My wife is a teacher. I am consistently shocked how much work she does in evenings, weekends. I earn more than twice as much as her and more than her maximum salary cap (we are both early in our careers). She blows me away in her dedication and effort, it's a great inspiration for me to continually study and work harder.
I mention it to people and always hear 'well maybe she is different but I've seen lots of teachers and they just do it for the holiday'. As if everyone is equally dedicated in any profession. As if the guy that sits at his computer 'working' for hours a day is a more efficient or effective worker just because he does more hours. As if outside observers of any industry can really spot who is producing vs who is not.
I can echo your story exactly. My wife teaches and is involved in an after school program. It isn't football but has a similar time commitment. During certain parts of the year she works 6 days a week often leaving the house at 8 am and returning at 9 or 10 pm. It is insane. Two other teachers in her department work similar hours. The pay per hour isn't very good once you factor all of that in.
At the other end of the spectrum, one of the teachers at my old school used to turn up at 8:30 and leave at 15:30. She used to put a video on, and then hand out worksheets to fill in whilst she marked the worksheets from the class before. Terrible teacher, luckily I only had her for a few weeks.
I have a few friends that are teachers and most of their schools wouldn't allow for this sort of thing to happen. Teachers aren't allowed to sit at their desk while a class is in session, they must be instructing or walking around (during a test, video, etc...). They get a planning period, where they might have a chance to do some grading or lesson planning, if they don't need to meet with a parent or something. This means they need to either stick around school several hours after it lets out to grade work and do lesson plans, or bring it home and work on it that night.
Same boat here. I pretty much assume that my wife will work at least 8 hours, uncompensated, every weekend. She typically works 7-4 at school, and then an hour or two at home. Because we've worked overseas, she has no seniority (years overseas don't count where we're at). Every year since being back in the states, she has been given a slightly different set of classes that have required her to spend a sizable portion of her summer developing new materials--again, pro bono.
I honestly hope she will leave teaching. Part of her extreme work schedule is self inflicted (she genuinely values her students and wants to hold them to a high standard, which creates a lot of work for her). However, I can't see anyone doing as much as she does for an entire career.
puff piece, if not pure propaganda bordering on hyperbole.
People and students respect teachers as a whole, what they do not respect and I bet many in the profession do as well is the inability to remove those who are not good teachers.
It is not a position one walks into without many upon many stories about what your really getting into. My Aunt retired from the trade, her aggravations in order that I remember are, Administrative people(usually political appointees), other teachers, and parents. There were a few others but mostly the tripe coming down from non teachers within the system seemed to be what we heard of.
That and the personal money she spent to have supplies because it was more important to blow money on marble floors than supplied, or having someone's wife/kid/friend in some advisement position that did nothing but occupy space.
Guess what, I can say the same of some other service professions, having a neighbor who does night shifts as a nurse and hearing the horror stories of what she puts up with is enough to let me know some jobs come with extra mental if not physical stress.
I think in the end we are all more than willing to heap accolades on good teachers. Its a system where the kids aren't first that irritates
This is true of being a professor as well (I certainly didn't understand what teaching really was about until I starting doing it).
I've always thought that our graduate students should be made to take acting lessons, because there's an element of second-order persuasion you have to do in a classroom that's hard to learn and difficult to describe but that shares some similarity to acting -- or maybe just rhetoric in the very ancient sense.
You can't just purvey information and mumble something about its importance. Ultimately, you're modeling what it means to be an intellectual -- trying to give your students certain habits of mind by showing them how those habits play out in practice.
We also spend an enormous amount of time trying to devise strategies for dealing with students who just don't get it (and you quickly learn -- or better learn -- that this might be the most important part of the job).
I could say more, of course. It's a very subtle set of skills -- more art than science, as they say. It's hard to do it at the college level, and I think it's far, far harder to do it at the elementary level, where the stakes are much higher.
What kind of third level institution do you work at? One is under the impress that going from passable to outstanding in teaching has much, much less effect on one's chances of getting tenure than going from mediocre to good in your research.
Because every time a post on education comes on HN everyone thinks they know all the answers. The comments end up turning into a "Well this is the real reason..." or "Everyone needs to be just like..."
The discussions end up being so worthless that I now flag every education related post on HN because it's just not worth the time here.
I don't think so. I think access to the best minds in the field is much more important than good teaching. Bad teaching is an opportunity to learn how to learn independently--an extremely valuable skill.
Great teachers inspire their students to learn independently. That's pretty much the most important part of the job description.
I think it's debatable whether great teaching or access to great minds is more important, and probably varies depending on the student and what stage of their education they're in. But either way, for the access to work at all, it has to really be access; receiving a dry lecture on introductory material from a great mind doesn't really give you access to that mind. But sure, the best students will seek out projects that give them real access, and those experiences will probably be incredibly valuable.
There is definitely a huge value in the university system just putting you in the right place to learn surrounded by the right people to learn from, but I hate the disrespect for actual teaching that I sometimes see when people talk about universities.
A lecture is a performance. When at the front of the class, I always felt like I was on stage, and accordingly, I was always "on". I was conscious of everything I said, and every movement I made, because everything went into the performance. That is one of the main reasons that giving a lecture is tiring - it's work to be "on" for over an hour.
The other main mental work is, as you said, devising strategies for explaining material to students who don't understand it the first time. It requires patience and self-control (if you betray any sense of frustration, you will lose them) on top of the difficult task of figuring out what their exact misunderstanding is.
And I agree, it's harder to do the more basic the material gets. Explaining advanced systems concepts to computer science juniors was much, much easier than explaining basic programming concepts to people with no prior programming experience. The more knowledge and concepts you have in common with your students, the easier it is to appeal to things you know they already understand - and you have the advantage of being able to use some of your areas jargon.
Here's the rub... I'm not aware of any Phd programs outside the Education departments that require formal teaching training. You might get an apprenticeship as a TA if you aren't an RA, but coursework in becoming a better teacher? Never. This is a prime example of the system being set up to support research more than teaching.
On the flip side, I've read research that says graduate degrees in education don't improve teaching results for high school. (Graduate degrees in the subject matter do.)
An open question on teaching... Do any liberal arts colleges have formal teaching improvement programs? If they're not trying to research and product Phds, perhaps their approach to the profession is different?
I have tons of respect and sympathy for teachers, but the argument I often hear for raising their pay ("they work really hard, they're super important, it's a difficult job") misses the central point.
It seems like we have enough teachers at the wages we currently pay. Teachers are willing to go into the profession despite the low wages, probably because they want a satisfying job with good benefits. If we didn't have enough teachers...we'd have to raise wages. Supply and demand.
We'd get better teachers if we paid more to good teachers. The problem is no one can seem to agree on how to measure what makes a good teacher - one side is busy arguing seniority should be the primary measure, the other side argues test scores, and neither one seems to want to spend any time or money figuring out an actually successful way to measure teacher skill.
You could ask the kids. They certainly know which classes are engaging, and which are time-biding garbage. And ultimately, assuming a teacher isn't running a movie theatre, student interest is the most important metric. You'd of course have to keep the actual weighting process a bit fluid to avoid the inmates gaining control of the asylum, but it should be quite straightforward to pick out the extreme bad and extreme good teachers.
It would also be a good introduction to the rationale behind secret ballots, and when it is actually appropriate to lie.
