells me that when she was there 30 years ago it was much more academically rigorous.
I gather it depends on how you're entering the field. My mother studies early childhood development with a focus on how it can go wrong (I forget the technical term, but things like severe autism)
It doesn't seem to be a 'hard' science, but it's still a science. As such, there's no glitter and construction paper involved, except when they are interacting with the children!
Certainly. I actually kind agree with your original point, from what I've seen of education majors. I took an education class in college, aced it and got rave reviews on my papers, and I barely even tried. Made me a little concerned about my fellow students in the course.
I went to grad school on CS for a year, focusing on AI. I then realized that I was more interested in improving reasoning in people rather than machines, so I switched to Ed. Psych. I can still recall my astonishment at how much lower the quality of grad students in the education school was. A very few bright ones and a whole lot of "dumm".
One anecdote: I was focusing for a while on better ways to teach algebra word problems. I put up some examples and not one education grad student, or the professor, could solve even one of them. I'm talking about stuff like "a boat goes 5 miles in an hour against the current and ..." Nada.
I just want to say thanks for the great post. I thought your comment on the other thread was particularly good, I'm glad to see you expand a bit more on it. Honestly, I was a little disappointed to see patio11 reference yummy's comments, since they really leave the impression that he has a horse in this race - it's nice to see a more even handed treatment of the matter.
First observation: geez teachers in the US don't get paid "that much". In Ontario (province in Canada), teachers can max out after 12 years at > 100K a year, it's not at all unheard of. The teacher's union here is very powerful, for better or worse.
I think deciding on how much a teacher "should" earn simply based on the time they put in and then compare it to another profession misses a valuable point - teachers can make a huge difference in the life of a human being. What's that worth to society? If a great math teacher encourages 3 kids to become engineers, then his salary is much less than it should be.
I saw a post on HN the other day about a teacher who told an otherwise disillusioned student that he was "gifted". Simply by being told so (he wasn't giften in the traditional sense) completely changed his perspective on school. If he goes on to become a contributing member of society, a good father, and good role model for others, then that teacher is probably worth more than 70K a year.
It's nearly impossible to fire teachers, but staying a teacher is tough in terms of dealing with the emotional and mental stress (or simply wanting more money).
There's something uniquely American about bitching whenever someone has something you don't have. Most people have shitty benefits and 2 weeks off. The rest of the world has free healthcare and double the vacation days. But the problem isnt that our employers are cheap bastards, its that the teachers' unions are too strong. Right.
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[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] threadSpeaking from experience, she generally brings home work every night (grading, lesson planning, etc). Weekends too. This fluctuates based on time of year (grading a round of research papers, preparing new lessons for a new quarter, etc).
Summers off? Kinda. New lessons and curriculums often have to be prepared for the following year. She's been doing that for a bit already whenever our little guy naps.
The other part of overlooked is the emotional toll. In my wife's case, she's dealing with high school freshmen, juniors, seniors, all who are one hell of a handful most of the time. Last year, she had a class that had her crying more than a few times. The kids were literally trying to make her cry.
But besides all that, teaching is a profession that is charged with preparing and educating our youth for tomorrow. Obviously, teachers go into it knowing this, and often for that very reason. But in my eyes, that's quite a responsibility. There are plenty of better paying jobs out there with less vacation that, at the end of the day, don't make much of a difference.
(For the record, my wife's district actually pays pretty well, so I don't think she's underpaid).
If you ask me, that's all the more reason to increase pay and remove the near absolute job security. (Note: I haven't independently fact checked the job security so if its wrong please let me know). Given how important the job is, doesn't it make sense to align the incentives properly?
For the most part, when I hear people disagree with this, they tend to bring up specific problems with things like No Child Left Behind. Its hard to disagree that using bad techniques to measure teacher performance is a bad idea and I don't have a specific better solution, but I don't think that means we should stop trying.
There are pros and cons to that - my wife and I discuss that subject often. I don't like the idea of tenured teachers not taking that responsibility seriously and just slacking off. My wife argues that it helps the good teachers make real change (since they can't before being tenured for fear of being fired).
