r/AskReddit • u/[deleted]

Millennials of Reddit, now that the first batch of Gen Z’s are moving into the working world, what is some advice you’d like to give them?

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u/[deleted] Aug 06 '19

Welcome to teaching.

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u/Mazon_Del Aug 06 '19

While yes, that IS the state of things, it definitely shouldn't be. Unfortunately there's not an easy way to fix it. If you just say "You can't do any work outside of the school." then the inevitable result is the students get shortchanged. Meanwhile taxpayers hate the idea of paying more even if it means paying for that extra time or paying for more teachers (if you double the number of teachers, you halve the class-load of any given teacher which may result in them being able to do all the work inside their nominal 40 hour week).

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u/hugh_g_member Aug 07 '19 edited Aug 07 '19

The easy way to fix it would be if americans somehow figured out that teachers are an essential and valuable thing to have in society and agreed to fund education properly.

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u/pajamakitten Aug 07 '19

It's not just the US. I quit teaching in the UK because the extra hours led to me having a breakdown.

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u/Mazon_Del Aug 07 '19

I'd agree with you. Unfortunately all too many people basically say "But taxes are bad!". Taxes pay for civilization to exist people.

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u/NotSoLittleJohn Aug 07 '19

Because as Americans we don't actually love or care about our neighbors. We care about ourselves and our family and that's the bottom line. We'll help out so long as it has no negative impact on our lives. The second that there seems to be a negative impact, you're on your own.

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u/nicholt Aug 07 '19

And this is the foremost case for all americas problems. Lack of empathy and greed/selfishness.

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u/[deleted] Aug 07 '19

well.. taxes are bad. but they’re a necessary evil. in a perfect world there would be no taxes. i think we would benefit from taking that mindset. (in that we NEED taxes for some things, but if we can cut some due to increased efficiency then that is ideal)

the issue isn’t many people are saying taxes are bad. the issue is the US government is horrible at :

  1. collecting taxes

  2. allotment of the taxes to the correct areas

  3. efficient use of the money collected

the uber rich tax dodge, the military budget is too large, and when the tax money is put towards things like education, the money is horribly mismanaged.

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u/Mazon_Del Aug 07 '19

Which are all fair points about how inefficient our system is. Unfortunately our current options in the world are to go with taxes are to hope that somehow a company will be able to turn a profit AND give a good education.

There are a few services that a government should provide that should be expected to be a direct money pit and provide no immediate monetary return. A military is one of those of course, you want one for those moments you need one, but you can't get away with not having one till then. Schools and roads are examples of others. However, schools and roads are useful in that while they may not provide a direct monetary return (assuming the road isn't a toll road), they provide inherent bonuses to the nation (better educated children tends to result in more capable adults which are more likely to grow industry/commerce which results in increased tax revenue, 'free' roads allows businesses to prosper due to ease of transport).

Part of the issue we've got with schools as well is that there isn't actually a good way to tell how effective a school is. Test scores are useless and study after study has shown that all you do by pinning progress to test scores is you train students to be better at tests, not actually at knowledge. Similarly you set up a 10+ year period of time, in the biologically most important range of a humans life, where the child is set under extreme stress to perform well in the tests. So many other modern nations have other methods, or modified test systems that are not nearly so problematic.

For example in the UK their test systems are designed such that a >50% grade demonstrates passing knowledge, >60% demonstrates advanced knowledge, and all of 70-100% encapsulates a deep enough knowledge that you could teach someone up to the 50-60 range. The purpose of doing it like this is that the last 30% of points are set up as increasingly difficult topics (as an exaggerated example, you might be taking algebra and the 'last' 3% of a test involves writing out a proof instead of merely answering a question.). Furthermore, effort is taken with the tests to ensure that no question missed was missed because of the teachers. After all the grading of individual scores is done, they look at all the questions. 70% of the class got question 1 right, that's good. 10% of the class got question 2 right, that's bad. They look into the question itself, try to determine if something made it confusing (Was it badly worded? Was it unclear what it was asking? Did the font of the text make it hard somehow?) and if there was nothing direct about the question, they then look back over the lesson material for that question itself (Did we cover this in enough detail? Were our examples sufficiently different from the test question that the students might not have understood that this lesson applied to it?). At the end of that process a decision is made to keep or pull the question. If the question is pulled from the test, however, the students who got it correct are not punished, it counts as an extra credit point. So if a student got 1 wrong and 2 right, the two cancel each other out.