Look at ratemyprofessor and see how well an incredibly difficult professor that is also engaging and interesting does; now imagine that in a situation where the people in his/her class are forced to be there.
I took a quick look through that site, paging through my alma mater of a decade ago. I do see pathologies in the ratings/comments that remind me of complaints I would hear about professors from fellow students that were stressed, not getting the material, or used to a more structured environment. And if these ratings held weight with the university, I can definitely see professors dumbing down their lessons to avoid bad reviews. So I do see what you're getting at with it going terribly wrong.
Still, I think there's several key differences:
1. Every school student would be rating their teachers, rather than just those that loved a professor, had an axe to grind, or were encouraged to by an entertaining personality.
2. The context would be "closed", with each teacher relative to their school, rather than open cross-institution competition with a front page of featured "rockstar" professors that make the rest seem inadequate.
3. The high schools officially sanctioning ratings with real results would give kids the feeling that they really do have a stake in the process, rather than simply being its victims.
4. High school is a more structured environment where the process details matter a lot more. So a teacher eg giving out an incomplete homework problem is actually a valid indictment rather than the stressed out nitpicking of a culture shocked freshman.
5. In college, there's a certain level of appreciation for the material that everyone should have but doesn't necessarily, causing them to get frustrated at a professor with a dry personality. Whereas with high school, the idea is that everybody should be learning a cursory understanding of all subjects.
6. In college, there's a huge variation in the level of courses. One specific professor I had for a seminar where it was basically his PhD research group and me, an undergrad who'd just started on a simultaneous master's. I learned a lot in that class, and really appreciated him. I then ended up in a grad-level "intro" course with him (which I knew was an utter waste going in, but it was the only thing that fit my schedule). Most of the students were rote-memorization paying-for-credential types, but his style certainly did them no favors either, and I can definitely see my recollection echoed in a few of his current reviews. I'd say that he's still a teaching asset, but not for intro lectures where most students aren't already committed to the subject.
Really, there just needs to be some extrinsic motivation/reward for teachers that are truly making a difference versus simply clock-punching, and that's not more top-down testing edicts that further shackle them. And sure, the immediate reaction shouldn't be to fire the lowest-reviewed, but neither should we pretend that they deserve similar compensation to the exceptional ones.
The incentives have to be at a higher level. Schools and school districts need more motivation to hire and promote good teachers and fire bad ones.
That's not to say that the people running schools and school districts don't want better teachers or to fire bad ones, but they (whether appointed or elected) aren't losing their jobs when that doesn't happen. And schools and districts aren't dissolved when that doesn't happen. Worst case scenario, they get rescued by the court system, which would be considered a bailout if it happened to a bank.
We also have enough fast food workers. That doesn't mean they're doing the job because they want "a satisfying job with good benefits." That's definitely not a good assumption about any profession.
If you treat teaching as a lowest-bidder-wins "supply and demand" field, you may get passionate teachers who don't mind the pay, teachers who don't need to earn more for whatever reasons, probably some teachers who do find the benefits attractive, and all sorts of other people. But distilling this all to "people do it, so the wages are fine" misses just about all of the central points.
Consider that teaching isn't working in a bookstore or packing shipments for Amazon. It's not just a lot of work; it's a vitally important role in our world's future. I for one would not call "supply and demand" at the lowest possible rate a good way to treat such a profession.
>>>We also have enough fast food workers. That doesn't mean they're doing the job because they want "a satisfying job with good benefits." That's definitely not a good assumption about any profession.
Teaching (in US/Canada at least) requires at least a bachelor's degree and some specific teaching training. It's reasonable to think people aren't forced into it due to inexperience/low skill the same way fast food workers are. They must have some reason for choosing to be teachers - and you're right, I was making an assumption based on the people I know personally, which may not extend to the whole population. But for whatever reason, lots and lots of people, armed with the knowledge of what the wage is, are choosing to be teachers. Indeed, in some areas in my province we have a glut of teachers applying for a few openings.
>>>it's a vitally important role in our world's future. I for one would not call "supply and demand" at the lowest possible rate a good way to treat such a profession.
What is the appropriate way to decide pay? We have a spectrum of possible wages we could set, from the lowest amount possible to ensure enough adequate teachers to the highest amount we could possibly afford (assuming teachers are public employees, this is related to how much we're willing to pay in taxes). Where should we land on that scale and why?
Well, by definition there are more below average teachers than exceptional ones, so it doesn't benefit unions to favor excellent or even promising teachers over terrible ones.
Teaching falls into the same category as stage magic, stand-up comedy and writing - it looks easy and effortless when done by an expert because that's part of the expertise. Capturing attention, exciting young minds and engaging them is something that, when done effectively, is transparent because that's how it works best. The whole host of knock-on problems that are spawned by this apparent ease are well-documented in TFA.
>The problem with teaching as a profession is that every single adult citizen of this country thinks that they know what teachers do. And they don't. So they prescribe solutions, and they develop public policy, and they editorialize, and they politicize. And they don't listen to those who do know. Those who could teach. The teachers.
Sorry, I cant take this seriously. The teachers unions are one of the most politically powerful entities in the US. They can make a candidate, and they can break a candidate. They can pass and tank ballot measures...even ones completely unrelated to their jobs. They can protect drunkards and criminals from getting prosecuted, let alone fired. They are fine forcing their agenda down our throats, but they cant take a little pushback?
>They are fine forcing their agenda down our throats //
The agenda of ensuring children have access to life-enhancing educational opportunities?
>They can make a candidate, and they can break a candidate. //
You mean a political candidate? You really think that the combined voice of a group of teachers can do that against the weight of media conglomerates, other unions, rich lobbyists and other political groups? Any examples?
Presumably under your assertion the education system in the USA is the one that the teaching unions have won by political action and the politicos and business people are looking on powerless to influence it?
I'm in the UK, I've known quite a lot of teachers one way or another and observed the actions of teachers union workers and unionised teachers. Here - and limited to my anecdotal data - whilst the union supports the teachers it is supporting them in their primary function as teachers for children. The goal of the union is to enable the teachers to perform as professional teachers rather than merely supporting them as wage earners. Activities of the teachers unions I know of include - as you surmise - the basic functions of support for employees but much of the focus is on sharing best practice, lobbying for the best possible educational system, supporting teachers in other countries and similar.
My overriding experience is that teachers are concerned with enabling children's education.
Analogising, it's like the IoP (http://iop.org) is for physicists and supports them in their careers but it does that in order to advance physics, because that is the primary focus of physicists.
Well, I can say that in two weeks of homeschooling I got my son to write more than they did in five years.
He was having trouble with bullies and the school did nothing about it. They pretty much gave up on teaching spelling completely. We found out that our school is a "magnet school" for behaviorally disturbed "special" kids from other districts so kids in the rich school and kids in the poor school where communities complain a lot get to enjoy a safer environment because the rural school gets all the psychotic kids.
I gave up on them when the superintendent gave a "town hall" where he told the mother of a "special" kid that he was a partner in his education and he told me I should just butt out because he was the expert and there's a new paradigm and homework is obsolete and because I don't have a phone number to call to get Albany breathing down his neck.
