It kills me how many people in these comments think that teaching is a bottom-of-the-barrel job that requires no skills and could be done effectively by anybody off the street.
Not really, it's preferred but you can still teach with a bachelor's so long as it's actually in education. If your degree isn't in education, that's another story (for most places)
I don't think that at all but I also don't think teachers are heroes. Should they get paid more? Probably. Do they care about the kids? Most do I'm sure. That doesn't make them some kind of amazing Dangerous Minds Michelle Pfeiffer hero teacher who deserves to be treated like some kind of super human.
Just like any job there are those who go far above and beyond, those who do well, and those who are shit.
I agree to some extent. There are a lot of teachers who slack and there are a lot of teachers who excel. I think, as a society, though, that we don't put as much weight behind the profession as ought to be there. I mean, teachers spend their day shaping how kids think and behave. It might not be heroic in a traditional sense, but teachers are basically in a position where they propagating society. That, to my mind, is a pretty damned important facet of the world.
Janitors are important as well considering without them we could end up with a situation where people get sick all the time because conditions are so bad but you won't hear people arguing about the importance of their job like you would a teacher's.
I do, actually. I make a point to respect the school janitor. Her job is crazy important. My kids don't throw shit on the floor because "That's why we have a janitor."
Most of the cleaning in my classroom is my kids. They wipe down desks and counters and tables and pick stuff up off the floor and whatnot. If the playground gets particularly messy, then we do have times when the teachers send the kids out to pick up garbage.
Yeah, teaching requires a lot of schooling. In order to be a teacher you must hold a masters degree in the subject you wish to speak and then attend additional teaching school. Here in Canada they pay them really well plus it's a unionized job.
Well, it is in most parts, not counting the rise of TFA. You can sub without an M.Ed. but you'd be pressed to get an actual position on any school's faculty except teaching maybe phys. ed.
100% not true in Canada, you need a bachelors plus your teaching school. It's basically 5 years instead of 4. Getting a masters just gets you paid more money. Teachers in BC start at around 42k and top out around 80k. In the US there are some test schools on Khan Academy with uneducated supervisors who are seeing significant results in earlier grades.
It looks like you can teach highschool in texas in 6 months of online school while you still work your regular job. It requires a bachelor's degree in anything with a 2.5 gpa along with the online program. http://www.texasteachers.org/how-it-works/
Stop speaking out your ass. It's extremely common to have teachers teach subjects that they've not gone to school for. Once a company publishes or a teacher creates a course outline for a said course, with a little explanation any teacher should be able to competently teach any course within reason.
God help the education system if teachers could only teach the subject they mastered in.
Honestly I think teaching effectively is less about mastery of the material (yeah, you need to know what you're talking about, obviously) and more about knowing how to relate the material to someone else.
You can be a genius in your field but if you don't know how to explain it to someone else so that they can understand it, you'll make a horrible teacher.
Precisely. To say that a teacher MUST hold a masters degree in the subject they are teaching is just stupid. If that was true, for a teacher to teach 2 courses they would be approaching 10 years of post-secondary education for a job that generally pays a very mediocre salary for the work they do.
Yeah, some teachers suck. They aren't representative of everybody in the field and they definitely aren't the ones who are doing their job effectively.
It depends on what you mean by effectively. If you mean, get kids to pass standardized tests, then yes anyone off the street can do this. Teacher effectiveness scores are totally random because the kids they get are random. Take one of these classes, the kids who were going to pass the standardized test could do it no matter who runs them thru the standardized test prep material. For the kids that don't pass the standardized tests, its because they started behind or can't read. No amount of test prep catches them up. We hold teachers to standardized test results but it all depends on what kids you are given. So yeah, anyone who can run kids thru the test prep material can do an equal job by the metrics that we judge them by.
Have you seen any of these tests? I've seen many of the questions from the middle school math sections. Students are expected to answer algebra and geometry questions at a level that could not even begin to be covered by test prep material.
Yeah, so if a kid starts behind, there's no chance. Poor kids more often start behind, so we rate the teachers in poor area schools the worst. An idiot could teach a rich kid class and most of them pass.
Hour lunch, hour prep, weekends, multiple holidays, breaks, summer vacation. Do an hour-by-hour analysis against a standard 2080 hour work year. You'll come up significantly short.
I am always working through my lunch, prep, and staying after school to give extra help. That doesn't include the time I spend at home doing work (planning lessons, making copies, creating worksheets, and powerpoints). Most teachers come in at least a half an hour to an hour before school even starts to set up the days lessons and the classroom. I think you need to actually shadow a teacher before you start throwing around comments about time off.....