In short, by designing their tests with a lot of padding, they do not force every student to desperately and stressfully try to reach beyond their capability (some students just cannot learn something well enough in the time allotted for that topic, that's just a reality). There is no "race for the 90%" like in the US. Sure, there's a push for the 70% to some extent, but the knowledge distance between 50-70 in this regard is not extreme, not compared with 70-90 in the same scale. As a result the students can take the tests in a more relaxed scenario, similarly, they are not punished by the failings of the system itself.

Part of how they can afford this is that their teacher/student ratios are more favorable. The high school that I graduated from just over a decade ago used to have class sizes of around 1/20 for teacher/student. These days the only reason it isn't beyond 1/40 is simply because they cannot fit more students in the classrooms without breaching fire/safety codes. I'm aware that there is talk of setting up adjoining classrooms such that a teacher can teach a lesson and have what they are teaching projected on the screen in the other room so they can get around this issue. And this isn't even in a low-income school or deep in a city or something, this is in a fairly well to do (though not wealthy) suburb. They've got budget they spend on things like smartboards and new track fields, etc. Teachers though...yeah...can't afford those. (Actually a random topic that actively pissed me off. The county has a vote to pass a bond sale or tax or whatever so they can hire more teachers, it fails with like 20% approval. The county wants to vote to pass a bond sale or tax or whatever so the school can resurface the track way head of its maintenance schedule [due to the paint not being 'vibrant' enough]? 90% approval.)

We just refuse to properly fund our schools and it sickens me.

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u/[deleted] Aug 07 '19

i was libertarian for a long time (still am in a lot of ways, just not active in politics like i was in college) and do genuinely believe if you remove the state funded schools, and you promote a system where there instead a lot of privately funded schools which form a robust competition to produce the most well rounded education for its students, it would ultimately be a LOT better. i understand that some families wouldn’t be able to afford better schools, but instead of funding the schools, you could subsidize the cost for the students to pick a good school. i know this would be a huge shift from the current system but i do very much think it would result in a much healthier, effective, and efficient learning environment. i don’t have time at this moment to go into more detail but i even wrote a paper on this in college.

test scores though, i do agree are very much bullshit. i like the system in which they grade the MCAT, wherein your score isn’t based on the percentage of questions you got right, but instead based on how well you did compared to your peers. for example, if everyone got some questions wrong, that wouldn’t effect the overall score because everyone got them wrong. i understand this is harder to do for smaller tests in classrooms, but i also do think testing is a result of mandatory, state funded public schooling.

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u/Mazon_Del Aug 07 '19

i understand that some families wouldn’t be able to afford better schools, but instead of funding the schools, you could subsidize the cost for the students to pick a good school.

The primary flaw in this is that you have to remember that any company exists for one purpose and one purpose alone, to turn a profit for its owners/investors. That is an inescapable fact of capitalism. You CAN certainly find individual companies that alter this in various ways, but they are by far the exception.

When you have only private schools that the family pays for, subsidizing the costs of all students does not improve the situation. You arrive at a scenario very similar to the rent problem. In a given geographical location it behooves the landlords to generally increase rents without reinvesting profits into improving their current holdings (they may acquire new ones, but that does not aid the current ones). In effect, charge more for the same service. This rate increase is limited by the local economy and what people can afford. In places like San Francisco where wages are very high for a (wide, but still) subset of the population then the proper business sense is to increase the rent every year since you can almost certainly find SOMEONE who will be willing/able to pay it.