The problems you experienced go beyond teachers unions. Dumping "problem" kids into one school is a recipe for disaster and communities are not served by that kind of thing at all (except those that dumped off students, although I would argue those communities aren't fixing their underlying problems). Administrator heavy, top down approaches that override community and teacher autonomy are a bad thing in general, and the obsession with testing over standard lessons and homework is a huge problem with the way the public education system is run.
Ultimately teachers as a professional class deserve a union. We see in other places and countries that the unions do not serve as an impediment to a quality public education, so we have to ask ourselves what is really going on with current systems and unions that make the situation so shitty (esp. in New York state).
I'm not saying that teachers shouldn't have a union, but from my perspective it is part of the problem rather than the solution more often than not.
For instance, they opened a charter school in our district which seems to be an honest effort to provide a safe (bullying free) environment for the high school and there have been two people associated with the union who have just been consistently hateful trying to shut it down.
The charter school movement is one of those things that draws strong opinions. Initiatives to provide safe school environments are good, but privatized charter schools have a lot of downside in terms of how a community, parents, and teachers can retain control over how education happens. In New York state in particular, there has been a strong effort to close public schools and open private charters, which in my opinion is the wrong way to fix problems with public education. The disagreement over charters isn't just a union thing, although public educators would be upset to see the system they work for dismantled instead of repaired.
Teachers unions influence local politics and Democratic Party primaries very heavily.
Yes, the combined voice of a group of teachers can make a significant difference. Why? Well, they're affiliated with other unions, to start. Further, as most are state employees, their ability to strike impacts public opinion regarding state government.
They've also got a lot of power because they are with your kids 6-7 hours a day.
They understand how political they need to be to keep the status quo, and are (at least in my and everyone else I know's experience) more focused on supporting the existing system for long term members than creating a better system for learning.
Awhile ago, I had a teacher for a roommmate, and one who was young and very passionate, and I hope, good at it, because we were best friends and I'd hate to think I'd be a poor judge :). But I rarely heard her talk about the pure joy of teaching, at least compared to the difficulties of dealing with the management (the principal) and other logistics issues...such as having to pay for her own classroom supplies, including books that she wanted if they weren't on the state-wide curriculum, and pencil and paper for her poorer students.
Her complaints about office politics were what really surprised me. Even though I know every bureaucracy is universally crushing (well, maybe I grok better now after watching The Wire), it just seems that being a great, passionate teacher, supersedes any kind of office bullshit...such as the way principal communicates with you. But then again, if you can't get along with the person who runs the place, and you're put in a shitty classroom and have to share a teacher's officespace with 3 other novices...how could that not affect your teaching performance and job satisfaction?
One memory I still have from high school was one afternoon when I had to stay after school to give a presentation to the teachers on their regular Thursday-school-wide meeting. The meeting was in the cafeteria...and you know how lunch tables reflect a sort of social-hierarchy among kids? It was no different for the teachers...and even more surprising, the social lines seemed to fall along with how I, as a student, expected them to (attractive young teachers sat with the other young teachers; cool popular teachers could sit anywhere they want; the weird chemistry teacher sat in the corner). I mean, it's one thing to have perceptions as a kid, but I knew I was a petty kid...so it was a surprise to see that things were not much different in the adult world.
Yeah, but we're talking about The Wire here :). But also I was an education reporter, worked as an aide, and have been part of other bureaucracies myself...
My wife teaches classes at a local high school as well as the university here she's successful because she works hard at it, has a natural aptitude to teach and she cares about her subjects and shows it. I think I had 3-4 outstanding teachers during my 13 years in public school and they all had these same characteristics. I had plenty of bad teaches too.
I agree with your point: the title is sensationalist. The difference between teaching and owning a coffee shop (and the others examples) is that few people will try to tell you how to handle your coffee shop while a lot think they know better than you how their children should be taught.
I've seen a close friend work 20 hours a day, barely make payroll, deal with employee drug habits and try to minimize the legal damage a sociopathic employee did.
You don't know what it's like owning a coffee shop.
I was going to say something to this effect, but I think the biggest one is: mathematician. It's like if you're a clothing shop owner you have a good idea what coffee shop owners do, and there are similar parallels for most professions. But not mathematician. Most people haven't the slightest clue what they do.
I guess that makes "math teacher" the most misunderstood of all :)
you mean because we've been trained for 8 hours a day for 10 years by field workers?
or we've been trained for 8 hours a day for 10 years by factory workers?
we've been working for oil rig operators for 8 hours a day for 10 years?
this looks a little like a straw man fallacy to me. go speak to someone who has worked in the oil field for years. oil field is a thing that has actually changed little over the years. you don't think they have a fair share of criticism and improvements to suggest?
coffee shop owners are probably the most dynamic of the bunch in your example. definitely much more dynamic than the teaching industry.
although we're actually in the process of a teaching revolution. a few top tier university are completely switching their study methodologies.
...or they could have just asked students 10 years ago, and asked them whether it makes sense to just read slides for them during the lecture. guess how many would have said yes.
In other words, teachers are human and have real lives. This may be news to an 18-year-old, but I'd really be surprised if it's really news to that many people above 30. I may not be a teacher but I could fill a very stylistically-similar paragraph or two with the woes that have befallen me, too. Most people can.
This strikes me as a variant on the You don't know what's like! meme... as a rule of thumb, you should never say that to anybody. You have no idea what they've been through. Everyone you pass on the street has a story, and no matter how bad you think yours is, you've got no guarantee that they don't have one worse than you.
What this essay describes is not specially "teaching", it's life.
>Most of all, we need to stop thinking that we know anything about teaching merely by virtue of having once been students.
I know something about teaching by reading peer-reviewed studies which give evidence for better teaching methods, but are almost never adopted because the teaching systems and/or teachers are extremely conservative apparently all around the world.
I hate writing like this. Even if most people don't know the thing you're referring to, basically telling the entire browsing population of the internet "we're all stupid and here's why" immediately leaves a bad taste, particularly for people -- you know, like teachers -- who do know what teachers do, or people who didn't make the assumption being assumed in the first place (which says a lot more about the author than anything else).
Pedantic? Maybe. But to me this is a really childish way to make a point that could be better stated in a way that doesn't instantly, baselessly denigrate the reader, particularly when you're writing for a publication that banks on its credibility and reputation.
This story strikes home with me. Like the author, I too picked up an MAT, taught for a couple years, and then left the field to pursue other opportunities. In the 3-4 years since I left, I have worked a lot less, made a lot more, and feel much more respected in what I do.
i see a lot of comments saying that we're watching from the sidelines criticizing, and therefore have no clue what's going on.
How is that even remotely true? We are the victims of the system. We experience firsthand what they do or believe they do.
This is like saying you think you know what the TSA is doing. Right? Wrong. Of course we do, we're the ones being screened.
what we don't know is the logic and culture behind the decisions we see, but that doesn't take any right away to criticize it.
having been an overachiever in school, and early university, it's been a constant struggle. "oh but school is not actually made for people like you" you say. yeah, i know. how is that not a problem?
edit: don't get me wrong, i've had a few really good teachers. but they've been rather few. and no, i'm not just counting the teachers i liked as good.
Does someone who's used a computer all their life know the ins and outs of being a programmer? Would you listen to their recommendations on how to improve your code? The answer is likely yes, feedback from customers is important - but you're not gonna get any useful advice re: the architecture or the design patterns used.