No Child Left Behind is a big problem if you talk to any teacher. In my wife's district, they will soon be implementing some incentive based teaching practices, where portions of a teachers pay will be tied directly to student performances. And since all high school teaching is geared toward good ACT scores, it will all basically come down to ACT scores (which it does a lot already).
That might be true for her. Nonetheless, the plural of anecdote is not data; as I observe in the post: "According to Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data, the average teacher works slightly less than 40 hours per week. If you have better data, I’d like to see it. Note too that people getting teaching degrees at the graduate level get substantially lower GRE scores than those in almost all other disciplines. This will come up later."
In any case, the ATUS specifies that its questions are about work done for pay/profit or free for a family business (since teachers typically work more hours than stated in their contract, a lot of work they do is not for pay).
But if you really do have a problem with anecdotal data, why do things like bring up Bill Gates, who is not only an anecdotal point, but an obvious outlier at that?
The more important question is whether the pay is competitive to attract teachers of sufficient quality.
http://edpro.stanford.edu/hanushek/files_det.asp?FileId=258
http://edpro.stanford.edu/hanushek/admin/pages/files/uploads...
The proposal considers issues of pay, but crucially it also considers issues of other working conditions, including the issue of whether working teachers who do better quality work than other teachers are recognized for that achievement.
I'm not entirely sure if this is a good reflection of the teaching role, or at least what it should be. Also, this statement to me gives the impression that teaching is a fairly static or fixed process -- once you've done it a little, your subconscious can take over. Sadly one can get by with that mindset (and unfortunately I've had plenty of teachers who act like they believe this), but any good teacher would be saddened by this. Proper teaching is so much more than just knowing the subject, or the routine. The amount of effort and thought involved in skillfully and effectively teaching any idea or concept to a wide range of different people with different backgrounds and knowledge and world views isn't a task that I believe can become automatic. Good teaching involved understanding your students and understanding where they're coming from and what they know, and tailoring everything you do to get each individual student deeply involved in the subject at hand. That's no easy task, even for seasoned teachers!
I'm not suggesting you necessarily are part of this mindset, however sadly so many in the US have such an obscured view of what teaching truly is. In my opinion, that is one of the core problems with education in the US.
> "Note too that people getting teaching degrees at the graduate level get substantially lower GRE scores than those in almost all other disciplines."
Sorry I don't understand -- what's your point with this, what is this supposed to prove, or how does this contribute to the argument?
After one semester teaching a class, you discover what ideas the students tend to find most confusing and what types of errors are the most common.
Having leftover notes from the last time you taught saves you you most of the planning work, too.
Again, I don't see teaching as simply "transferring" facts/knowledge. Students can test well and have no conceptual understanding whatsoever. Or, students can show understanding but have underlying mental models untouched (making them even more confused than previously). Both of these cases are failures.
The book "What the Best College Teachers Do" has amazing insights on how involved, dedicated, knowledgeable, and wise very successful and effective teachers are. The amount of thought and effort they put into their courses is staggering, so I'm approaching this discussion from that frame of mind, rather than what the average teacher (or student teacher) does.
I doubt teaching will ever be "effortless," at least if you're any good or aspire to be any good, but the idea that you have to spend five hours of prep (or some ridiculous number) for every hour of class; I probably spend ~15 minutes prepping for a 50 – 75 minute class if I've already read the material a couple times, have a loose lesson plan, and, as one of the above posters mentioned, know where the likely trouble spots are going to be.
If you're good or want to be good, I don't think you ever just phone it in. But these stories of hero teachers spending 12 hours a day, every day working to prep for class sound highly improbable to me, based in part on experience and based in part on the aforementioned BLS data.
Teaching can also be hugely mentally taxing while you're in the classroom. That's when I'm most on my toes and most ready to follow where the class goes; if a bunch of people want to discuss a subject, or unexpected questions arise, or whatever, you have to be ready to roll with it. Those are often the most satisfying classes. Most of the time I go in with a loose plan that'll cover whatever I'm shooting to cover that day, and if the class goes in another direction that's still productive, I'm ready to roll.
The stories I hear about are the ones of teachers working ~12 hours a day because they teach several different subjects a day and constantly have mounds of documentation the state requires of them on every student. In addition, they have large classes and spend hours and hours grading and providing valuable feedback on homework/projects and exams.
