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Teaching is great and noble and rewarding. Being a teacher sucks though. I did it for 4 years out of college, during which time I: - Bounced from Maternity Leave position to half-day positions to substitute work to another Maternity gig, etc. (steady work is hard to come by) - Dealt with a full range of kids with tons of baggage and backgrounds that I was not prepared (or properly trained) to deal with - Dealt with the poison politics of hover-parents and two-faced administrators - Saw numerous soon-to-be tenured teachers get the rug pulled out from underneath them and lose their jobs due to budget constraints; similarly had a contract not renewed at the end of the year for “budgetary reasons” despite great reviews all year - Made basically minimum wage and paid for all my class supplies out of pocket After 4 years of misery I applied for a temp job that led me to my current full-time job as a corporate training consultant. Working in a cubicle farm is a bit soul-sucking at times, but nowhere near as bad as teaching ever was. Plus the pay/benefits I have now are better than what the top teachers in the (somewhat well off) districts I worked in were making after 20+ years of experience. Unless you step in golden poo poo and land a great position at a great school with great kids and great administrators (which can happen!), you’ll probably hate teaching as much as those reddit wieners. Edit: context, taught K-12 Social Studies/History, mostly grades 6-12. And this was pre-covid, I don’t even want to imagine how bad that gig is nowadays BodyMassageMachine fucked around with this message at 16:37 on May 25, 2023 |
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May 25, 2023 16:34
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A friend of mine taught for 10 years and quit the entire profession last year. Parents had always been the biggest obstacle to teaching kids, she said it just got worse and worse over the last 5 years or so. When they went back to in-person teaching in 2021 a bunch of parents picketed the school since there was still a mask mandate for kids. The administration dropped that after protests, then a bunch of kids got sick, then a bunch of teachers got sick. Then they had a hearing with parents who thought the kids weren't getting enough hands-on learning since they kept having to combine classrooms and stuff to handle the teachers being out. They made it through the worst of that stuff, but then parents started trumpeting those right-wing talking points about teachers grooming kids or whatever. The administration kept giving these people a platform, even though it's like 1% of the parents saying this stuff. She quit, now she's a librarian.
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May 25, 2023 16:40
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one of my jobs is teaching and it’s pretty good, but i teach adults in a country that isn’t the usa or the uk so my experience is probably different from most people in this thread. i don’t think i would ever want to work in a state school in one of those countries based on what i’ve heard from friends who have done it/are doing it
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May 25, 2023 16:59
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FilthyImp posted:Depends where you teach but you deal with lovely kids lashing out at you and their shittier parents all day. My cousin's wife was really excited to start teaching, as she loved her coursework and student teaching experience (a 12th honors class at an upscale suburban school). She got a job teaching 9th grade English at a school that, while not a ghetto school, didn't have the best reputation, and on the first day had kids telling her to "gently caress off bitch". The first time that happens you throw them out of class and send them to the office, but what do you do the next day? And the day after that? The administration is going to get tired of having these kids in the office every day, and if they stay in class, they just cause problems for everyone else. Talking to the parents was futile, as they either didn't respond to anything from the school, or were just as lovely as their rear end in a top hat kids. She put in her notice before the year was even half over. The next year she found another job at some hoity-toity private school, but that just came with a different set of problem students and parents. She ultimately wound up changing careers.
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May 25, 2023 17:01
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mind the walrus posted:This is one of those things that sounds right but you're assuming all teaching skills are transitive and/or that people in "real" careers enjoy collaborating with someone who has a teacher's skillset in their work environment (they don't). I mean I am solely speaking to the teachers I had rapport with, a lot of jobs do exist that mesh with teacher skillsets. But the biggest tragedy is absolutely that American teachers are often treated poorly
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May 25, 2023 20:41
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NoiseAnnoys posted:from the other side of higher ed, absolutely, parents are the worst part of teaching up until grad school. What percentage of undergrads actually have their parents interact with instructors in any way, wtf.
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May 25, 2023 20:56
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I teach at a Midwest public middle school in the USA. Most kids are good most of the time. That's the simplest summary.