My cousin is a high school teacher and posted this article on Facebook with the comment that it's like saying just because you had parents, you think you know everything there is to know about parenting.
Because this post makes the claim that all teachers should be looked up to.
My entire family consists of teachers. They know who the bad teachers are. You've got Paulina Pensioner who just shows old VHS tapes as a history cirriculum. Or Carl the Coach that knows, just knows there's only one way to solve this pre-algebra problem.
And some teachers work hard. They bust their ass and bring grading home and lesson plan on the weekends.
But they aren't the problem. There's a bad system that keeps bad teachers in at the expense of the good.
So they design tests and standards as a way to "firewall" these bad teachers in, to turn their poor performance into mediocre performance. And there's a cost, because it removes the creativity and initiative from the good teachers.
I understand that the goal of the author is to criticize common core, but while the conclusion is sound (Core is garbage) the reasoning is not.
And the new standards being developed? One of the main proponents is the Council of Chief State School officers. Many (probably most) came from the teaching profession. Who know what it's like to be a teacher.
The author gives us some feel-good patronization about how teachers have it so hard and we have no right to impose standards upon them. But these standards exist because we can't fire bad teachers.
I don't think Core is garbage at all. I think there's a deeply ingrained culture of anti-intellectualism in US culture that needs to be nuked out of the school system, and I honestly couldn't care less what the collateral damage is.
You like it when there's wide, sweeping cirriculum on the Federal level... when you agree with it.
But what happens if there's enough political pressure (it is a midterm election cycle) to add ID into the cirriculum? Or maybe they look at feel-good math that is just teaching to the test [1]?
And that's the issue. Centralized power is great when you agree with it, but terrible in the wrong hands.
I agree with your point. I suppose I'm fortunate enough to also agree with the goals of Common Core as they are today.
Onto that article, however:
1. I never use an academic degree as an indicator of intellectual capacity. I find that some people are so objective-driven that they zoom right past the point and straight to rageville when they don't understand something.
2. A simple Google search on front-end estimation would have helped this mom realize that the example given on the sheet is incorrect. I will concede that an effective teacher would have realized that the example given is incorrect and would have corrected it.
(In front end estimation, you round the leftmost digit, so the example should actually be 400 + 300, not 300 + 200). IMHO 700 is actually a decent estimate for 645, so I don't think there's a problem with the math itself. It's not really feel-good math, but I think some people take for granted that estimation is not an innate ability.
Now, it becomes another discussion altogether when the teacher is so horrible that they refuse to accept that the example is wrong. But, I don't think I've seen evidence of that, so I won't accuse anyone of anything.
EDIT: I just read some of the comments in that article, and it looks like some districts teach front-end estimation with truncation rather than rounding, in which case 300 + 200 = 500 would be correct.
Here are a few more things to note: the parents here assume that estimation and rounding are the same thing. That in itself isn't true.
More importantly, though, look at the goal of the estimation -- to see if the actual answer, 645, is reasonable. That's not the same thing as asking if 500 is a reasonable estimate of 645. I think the point of this exercise is for kids to say "ok, if I add these two numbers together, I expect to get a 3-digit number somewhere in the ballpark of 500." That is to say: if I add 354 and 291, I shouldn't expect to get 20000 or 7 or 81 or 9750. It's just a simple way of checking your work using a quick, easy method that you can do in your head. Again, I find the value in this -- adding "common sense" to the curriculum is definitely something I can get behind, but I understand that parents who aren't used to "common sense on paper" will struggle.
I can't agree with this enough. The article tries to paint all teachers with the same brush, which when you get to know teachers you realize is absolutely ludicrous.
No system is going to perfect the way teaching works, and it's obvious why when you look at the teachers themselves. They have wildly varying educational background, cultural background, social skills. Different motivations. Different methods. Of course some schools are better than others, because a variety of factors based on region and executive management changes the way students and teachers are sourced, to say nothing of prescribed curriculum and funded school resources.
So when people talk about schools, or teachers, or education in general in the USA like it's one big blob, I know it's a huge crock of shit. It's highly variable all over the country and even within the same local region.
The one thing that is fairly consistent, though, is the passion of the teachers. Most of them teach because they really want to teach. But there are myriad roadblocks to providing kids a good education - and that's in the cases where kids are open to actually learning. But I shouldn't address the elephant in the room of how the culture of parents who don't give a shit about their kids affects their education... then we couldn't blame an amorphous faceless blob of an organization.
> All of you former students: you did not design
> curricula, plan lessons, attend faculty meetings,
> assess papers, design rubrics, create exams, prepare
> report cards, and monitor attendance. You did
> not tutor students, review rough drafts, and create
> study questions. You did not assign homework. You
> did not write daily lesson objectives on the
> white board. You did not write poems of the week
> on the white board. You did not write homework on
> the white board. You did not learn to write
> legibly on the white board while simultaneously
> making sure that none of your students threw a
> chair out a window.
I'm not a teacher, so I could be wrong, but it seems to me that much of this list falls into two categories:
1. Routine things that could be orders of magnitude more efficient (or even fully automated) given enough resources. In most cases, the resources needed would be fairly modest compared to the aggregate amount of effort teachers everywhere spend on them. Writing and grading elementary-level math tests, for example, shouldn't take any time at all given the right software.
2. Routine things that couldn't be automated well but could easily be done by some sort of entry-level assistant. Babysitting and discipline tasks don't require college degrees.
It strikes me that the economics of education are structured in a way that there is marginal impetus to improve efficiencies in the day-to-day work of teachers.
You are not a teacher. And from your comments, you have not looked too much in the research about how to teach students.
Yes, certain things COULD be automated... at considerable expense to student achievement. One big thing they have found - remove the personal feedback and connection to students --> lose the motivation of students. If a teacher (the same teacher) isn't interacting with a student consistently at nearly every step of the learning process, the feedback doesn't stick and the student loses motivation.
It would be interesting to looking to the basic research behind the feedback-achievement connection and stereotype threat to start.
Hope that helps you address some of the problems with the automate/delegate solutions so often thrown at teachers.
> Yes, certain things COULD be automated... at considerable expense to student achievement.
I seriously doubt that letting teachers automatically grade arithmetic tests will hurt student achievement. The fact is that many teachers do that sort of thing at home in what should be considered overtime hours. I would like to hear how automatic grading causes student achievement to suffer.
Likewise, I'm skeptical that it should be solely educators' responsibility to make sure chairs are not being thrown out windows. Letting teachers focus on educating and not babysitting seems like a good thing.
I did two years of a special ed major in college before switching over to computer science and I can say that the ed program I was in covered in depth how to teach and handle a class room, it focused on how to teach math to people who don't understand any concepts, and the department had additional offered classes if you wanted to do teach for america or inner city schooling.
Speaking with friends who have become professors they are often jealous of this because they were never given any kind of 'teaching' classes. Their under grad wasn't in education and their teaching experience was trial by fire teaching assistant jobs of handling undergrad college courses.
All that said, I grow tired of the arguments and articles of 'don't speak unless you've walked a thousand miles' which I felt as I read this article. Not all knowledge and understanding must derive from doing something to have a valid opinion. We need to treat teachers better and find better pay structures but I've found no harsher critics of teachers and our schools than the teachers I went to college with as they filter into the systems and find tired and broken systems in which they get no voice until they have 'tenure'.