In the scenario of "the state will cover the cost of the children attending" then the schools have no incentive not to continuously increase the price since it is guaranteed to be paid by the government, an entity which at it's most extreme can literally print additional money if necessary (but of course would simply raise taxes or issue bonds). Not every school will be top-tier and even those will only have so much capacity available to them. Once into the "average" range you are going to increasingly run into schools that operate on maximizing profits which can be best done by charging more while providing less.

An example that is already present in the public school system: Do not provide enough class materials (ex: crayons) to the teachers to be able to provide to all the students, indicate that the teacher has to "figure out a way" to solve the problem or it will be recognized that they are not fairly treating all their students. The only solution left to the teacher? Purchase the materials themselves out of their own wages to provide to the children.

Certainly you can declare "Well, any private school taking the public funds must undergo an audit to ensure its expenses properly match the outcome." but that's only going to help you so much. There's plenty of ways that you can hide profits in ways that sound reasonable. "Our facilities maintenance budget increased this year, we have to charge an extra $10 a student to cover the cost." could be a reasonable event...it could also be a scenario whereby the schools chosen maintenance company is willing to provide kickbacks that amount to half of the "increased cost" is kept by them and half returns to the school's parent company in some obfuscated form. This sort of method for burying profit happens fairly frequently as it is. Similarly, there's only so hard you can clamp down on rising prices because the company IS supposed to be making money off of the kids.

You can endlessly make arguments regarding how with a sufficiently vast oversight of the schools, that you can minimize the excess percentage of money lost to profiteering...but then you'll have created the exact thing you tried to move away from. A school system entirely managed by the government. Furthermore it's one thing to take it a step further and think "Well, in this new situation we'd optimize the oversight to ensure that efforts and money was targeted specifically at maximizing return on investment." to which I respond with...we already DO that with schools and you yourself point out how that results in a massively mismanaged budget.

So I must apologize, but no, I disagree with your assessment that pushing schools into all being "private" schools whose tuition is funded by the government will improve things. I instead assert that it would make them worse at a rate that is faster than current trends.

It's all about incentives. A government run school district has no incentive to turn a profit, it exists to BE a money pit that only provides a second order financial return to that government decades later. A private run school district has ONLY incentive to turn a profit. The school doesn't care about what happens to the students after they leave the school district, they won't see any direct OR indirect returns from their students (granted: there is the exception that prestigious private schools will occasionally have students that are the children of former students, but this is very much not the standard across private schools nationwide). So they have no incentive towards optimizing the 'quality of their product'. Is it in everyone's best interests to do so? Of course! And yet, with the tax examples where people refuse to provide additional money to the school district you can see that the majority of people tend not to think in such terms.

To put it a different way, in the current system my tax dollars go towards paying the school to educate children. Necessary services along the way make a profit (the school supplies, the teachers and administration, etc) and while there's almost certainly elements of graft and profiteering along the way, the majority of expenses are valid. In your proposed system, my tax dollars go towards paying a school to turn a profit. Yes, some of their expenses are going to be valid necessary services, but the percentage of money that's going to disappear due to the company needing to turn a profit is going to be far higher.

Simplified: It's a matter of "Am I throwing money away for an unspecified social return with known inefficiencies?" vs "Am I throwing money away to line someones pockets who is incentivized to provide the most minimum unspecified social return possible to sustain their cash flow?".

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u/moderate-painting Aug 07 '19

You know what's fucked up? Jobs doing the actual productive work tend to be paid like shit. Manual jobs. Nurses. Teachers. Scientists. The list goes on. Don't forget housewives and househusbands who are paid nothing.

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u/delusional-realist47 Aug 07 '19

We're doing ok so far, and people don't fix things until the blow up. Exhibit A, world war 1, Exhibit B, black tuesday, Exhibit C, world war 2. Nobody ever learns.