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May 25, 2023 21:14
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Also, my student loans just got forgiven this week after 10 years of public service, so that's been a nice touch. I had 80k in loans because I was dirt poor and using them to survive college long enough to graduate
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May 25, 2023 21:17
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The Moon Monster posted:What percentage of undergrads actually have their parents interact with instructors in any way, wtf. a ton, especially given how much college costs in the us and how it's billed as "essential" to a student's life. in europe, where university education is largely free or heavily subsidized, i have no interaction with parents at all. with american students on study abroad or when i was back in america? every semester a parent or two would call to challenge a grade, get a redo, contest an acdemic honesty hearing, etc. it's semi-understandable when you realize that some state schools cost like 20K a year now for in-state tuition and elite private schools are like 70k per year, which means about a quarter of a million dollars for your kid's communication BA they obviously plagiarized their way through. but yeah, teaching itself is great. nothing outside of drugs or sex beats that moment of something clicking for a student and watching their world expand in real time.
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May 25, 2023 21:18
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pretty soon if youre a teacher yo uget to have a gun just like a cop so that is pretty loving cool pewpewpew
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May 25, 2023 21:19
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We had a lockdown drill today 😓 It's horrifyingly normal to them
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May 25, 2023 21:25
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Nooner posted:pretty soon if youre a teacher yo uget to have a gun just like a cop so that is pretty loving cool pewpewpew Finally discipline returns to the classrooms
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May 25, 2023 21:27
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NoiseAnnoys posted:but yeah, teaching itself is great. nothing outside of drugs or sex beats that moment of something clicking for a student and watching their world expand in real time. This is why I have spent my entire professional life working for a nonprofit teaching adults English and the High School Equivalency. It loving rules and the students (mostly) appreciate it because they know the poo poo they missed out on and want to catch up, and if they don't, they don't hang around to make my life worse.
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May 25, 2023 22:11
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The Moon Monster posted:What percentage of undergrads actually have their parents interact with instructors in any way, wtf. When I was in grad school my advisor had to put a sign on her door that was just an excerpt from the Federal Education Right to Privacy Act, specifically the part that clarified any student over the age of 18 had to provide written permission before any third party would be permitted to view their grades. She did this because parents had tried calling her directly or coming to her office demanding to see her about their kids’ grades. She taught mostly 3000 and 4000 level courses lol
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May 26, 2023 00:11
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Prepare for old man shakes fist at cloud. Heh. Smartphones in school is a huge, impossible problem I see no solution to. We've absolutely accepted for some loving reason that students "need" a portable constant distraction device because it's a "phone." Yeah, that's what it is, a "phone." That's what people use it for mostly, to make "phone calls."  Parents would never send their kids to school with a DS or a Gameboy. But every loving parent in the country sends their kid to school with a loving smartphone. So the moment the kid is bored they pull out their phone and that's that. Or when it buzzes in their pocket, that's it for class, the only thing on their mind now is "What was that, did someone say something about me?!?!" So now you have every single kid in the entire school with a portable constant distraction device in their pocket and teachers are now supposed to be the cell phone cops. Kid's using their phone? The one their parents bought and send them to school with every day? Stop class and deal with it. 29 other kids sitting there. While you're dealing with one phone 10+ kids pull theirs out because "We're not doing anything right now." The kid whose phone you took is now done with the class, their only thought is, "When will I get it back?!?!" Oh you could get a cell phone prison and tell them to put their phones in it when they come in. And when they don't, and you catch them on IG live in loving class now you have even more to deal with. Maybe... just maybe... they shouldn't be in school. I know, I know, it's a "phone." But there are "phones" at the school too! And if it's really "emergencies" that you're worried about, you could just buy one of those $20 kid phones that can only call a couple of numbers period. It's completely loving insane and is by far my biggest frustration with teaching in my 21 years of middle and high school. And at the beginning of the smartphone era, I was the biggest proponent of phones in the classroom that existed on Earth. "They come in every day with a little computer in their pocket, we should use it!" But the thing is... kids just can't handle it. They just can't! The social media apps they are all on were designed by casinos, the human brain was not ready for the idea of constant always-on novelty, and school can be hard, dull, and annoying. Anyway, I've got one more year in me to see if this year was a fluke and if not I'm gone at the semester in December.
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May 26, 2023 01:13
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Teaching is really hard work and when I don't do it I like my life a lot more, but it's also really rewarding and I don't think I'd ever want to do anything else. Maybe the problem is me.