> All that said, I grow tired of the arguments and articles
> of 'don't speak unless you've walked a thousand miles'
> which I felt as I read this article. Not all knowledge and
> understanding must derive from doing something to have a
> valid opinion. We need to treat teachers better and find
> better pay structures but I've found no harsher critics of
> teachers and our schools than the teachers I went to
> college with as they filter into the systems and find
> tired and broken systems in which they get no voice until
> they have 'tenure'.
I don't know that this article is so much about "not speaking bad about teachers", but about having compassion for teachers and talking about education with a little more humility for the institution that helped produce you. I would say this article is more of the "teachers don't write articles about how to __________ better, so don't let _______________ers tell teachers how to teach better" variety.
And I totally agree that most young teachers are completely overwhelmed by the ridiculous systems in which they are forced to teach. My only hope is that some of these young, inspiring teachers remain in the profession long enough to change the broken system (which might take a LONG time!). The unions are broken; for the most part, teachers are not.
I'm not sure what the implication at the end is about public policy? Even if we supposedly do not understand teaching, that does not mean we can't form opinions about the current system and develop policies for it. That's precisely how politics work in every other field.
How many people who want to ban fracking actually understand fracking or precisely what the real risks are? How many people want to ban nuclear energy and don't understand any of the actual risks of modern nuclear power plants?
Politics suck for anyone that isn't a politician. Each industry must learn how to deal with that aspect. Writing an appeal to emotion on the Washington Post is not going to sway anyone. It just resonates with people already on their side and sounds like whining to people that aren't.
Since the author says she started out making 5 times as much as a lawyer than as a teacher, I can only assume she landed one of the associate jobs at a major law firm straight out of law school making $160k+.
She makes it sound like anybody can hit up law school and come out making almost $200k. The vast majority of law graduates do not land jobs like that. The vast majority also have nearly crippling debt. The vast majority of the firms paying $160k+ are also in hyper expensive metro areas, whereas teachers can live comfortable lives in very rural towns (if they want to).
While what she is stating might not be the case for all law school grads, it isn't as far fetched to come out of school easily making 2-3 times what a starting teacher is making, depepnding on the degree you choose. As a software engineer in michigan, you can come out of uni with a BS in computer science and easily find a job paying $55k+ and make 2-3 times as much as a starting teacher ($35k if you're lucky and find a good school that has funding) in the same state after a year or two of experience.
Education policy is the issue that drew me to participate on Hacker News,[1] so I'll jump in here too. I get the impression that mathattack, whose comments I enjoy reading, may have posted this article for disagreement. The Answer Sheet blog from which this guest post comes is basically a propaganda organ, and some of the guest posts from the same blog that were submitted to Hacker News in the past were exposed as hack jobs after discussion here.[2]
The obligatory disclosure here is to note that I am a classroom teacher by occupation. Over the years, I have been a teacher of Chinese to native speakers of English, a teacher of English to native speakers of Chinese (and other languages), and most recently a teacher of advanced elementary mathematics ("prealgebra" mathematics for third-, fourth-, and fifth-graders) for a nonprofit organization in my town. My HN user profile describes a bit more of my background.
Yep, classroom teaching is hard, no doubt about it. It has emotional rewards that some people value highly enough that it is a sought-after occupation, not a labor-shortage occupation, and that has the most to do with teacher compensation. Classroom teaching by teachers in private practice (like me) can also be poorly compensated (relative to the difficulty of doing the job well) because most clients have already paid for "free" lessons at the local public schools through their taxes, and will only pay out of pocket for a private lesson if it is truly superior in some way. "In modern times [as contrasted with ancient times] the diligence of public teachers is more or less corrupted by the circumstances which render them more or less independent of their success and reputation in their particular professions. Their salaries, too, put the private teacher, who would pretend to come into competition with them, in the same state with a merchant who attempts to trade without a bounty in competition with those who trade with a considerable one. . . . The privileges of graduation, besides, are in many countries . . . obtained only by attending the lectures of the public teachers. . . . The endowment of schools and colleges have, in this manner, not only corrupted the diligence of public teachers, but have rendered it almost impossible to have any good private ones." -- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book V, Part 3, Article II (1776)
A couple of the comments posted here before I arrived in the thread mention the particular skills that a teacher needs to have to teach a class effectively. There is much interesting research on this coming from the charter school movement, with some of the best how-to research coming from the Teach Like a Champion[3] project. I love learning about new ways to be a more effective teacher. Besides actual teacher skills, another grave problem in United States school is extremely poor teaching materials[4] and I devote hundreds of hours to curriculum planning and seeking out the best available textbooks[5] for the subjects I teach.
A good teacher is worth a lot.[6] We would not go far wrong by saying that a good teacher is literally worth his or her weight in gold. But the tricky issue in school administration is distinguishing effective from ineffective teachers. To ensure that school leaders have incentives to find and reward the best teachers, we need to make sure that learners (or the adult guardians of minor learners) have the power to shop, the power to refuse the services of an ineffective teacher and to seek out the services of an effective teacher. Teachers will gain both more pay and more respect if learners gain power to shop.
86 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadI mention it to people and always hear 'well maybe she is different but I've seen lots of teachers and they just do it for the holiday'. As if everyone is equally dedicated in any profession. As if the guy that sits at his computer 'working' for hours a day is a more efficient or effective worker just because he does more hours. As if outside observers of any industry can really spot who is producing vs who is not.
I honestly hope she will leave teaching. Part of her extreme work schedule is self inflicted (she genuinely values her students and wants to hold them to a high standard, which creates a lot of work for her). However, I can't see anyone doing as much as she does for an entire career.
People and students respect teachers as a whole, what they do not respect and I bet many in the profession do as well is the inability to remove those who are not good teachers.
It is not a position one walks into without many upon many stories about what your really getting into. My Aunt retired from the trade, her aggravations in order that I remember are, Administrative people(usually political appointees), other teachers, and parents. There were a few others but mostly the tripe coming down from non teachers within the system seemed to be what we heard of.
That and the personal money she spent to have supplies because it was more important to blow money on marble floors than supplied, or having someone's wife/kid/friend in some advisement position that did nothing but occupy space.
Guess what, I can say the same of some other service professions, having a neighbor who does night shifts as a nurse and hearing the horror stories of what she puts up with is enough to let me know some jobs come with extra mental if not physical stress.
I think in the end we are all more than willing to heap accolades on good teachers. Its a system where the kids aren't first that irritates
I've always thought that our graduate students should be made to take acting lessons, because there's an element of second-order persuasion you have to do in a classroom that's hard to learn and difficult to describe but that shares some similarity to acting -- or maybe just rhetoric in the very ancient sense.
You can't just purvey information and mumble something about its importance. Ultimately, you're modeling what it means to be an intellectual -- trying to give your students certain habits of mind by showing them how those habits play out in practice.
We also spend an enormous amount of time trying to devise strategies for dealing with students who just don't get it (and you quickly learn -- or better learn -- that this might be the most important part of the job).
I could say more, of course. It's a very subtle set of skills -- more art than science, as they say. It's hard to do it at the college level, and I think it's far, far harder to do it at the elementary level, where the stakes are much higher.