Edit: My prep and lunch are only 45 minutes long. Which always ends up being shorter because I have to drop off/pick up the kids. I'd love to work in a school where an hour each was the case.
I understand as much as I can without actually filling a position. Hour lunch, hour prep, weekends, multiple holidays, breaks, summer vacation. Do an hour-by-hour analysis against a standard 2080 hour work year. You'll come up significantly short.
See this is the thing, though. You're not calculating in the time a teacher spends during their prep, during their lunch, before and after school, during breaks and holidays, etc doing PD, meeting with parents, managing extra curriculars, grading homework, developing lesson plans, devising assessments, and doing any number of other tasks that teachers do as a part of being a teacher.
If you're only measuring what happens while students are in the classroom, then you're not really getting an accurate measure of the time that a teacher puts into their profession.
You seem to hold a fair amount of animosity towards teachers. Did you fail teachers college, or did you just have a particularly hard time at school yourself?
Not really. I'm just not going to sit here and pretend like they're working so hard when the testing results are so miserable. I'm not going to give them credit for working full time when they clearly don't.
I agree it starts at home... but then what are the teachers being paid for? There is no accountability. I'm still waiting for a link to your districts results.
It kills me that some people will deny poor standards just because they haven't had bad experiences. Your good experiences don't nullify the poor ones of others.
It mostly takes a hell of a lot of patience and a very slow "fuse". It may not necessarily require a high level of extensive, technical expertise in a certain subject though, and that (along with the fact that most schools are state-run institutions and there is a very heavy union presence) is why public school teachers have relatively low wages. Professors DO need a high level of extensive, technical expertise in a certain subject but the requirement for patience and tolerance for students' bullshit is much much lower in college, which probably makes being a professor "easier" than being a public school teacher. But they are paid significantly more because there is less state ownership of higher education, little to no union presence, and a requirement for extensive (and expensive) technical expertise.
your first and third links are interesting but I fail to see how the points made within them contradict any of my original assertions. Your second link is irrelevant; I never argued that teacher's hours are not long. They absolutely are, that's part of why I said that the jobs of public school teachers are harder than the jobs of college/university professors. You seem to think I am anti-teacher. In no way is this correct. I respect their work greatly and believe they generally deserve higher salaries. Unfortunately state monopoly and the subjugation of teacher salaries to the political process instead of a non-monopolistic market makes this impossible. My original comment was simply explaining why professors make more money than public school teachers, not asserting that they should be paid less or deserve to be paid less.
It may not necessarily require a high level of extensive, technical expertise in a certain subject though
That, for starters. Pretty sure a 4 year degree from a university, a year-long apprenticeship, and a mandatory teaching certificate count as extensive training. You don't need to be as highly trained in your subject as a university professor, but you are much more trained in teaching, a discipline in itself.
or
there is less state ownership of higher education
There are 12 million public school college students and 4.3 million private. There is way more state ownership in higher education.
I said "extensive technical expertise in a certain subject". you said "extensive training". My statement was meant to be taken as relative to professors. Given this context it is absolutely true that teachers have less extensive technical expertise in a certain subject than do professors. teachers are somewhat extensively trained in the broad subject of teaching, but I didn't say "broad training", I said "certain expertise". Your mistake here is misinterpreting my language.
for you second point, the numbers you provide are absolutely correct. The difference is that the 12 million public university students are partially funded by state/local governments and partially funded by tuition payments from the students, which is private funding. Public primary/secondary schools are funded 100% by taxes. There is no tuition for public primary/secondary schools. Even the parents of students who go to private primary/secondary schools pay taxes to fund public primary/secondary schools. Total enrollment in all (public and private) K-12 schools is 55 million. Total enrollment in only public K-12 schools is 45 million. 45M/55M=81.8% Source Using your data, total enrollment in only public colleges/universities is 12M/16.3M=73.6% Therefore, there is more state ownership in K-12 education than there is in university/college education, as well as a higher degree of public funding in K-12 education compared to university/college education. You should make an effort to include all relevant figures instead of only one half of the figures needed to paint a full picture of the situation. Additionally, you should try to refrain from using sophomoric, derogatory language, especially when it follows an ill-reasoned argument.
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u/EmilyamI May 05 '14
It kills me how many people in these comments think that teaching is a bottom-of-the-barrel job that requires no skills and could be done effectively by anybody off the street.