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May 26, 2023 03:01
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my teacher friend says hes taken a largely hands off approach and its worked out great. he makes it sound like a montessori kinda thing where minimal basics are covered and then everything else is kinda up to the kids to give a poo poo about and if they do he goes to town. otherwise they cover their own asses. honestly i think id prefer that to what i got in 90e small town public school
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May 26, 2023 03:06
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The Saucer Hovers posted:my teacher friend says hes taken a largely hands off approach and its worked out great. he makes it sound like a montessori kinda thing where minimal basics are covered and then everything else is kinda up to the kids to give a poo poo about and if they do he goes to town. otherwise they cover their own asses. I assume the “minimal basics” are what will appear on standardized testing.
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May 26, 2023 04:14
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JonathonSpectre posted:Prepare for old man shakes fist at cloud. Heh. Just teach kindergarten like my wife  Kidding, this is a big deal and I don't know what we'll do when our toddler is older. I didn't get a phone until I was working and I sure as hell didn't have friends in middle/high school
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May 26, 2023 04:18
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I like it, but I teach at an international school in South Korea, so the kids are all rich as hell and only a few have any significant behavioral problems, so for the most part, they're only kind of noisy and hyperactive. I also only teach AP Computer Science so I get all the overachieving nerds who tend to behave extremely well because their parents will lock them outside on the balcony all night for an A-. My class is also an elective, so the parents don't really bother me much, preferring to hover over the homeroom teachers. I'd never teach in America, though, gently caress that. JonathonSpectre posted:Prepare for old man shakes fist at cloud. Heh. We just have a box they put it in at the beginning of the day, and we give it back at the end of the day. Edit: Thinking about it, I guess that might not be the best idea in the US. The first shooting that occurs where a kid can't call the cops to come stand impotently outside as they get murdered one-by-one would make for some really bad press. I'd suggest only allowing them those old flip-phones that don't really have much in the way of apps or internet access, but I don't know if those are even available anymore, and still doesn't address the issue of texting. The Bible fucked around with this message at 06:45 on May 26, 2023 |
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May 26, 2023 05:28
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A guy I golf withs kid was sent home today for threatening to kill the entire class... The kid is 5 or 6 Teachers really don't have it easy. I mean now that is more than just a kid being upset it's an actionable loving threat from a 6 уеаг old.
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May 26, 2023 05:50
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I meet grown rear end adults whose brains are just melted all over the pavement from spending every waking hour on social media. I can't imagine dealing with 30-40 young adults who've grown up thinking that's the normal state of being.
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May 26, 2023 06:40
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Today for our last day we have "field day" where kids go outside for like two hours. Brought out frisbees, footballs, soccer balls, basketballs. 80% of the kids sat under trees and were on their phones.
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May 26, 2023 08:30
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Grem posted:Today for our last day we have "field day" where kids go outside for like two hours. Brought out frisbees, footballs, soccer balls, basketballs. 80% of the kids sat under trees and were on their phones. That's what I do on our field days.
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May 26, 2023 09:39
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Grem posted:Today for our last day we have "field day" where kids go outside for like two hours. Brought out frisbees, footballs, soccer balls, basketballs. 80% of the kids sat under trees and were on their phones. Lol
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May 26, 2023 11:32
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We should unironically do a Butlerian Jihad on social media
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May 26, 2023 11:34
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Toxic Mental posted:We should unironically do a Butlerian Jihad on social media they should have done this like 20 years ago and saved us all the shame of posting on somethingawful
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May 26, 2023 11:35
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Caesar Saladin posted:they should have done this like 20 years ago and saved us all the shame of posting on somethingawful I don't feel any shame posting on here!
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May 26, 2023 11:56
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The kids are mostly fine other than the fact that they're all hopelessly addicted to their smartphones. Their parents can go to loving hell.
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May 26, 2023 15:03
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Caught Cubs Posting
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i dipped my toe in the water by tutoring at Boys n Girls club in college and noped out of that poo poo after one semester had more than one student get felony charges in that semester. was chaotic. did not get much tutoring done
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May 26, 2023 15:15
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15 years of teaching high school (not in America). Some days are a grind, but still happy to do it. I'm lucky, been able to design elective classes where I get to do what I want. Grade 9 kids will come in and work on a 2 week soldering or programming project for an hour a day, without too many issues. I wasn't intentionally doing Project Based Learning classes, it just sort of happened. It's really cool to see boys who are just not going to do math or social studies assignments build a really great design that they are proud of. I also tone down my own work outside of school. 50 year old teachers who mark until midnight every day are psychotic. When I started out I was pulling 16 hour days to feel prepared, but now when the school day is done, I am done. Another experience that helped keep me balanced was my time in military reserves. I remember helping on a basic course, when I was about 20, and thinking "kids these days are so soft, the course is easy compared to when I did it", and immediately realized how stupid that is to think. Things are different, but kids are still kids, I try not to dislike them for being kids of the environment they are brought up in. Bad admin can get absolutely hosed. I've had great and terrible. If the only thing you care about is having all high schoolers pass, kids will realize they don't have to do anything and teachers will be forced to pass them. I became once happier once I stopped trying to work with the office and just dealt with things my own way.