Also, what's with the condescending sneery tone?
The discussions end up being so worthless that I now flag every education related post on HN because it's just not worth the time here.
Is the university system (excepting "third level institutions" apparently) just a scam perpetrated against its students?
I think it's debatable whether great teaching or access to great minds is more important, and probably varies depending on the student and what stage of their education they're in. But either way, for the access to work at all, it has to really be access; receiving a dry lecture on introductory material from a great mind doesn't really give you access to that mind. But sure, the best students will seek out projects that give them real access, and those experiences will probably be incredibly valuable.
There is definitely a huge value in the university system just putting you in the right place to learn surrounded by the right people to learn from, but I hate the disrespect for actual teaching that I sometimes see when people talk about universities.
The other main mental work is, as you said, devising strategies for explaining material to students who don't understand it the first time. It requires patience and self-control (if you betray any sense of frustration, you will lose them) on top of the difficult task of figuring out what their exact misunderstanding is.
And I agree, it's harder to do the more basic the material gets. Explaining advanced systems concepts to computer science juniors was much, much easier than explaining basic programming concepts to people with no prior programming experience. The more knowledge and concepts you have in common with your students, the easier it is to appeal to things you know they already understand - and you have the advantage of being able to use some of your areas jargon.
On the flip side, I've read research that says graduate degrees in education don't improve teaching results for high school. (Graduate degrees in the subject matter do.)
An open question on teaching... Do any liberal arts colleges have formal teaching improvement programs? If they're not trying to research and product Phds, perhaps their approach to the profession is different?
It seems like we have enough teachers at the wages we currently pay. Teachers are willing to go into the profession despite the low wages, probably because they want a satisfying job with good benefits. If we didn't have enough teachers...we'd have to raise wages. Supply and demand.
Maybe we'd get better teachers if we paid more?
It would also be a good introduction to the rationale behind secret ballots, and when it is actually appropriate to lie.
Still, I think there's several key differences:
1. Every school student would be rating their teachers, rather than just those that loved a professor, had an axe to grind, or were encouraged to by an entertaining personality.
2. The context would be "closed", with each teacher relative to their school, rather than open cross-institution competition with a front page of featured "rockstar" professors that make the rest seem inadequate.
3. The high schools officially sanctioning ratings with real results would give kids the feeling that they really do have a stake in the process, rather than simply being its victims.
4. High school is a more structured environment where the process details matter a lot more. So a teacher eg giving out an incomplete homework problem is actually a valid indictment rather than the stressed out nitpicking of a culture shocked freshman.
5. In college, there's a certain level of appreciation for the material that everyone should have but doesn't necessarily, causing them to get frustrated at a professor with a dry personality. Whereas with high school, the idea is that everybody should be learning a cursory understanding of all subjects.
6. In college, there's a huge variation in the level of courses. One specific professor I had for a seminar where it was basically his PhD research group and me, an undergrad who'd just started on a simultaneous master's. I learned a lot in that class, and really appreciated him. I then ended up in a grad-level "intro" course with him (which I knew was an utter waste going in, but it was the only thing that fit my schedule). Most of the students were rote-memorization paying-for-credential types, but his style certainly did them no favors either, and I can definitely see my recollection echoed in a few of his current reviews. I'd say that he's still a teaching asset, but not for intro lectures where most students aren't already committed to the subject.
Really, there just needs to be some extrinsic motivation/reward for teachers that are truly making a difference versus simply clock-punching, and that's not more top-down testing edicts that further shackle them. And sure, the immediate reaction shouldn't be to fire the lowest-reviewed, but neither should we pretend that they deserve similar compensation to the exceptional ones.
That's not to say that the people running schools and school districts don't want better teachers or to fire bad ones, but they (whether appointed or elected) aren't losing their jobs when that doesn't happen. And schools and districts aren't dissolved when that doesn't happen. Worst case scenario, they get rescued by the court system, which would be considered a bailout if it happened to a bank.
Just not very many good ones.
If you treat teaching as a lowest-bidder-wins "supply and demand" field, you may get passionate teachers who don't mind the pay, teachers who don't need to earn more for whatever reasons, probably some teachers who do find the benefits attractive, and all sorts of other people. But distilling this all to "people do it, so the wages are fine" misses just about all of the central points.
Consider that teaching isn't working in a bookstore or packing shipments for Amazon. It's not just a lot of work; it's a vitally important role in our world's future. I for one would not call "supply and demand" at the lowest possible rate a good way to treat such a profession.
Teaching (in US/Canada at least) requires at least a bachelor's degree and some specific teaching training. It's reasonable to think people aren't forced into it due to inexperience/low skill the same way fast food workers are. They must have some reason for choosing to be teachers - and you're right, I was making an assumption based on the people I know personally, which may not extend to the whole population. But for whatever reason, lots and lots of people, armed with the knowledge of what the wage is, are choosing to be teachers. Indeed, in some areas in my province we have a glut of teachers applying for a few openings.
>>>it's a vitally important role in our world's future. I for one would not call "supply and demand" at the lowest possible rate a good way to treat such a profession.
What is the appropriate way to decide pay? We have a spectrum of possible wages we could set, from the lowest amount possible to ensure enough adequate teachers to the highest amount we could possibly afford (assuming teachers are public employees, this is related to how much we're willing to pay in taxes). Where should we land on that scale and why?
Others say we need to raise wages because our teachers aren't good enough and we need higher pay to attract better teachers.
It's kind of an interesting example of how two groups with basically opposite viewpoints can end up supporting the same policies.
Sorry, I cant take this seriously. The teachers unions are one of the most politically powerful entities in the US. They can make a candidate, and they can break a candidate. They can pass and tank ballot measures...even ones completely unrelated to their jobs. They can protect drunkards and criminals from getting prosecuted, let alone fired. They are fine forcing their agenda down our throats, but they cant take a little pushback?
But I can still take seriously the notion that people assume they understand something just because they've observed it from the outside.
The agenda of ensuring children have access to life-enhancing educational opportunities?
>They can make a candidate, and they can break a candidate. //
You mean a political candidate? You really think that the combined voice of a group of teachers can do that against the weight of media conglomerates, other unions, rich lobbyists and other political groups? Any examples?
Presumably under your assertion the education system in the USA is the one that the teaching unions have won by political action and the politicos and business people are looking on powerless to influence it?
I'm in the UK, I've known quite a lot of teachers one way or another and observed the actions of teachers union workers and unionised teachers. Here - and limited to my anecdotal data - whilst the union supports the teachers it is supporting them in their primary function as teachers for children. The goal of the union is to enable the teachers to perform as professional teachers rather than merely supporting them as wage earners. Activities of the teachers unions I know of include - as you surmise - the basic functions of support for employees but much of the focus is on sharing best practice, lobbying for the best possible educational system, supporting teachers in other countries and similar.
My overriding experience is that teachers are concerned with enabling children's education.
Analogising, it's like the IoP (http://iop.org) is for physicists and supports them in their careers but it does that in order to advance physics, because that is the primary focus of physicists.
He was having trouble with bullies and the school did nothing about it. They pretty much gave up on teaching spelling completely. We found out that our school is a "magnet school" for behaviorally disturbed "special" kids from other districts so kids in the rich school and kids in the poor school where communities complain a lot get to enjoy a safer environment because the rural school gets all the psychotic kids.