For the sake of the discussion, some sample thoughts about what the "good" teachers think about:
What about considering the larger questions? Why are the students in the course in the first place? Throughout the course, are they being inspired to continue their studies outside of class? Why is the material on the syllabus actually on the syllabus -- what purpose does any of it serve the students? Is this purpose taught in such a way that it is understood by the students? Are they often intrinsically motivated to learn or are most of them just seeking a good grade? How can you structure each activity, lecture, and exam to ensure or encourage students to be intrinsically motivated and care about their learning and development? How can you help students desire the knowledge long-term, rather than just for the course or for their studies...? Are the students learning to think about the subject at a deeper level -- more like the experts? How can you encourage such thinking? Is the learning environment or atmosphere itself safe and welcoming -- encouraging students to ask questions without fear of failure or looking dumb, and is free from stereotypes and negative expectations -- does it encourage free-thinking, discovery, negotiation of meaning -- does the teacher feedback encourage all this? Is the learning functional or is it just leading to correct answers? Do the students to the proper extent have control over their own education/learning? Are the expectations in place to encourage this? Is it thought about what should be expected of the students once they complete the lesson, section or course? What deep mental models does it appear the students have that prevent them from learning to their fullest? How could those be tackled? How can it be encouraged to collaborate on finding answers? How can the course be taught by having the students asking the proper questions rather than being told what to think?... and so on.
Taxing...
I'd like to see someone approach any other professional and claim she should get less money now that her job comes more easily to her.
The main article also neatly skips over the risk that teachers do have - excluding tertiary, they have far more job roles than they used to and get sued or abused with monotonous regularity, particularly in regards to their new-found 'nurse' role.
The whole article reeks of "teaching as a profession is just being a glorified graduate student TA" when it's clearly not. It's like a bricklayer saying that there's nothing special to being an architect.
I'd venture to guess your observation is way off...
1. some teachers can't be laid off.
2. schools don't get proportionally more money for exceptional work.
3. most parents are indifferent to maxing out their child's education quality.
4. most of the teachers effort must be applied to the hellions and problem-makers. optimization for max output requires removing the bottom 20% that cause 80% of the problems.
If you want teachers to be paid what they are worth, you have to take the Communism out of the school and replace it with that evil Capitalism thing that makes salary tied to how much a worker is worth.
When I think "Communism in American schools", I think of the famous communism quote: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."
Without a doubt it has to be the easiest major out there. While I was writing papers, my friends were learning how to make name tags with construction paper and crayons, and learning kiddy songs (this is not an exaggeration).
The problem is that once you get the degree and jump through the hoops, you're in. That's all there is to it
If any idiot can become a teacher, and a bad teacher makes the same a great teacher, then the pay is going to end up as the average of what you'd pay a bad teacher and great one.
Side-note: my mom, who also has a degree in early childhood education, tells me that when she was there 30 years ago it was much more academically rigorous.
It doesn't seem to be a 'hard' science, but it's still a science. As such, there's no glitter and construction paper involved, except when they are interacting with the children!
One anecdote: I was focusing for a while on better ways to teach algebra word problems. I put up some examples and not one education grad student, or the professor, could solve even one of them. I'm talking about stuff like "a boat goes 5 miles in an hour against the current and ..." Nada.
If the quality of teachers was uniformly high, we could pay them all what they deserve to be paid and not have to worry about leeches so much.
If good teachers were paid what they deserve, the quality of teachers would be uniformly high.
I think deciding on how much a teacher "should" earn simply based on the time they put in and then compare it to another profession misses a valuable point - teachers can make a huge difference in the life of a human being. What's that worth to society? If a great math teacher encourages 3 kids to become engineers, then his salary is much less than it should be.
I saw a post on HN the other day about a teacher who told an otherwise disillusioned student that he was "gifted". Simply by being told so (he wasn't giften in the traditional sense) completely changed his perspective on school. If he goes on to become a contributing member of society, a good father, and good role model for others, then that teacher is probably worth more than 70K a year.
It's relatively easy to become a teacher, so if we just start paying every teacher more money we just attract more substandard candidates.
http://www.timesdaily.com/article/20090222/articles/90222032...