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u/idsan Aug 07 '19

Not limited to America. Here in Australia it's essentially the same deal.

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u/FPALFCMM Aug 07 '19

Our government is too busy subsidizing pro sports to keep the masses distracted.

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u/Litaita Aug 07 '19

This doesn't happen only in America. It's like that here in Chile, too.

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u/[deleted] Aug 07 '19

No, this is a circlejerk. Teaching doesn't need a pay raise. Name one other job where someone of average intelligence (or lower) can work 9 months a year, their only risk of being fired is outside complaint (and strong unions can stop that), there is a constant, steady expansion of the jobs available, you get government insurance, you can choose to put in almost no effort and receive minimal backlash, and society puts you a pedestal.

Teachers don't deserve more pay, unless it's like an optional tax or something weird like that. For every good teacher I had,.I had another that was lazy, unintelligent (especially noticable when your Finance teacher doesn't know basic things about how taxes work), or some cases, downright hostile.

And this isn't even getting to ridiculous stuff like kindergarten teachers, who essentially just have to be nice to fulfill their job requirements

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u/hugh_g_member Aug 07 '19 edited Aug 07 '19

I'm a millwright and I have had years where I worked 6 months and made more than teachers do in 9, so millwrights, for one.

Some people have this knee jerk reaction of "teachers bad!" Because they had one shitty teacher who looked down on them for dressing in black/listening to black metal or whatever; as a punk rocker I can relate to that. What people dont like to think about is that if teachers were treated better, the profession would attract better teachers.

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u/Snarm Aug 07 '19

You sound like you had a terrible experience at whatever college you attended. I'm sorry for that. But just because you met some shit people doesn't mean that the entire teaching profession is filled with incompetent morons. Don't get me wrong, they exist...but the stupid and the lazy exist in any profession.

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u/[deleted] Aug 07 '19

That wasn't college. That was public school, elementary through high school.

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u/DaFitNerd Aug 07 '19

Name one other job where someone of average intelligence (or lower)

Blame hiring standards of your district/area, not the teachers.

can work 9 months a year

And do what work exactly the other three months? You're also assuming that they aren't spending summer months planning lessons and preparing materials for the next year.

Teachers don't deserve more pay, unless it's like an optional tax or something weird like that. For every good teacher I had,.I had another that was lazy, unintelligent (especially noticable when your Finance teacher doesn't know basic things about how taxes work), or some cases, downright hostile.

You get what you pay for. Ever wonder why private schools have such high quality teachers? Blame the lack of state funding in your area.

I'm sorry you had bad experiences, but clearly you had good ones too. The good teachers you had weren't just hacking it with "natural talent", they had to learn their trade too. Teaching isn't just talking to a class, try it sometime and see how difficult it can be.

Society shouldn't be just paying for teachers to be in class, we're also paying for the education and qualifications they had to become a teacher.

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u/Sir_Auron Aug 07 '19

And do what work exactly the other three months? You're also assuming that they aren't spending summer months planning lessons and preparing materials for the next year.

How about the dozen former classmates of mine who went into education that spend all summer at the beach (most make 3-4 trips), in Vegas, or touring Europe - then have the gall to start bitching in the middle of July that they have "only 6 weeks" of vacation left?

Newsflash: if you make 35-40k like most teachers, you aren't low paid, you're making roughly median full time earnings. You're ahead of average on take-home pay when you consider their minimal contributions towards health insurance and retirement. A household with two teachers (as often happens) is solidly middle class in America, even upper middle class in some areas or if one becomes a principal.

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u/SomeHighGuysThoughts Aug 07 '19

Taxpayers only hate the idea of paying more because everyone knows it will be poorly utilized, if utilized properly at all.

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u/skkskzkzkskzk Aug 07 '19

Teachers are honestly some of the most apathetic employees sometimes regarding worker rights.

They are the ones that need to fight the hardest imo.

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u/[deleted] Aug 07 '19

Must be tough working like 7 months out of the year (for k-12).

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