I gave up on them when the superintendent gave a "town hall" where he told the mother of a "special" kid that he was a partner in his education and he told me I should just butt out because he was the expert and there's a new paradigm and homework is obsolete and because I don't have a phone number to call to get Albany breathing down his neck.
F the teacher's unions.
Ultimately teachers as a professional class deserve a union. We see in other places and countries that the unions do not serve as an impediment to a quality public education, so we have to ask ourselves what is really going on with current systems and unions that make the situation so shitty (esp. in New York state).
For instance, they opened a charter school in our district which seems to be an honest effort to provide a safe (bullying free) environment for the high school and there have been two people associated with the union who have just been consistently hateful trying to shut it down.
Did you steal this from one of their pamphlets?
Are you implying that teachers unions only agenda is to help students and not self preservation?
Yes, the combined voice of a group of teachers can make a significant difference. Why? Well, they're affiliated with other unions, to start. Further, as most are state employees, their ability to strike impacts public opinion regarding state government.
They've also got a lot of power because they are with your kids 6-7 hours a day.
They understand how political they need to be to keep the status quo, and are (at least in my and everyone else I know's experience) more focused on supporting the existing system for long term members than creating a better system for learning.
Her complaints about office politics were what really surprised me. Even though I know every bureaucracy is universally crushing (well, maybe I grok better now after watching The Wire), it just seems that being a great, passionate teacher, supersedes any kind of office bullshit...such as the way principal communicates with you. But then again, if you can't get along with the person who runs the place, and you're put in a shitty classroom and have to share a teacher's officespace with 3 other novices...how could that not affect your teaching performance and job satisfaction?
One memory I still have from high school was one afternoon when I had to stay after school to give a presentation to the teachers on their regular Thursday-school-wide meeting. The meeting was in the cafeteria...and you know how lunch tables reflect a sort of social-hierarchy among kids? It was no different for the teachers...and even more surprising, the social lines seemed to fall along with how I, as a student, expected them to (attractive young teachers sat with the other young teachers; cool popular teachers could sit anywhere they want; the weird chemistry teacher sat in the corner). I mean, it's one thing to have perceptions as a kid, but I knew I was a petty kid...so it was a surprise to see that things were not much different in the adult world.
You cannot grok something just by watching it.
You think you know what factory workers do. Right? Wrong.
You think you know what farmers do. Right? Wrong.
You think you know what oil rig operators do. Right? Wrong.
You think you know what coffee shop owners do. Right? Wrong.
You think you know what lawn care specialists do. Right? Wrong.
You don't know what it's like owning a coffee shop.
I guess that makes "math teacher" the most misunderstood of all :)
But practically every day I hear some grand opinion of teaching from people who haven't taught a class, ever.
or we've been trained for 8 hours a day for 10 years by factory workers?
we've been working for oil rig operators for 8 hours a day for 10 years?
this looks a little like a straw man fallacy to me. go speak to someone who has worked in the oil field for years. oil field is a thing that has actually changed little over the years. you don't think they have a fair share of criticism and improvements to suggest?
coffee shop owners are probably the most dynamic of the bunch in your example. definitely much more dynamic than the teaching industry.
although we're actually in the process of a teaching revolution. a few top tier university are completely switching their study methodologies.
...or they could have just asked students 10 years ago, and asked them whether it makes sense to just read slides for them during the lecture. guess how many would have said yes.
This strikes me as a variant on the You don't know what's like! meme... as a rule of thumb, you should never say that to anybody. You have no idea what they've been through. Everyone you pass on the street has a story, and no matter how bad you think yours is, you've got no guarantee that they don't have one worse than you.
What this essay describes is not specially "teaching", it's life.
There is a very pertinent and legitimate point made in the article that -teaching- is not a respected industry.
It's not exactly a new comment!
What would be different if teaching were considered an industry? Would it be better?
I know something about teaching by reading peer-reviewed studies which give evidence for better teaching methods, but are almost never adopted because the teaching systems and/or teachers are extremely conservative apparently all around the world.
In fact, I'd trust studies over teachers any day.
Pedantic? Maybe. But to me this is a really childish way to make a point that could be better stated in a way that doesn't instantly, baselessly denigrate the reader, particularly when you're writing for a publication that banks on its credibility and reputation.
How is that even remotely true? We are the victims of the system. We experience firsthand what they do or believe they do.
This is like saying you think you know what the TSA is doing. Right? Wrong. Of course we do, we're the ones being screened.
what we don't know is the logic and culture behind the decisions we see, but that doesn't take any right away to criticize it.
having been an overachiever in school, and early university, it's been a constant struggle. "oh but school is not actually made for people like you" you say. yeah, i know. how is that not a problem?
edit: don't get me wrong, i've had a few really good teachers. but they've been rather few. and no, i'm not just counting the teachers i liked as good.
Because this post makes the claim that all teachers should be looked up to.
My entire family consists of teachers. They know who the bad teachers are. You've got Paulina Pensioner who just shows old VHS tapes as a history cirriculum. Or Carl the Coach that knows, just knows there's only one way to solve this pre-algebra problem.
And some teachers work hard. They bust their ass and bring grading home and lesson plan on the weekends.
But they aren't the problem. There's a bad system that keeps bad teachers in at the expense of the good.
So they design tests and standards as a way to "firewall" these bad teachers in, to turn their poor performance into mediocre performance. And there's a cost, because it removes the creativity and initiative from the good teachers.
I understand that the goal of the author is to criticize common core, but while the conclusion is sound (Core is garbage) the reasoning is not.
And the new standards being developed? One of the main proponents is the Council of Chief State School officers. Many (probably most) came from the teaching profession. Who know what it's like to be a teacher.
The author gives us some feel-good patronization about how teachers have it so hard and we have no right to impose standards upon them. But these standards exist because we can't fire bad teachers.
You like it when there's wide, sweeping cirriculum on the Federal level... when you agree with it.
But what happens if there's enough political pressure (it is a midterm election cycle) to add ID into the cirriculum? Or maybe they look at feel-good math that is just teaching to the test [1]?
And that's the issue. Centralized power is great when you agree with it, but terrible in the wrong hands.
[1] http://www.momdot.com/common-core-is-making-me-stupider/
Onto that article, however:
1. I never use an academic degree as an indicator of intellectual capacity. I find that some people are so objective-driven that they zoom right past the point and straight to rageville when they don't understand something.
2. A simple Google search on front-end estimation would have helped this mom realize that the example given on the sheet is incorrect. I will concede that an effective teacher would have realized that the example given is incorrect and would have corrected it.
(In front end estimation, you round the leftmost digit, so the example should actually be 400 + 300, not 300 + 200). IMHO 700 is actually a decent estimate for 645, so I don't think there's a problem with the math itself. It's not really feel-good math, but I think some people take for granted that estimation is not an innate ability.
Now, it becomes another discussion altogether when the teacher is so horrible that they refuse to accept that the example is wrong. But, I don't think I've seen evidence of that, so I won't accuse anyone of anything.
EDIT: I just read some of the comments in that article, and it looks like some districts teach front-end estimation with truncation rather than rounding, in which case 300 + 200 = 500 would be correct.
Here are a few more things to note: the parents here assume that estimation and rounding are the same thing. That in itself isn't true.
More importantly, though, look at the goal of the estimation -- to see if the actual answer, 645, is reasonable. That's not the same thing as asking if 500 is a reasonable estimate of 645. I think the point of this exercise is for kids to say "ok, if I add these two numbers together, I expect to get a 3-digit number somewhere in the ballpark of 500." That is to say: if I add 354 and 291, I shouldn't expect to get 20000 or 7 or 81 or 9750. It's just a simple way of checking your work using a quick, easy method that you can do in your head. Again, I find the value in this -- adding "common sense" to the curriculum is definitely something I can get behind, but I understand that parents who aren't used to "common sense on paper" will struggle.
No system is going to perfect the way teaching works, and it's obvious why when you look at the teachers themselves. They have wildly varying educational background, cultural background, social skills. Different motivations. Different methods. Of course some schools are better than others, because a variety of factors based on region and executive management changes the way students and teachers are sourced, to say nothing of prescribed curriculum and funded school resources.
So when people talk about schools, or teachers, or education in general in the USA like it's one big blob, I know it's a huge crock of shit. It's highly variable all over the country and even within the same local region.
The one thing that is fairly consistent, though, is the passion of the teachers. Most of them teach because they really want to teach. But there are myriad roadblocks to providing kids a good education - and that's in the cases where kids are open to actually learning. But I shouldn't address the elephant in the room of how the culture of parents who don't give a shit about their kids affects their education... then we couldn't blame an amorphous faceless blob of an organization.
1. Routine things that could be orders of magnitude more efficient (or even fully automated) given enough resources. In most cases, the resources needed would be fairly modest compared to the aggregate amount of effort teachers everywhere spend on them. Writing and grading elementary-level math tests, for example, shouldn't take any time at all given the right software.
2. Routine things that couldn't be automated well but could easily be done by some sort of entry-level assistant. Babysitting and discipline tasks don't require college degrees.
It strikes me that the economics of education are structured in a way that there is marginal impetus to improve efficiencies in the day-to-day work of teachers.
Yes, certain things COULD be automated... at considerable expense to student achievement. One big thing they have found - remove the personal feedback and connection to students --> lose the motivation of students. If a teacher (the same teacher) isn't interacting with a student consistently at nearly every step of the learning process, the feedback doesn't stick and the student loses motivation.
It would be interesting to looking to the basic research behind the feedback-achievement connection and stereotype threat to start.
Hope that helps you address some of the problems with the automate/delegate solutions so often thrown at teachers.
I seriously doubt that letting teachers automatically grade arithmetic tests will hurt student achievement. The fact is that many teachers do that sort of thing at home in what should be considered overtime hours. I would like to hear how automatic grading causes student achievement to suffer.
Likewise, I'm skeptical that it should be solely educators' responsibility to make sure chairs are not being thrown out windows. Letting teachers focus on educating and not babysitting seems like a good thing.
Speaking with friends who have become professors they are often jealous of this because they were never given any kind of 'teaching' classes. Their under grad wasn't in education and their teaching experience was trial by fire teaching assistant jobs of handling undergrad college courses.
All that said, I grow tired of the arguments and articles of 'don't speak unless you've walked a thousand miles' which I felt as I read this article. Not all knowledge and understanding must derive from doing something to have a valid opinion. We need to treat teachers better and find better pay structures but I've found no harsher critics of teachers and our schools than the teachers I went to college with as they filter into the systems and find tired and broken systems in which they get no voice until they have 'tenure'.
I don't know that this article is so much about "not speaking bad about teachers", but about having compassion for teachers and talking about education with a little more humility for the institution that helped produce you. I would say this article is more of the "teachers don't write articles about how to __________ better, so don't let _______________ers tell teachers how to teach better" variety.
And I totally agree that most young teachers are completely overwhelmed by the ridiculous systems in which they are forced to teach. My only hope is that some of these young, inspiring teachers remain in the profession long enough to change the broken system (which might take a LONG time!). The unions are broken; for the most part, teachers are not.
How many people who want to ban fracking actually understand fracking or precisely what the real risks are? How many people want to ban nuclear energy and don't understand any of the actual risks of modern nuclear power plants?
Politics suck for anyone that isn't a politician. Each industry must learn how to deal with that aspect. Writing an appeal to emotion on the Washington Post is not going to sway anyone. It just resonates with people already on their side and sounds like whining to people that aren't.
She makes it sound like anybody can hit up law school and come out making almost $200k. The vast majority of law graduates do not land jobs like that. The vast majority also have nearly crippling debt. The vast majority of the firms paying $160k+ are also in hyper expensive metro areas, whereas teachers can live comfortable lives in very rural towns (if they want to).
So I'm wrong that I think that I know what teachers do?
Do teachers teach you how to write intelligible headlines?
The obligatory disclosure here is to note that I am a classroom teacher by occupation. Over the years, I have been a teacher of Chinese to native speakers of English, a teacher of English to native speakers of Chinese (and other languages), and most recently a teacher of advanced elementary mathematics ("prealgebra" mathematics for third-, fourth-, and fifth-graders) for a nonprofit organization in my town. My HN user profile describes a bit more of my background.
Yep, classroom teaching is hard, no doubt about it. It has emotional rewards that some people value highly enough that it is a sought-after occupation, not a labor-shortage occupation, and that has the most to do with teacher compensation. Classroom teaching by teachers in private practice (like me) can also be poorly compensated (relative to the difficulty of doing the job well) because most clients have already paid for "free" lessons at the local public schools through their taxes, and will only pay out of pocket for a private lesson if it is truly superior in some way. "In modern times [as contrasted with ancient times] the diligence of public teachers is more or less corrupted by the circumstances which render them more or less independent of their success and reputation in their particular professions. Their salaries, too, put the private teacher, who would pretend to come into competition with them, in the same state with a merchant who attempts to trade without a bounty in competition with those who trade with a considerable one. . . . The privileges of graduation, besides, are in many countries . . . obtained only by attending the lectures of the public teachers. . . . The endowment of schools and colleges have, in this manner, not only corrupted the diligence of public teachers, but have rendered it almost impossible to have any good private ones." -- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book V, Part 3, Article II (1776)
A couple of the comments posted here before I arrived in the thread mention the particular skills that a teacher needs to have to teach a class effectively. There is much interesting research on this coming from the charter school movement, with some of the best how-to research coming from the Teach Like a Champion[3] project. I love learning about new ways to be a more effective teacher. Besides actual teacher skills, another grave problem in United States school is extremely poor teaching materials[4] and I devote hundreds of hours to curriculum planning and seeking out the best available textbooks[5] for the subjects I teach.
A good teacher is worth a lot.[6] We would not go far wrong by saying that a good teacher is literally worth his or her weight in gold. But the tricky issue in school administration is distinguishing effective from ineffective teachers. To ensure that school leaders have incentives to find and reward the best teachers, we need to make sure that learners (or the adult guardians of minor learners) have the power to shop, the power to refuse the services of an ineffective teacher and to seek out the services of an effective teacher. Teachers will gain both more pay and more respect if learners gain power to shop.
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4728123
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3327847
[3] http://teachlikeachampion.com/
[4]
A showcase of shard-db. Data from the Hacker News API. Refreshed every 15 minutes.
Source · Live DB stats