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May 26, 2023 15:29
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I taught sociology and criminology at my university when I was a grad student. Nothing terrible like teaching high school, but standing up and lecturing is a real draining experience if the students aren't interested. My worst experience with that came from a conference presentation, though. It was a sparsely attended 9:00AM session with old white men who would read the newspaper during your presentation. I didn't give a poo poo and just got it over with, but this poor woman presenting her dissertation research broke down in the middle of her presentation and started crying. Anyway, back then (10-15 years ago) asking students to turn cell phones off during class was not a big deal and no one really complained. It was expected. I can't imagine dealing with that even with college students these days.
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May 26, 2023 15:50
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JonathonSpectre posted:It's completely loving insane and is by far my biggest frustration with teaching in my 21 years of middle and high school. And at the beginning of the smartphone era, I was the biggest proponent of phones in the classroom that existed on Earth. "They come in every day with a little computer in their pocket, we should use it!" But the thing is... kids just can't handle it. They just can't! The social media apps they are all on were designed by casinos, the human brain was not ready for the idea of constant always-on novelty, and school can be hard, dull, and annoying. As a parent, not being able to lock down the phone during school will be a major concern of mine. For everyone, what are the recommendations for parental control? I use Android and a quick look shows me that Google has something that only controls total time per day and not scheduling specific periods. An Android app called "bark" that seems to control that kind of scheduling for $5 a month.
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May 26, 2023 15:51
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Carwash oval office posted:I also tone down my own work outside of school. 50 year old teachers who mark until midnight every day are psychotic. When I started out I was pulling 16 hour days to feel prepared, but now when the school day is done, I am done. I teach high school myself (also not in America) and this is probably the most important lesson any new teacher can learn I think. Probably so in most any profession, that it is a job, it's of course a good thing if you like your job and you're passionate about it, but it's probably better for almost everyone, not only you but also your co-workers and students if you treat it as that and don't make it your entire existence if that makes sense. All in all I really enjoy teaching despite the frustrations and stress that can be part of it, it's also not for everyone and unfortunately there's many who could probably have been really good teachers if it weren't for some issues with pay and work conditions. I'm in Norway, benefits are pretty good, but there are issues with pay compared to other highly educated professions and there's also the issue of work conditions and expectations for instance as regards the increasing demands put upon teachers to be a whole lot more in addition to a teacher in dealing with students and parents. Alot of new teachers also burn out because of stress and uncertainty from how they are really just thrown into things without really getting much training or preparation for the actual day-to-day and other responsibilities of the profession, in theory there's a mentor program where new teachers are paired up with an experienced one who can accompany them in lessons and provide feedback and support, as well as help out with easing into the administrative responsibilities, however schools are typically so short-changed with staff (especially in the districts) that this is rarely possible. The result being that new teachers are frequently left almost entirely to their own devices to figure out how they are actually supposed to do things.
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May 26, 2023 16:10
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A buddy teaches grad school and it’s ridiculous what students still try to get away with. It’s funny hearing how AI generated papers are going to be undetectable, when students are turning in work that drastically changes voice between paragraphs, or when questioned about it have no clue what the themes or arguments of their paper were. Unfortunately it’s nearly impossible to discipline students as the admins have no interest in kicking out someone paying $45k a year, and even ridiculously egregious repeat offenders get to write professor evaluations that have a lot of weight & don’t contain disclaimers about the student’s behavior. Although my friend has been amused when someone like that who managed to graduate anyway tries to publish papers in the insular academic community and finds the peer review process slightly hostile.
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May 26, 2023 16:55
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Hyrax Attack! posted:A buddy teaches grad school and it’s ridiculous what students still try to get away with. It’s funny hearing how AI generated papers are going to be undetectable, when students are turning in work that drastically changes voice between paragraphs, or when questioned about it have no clue what the themes or arguments of their paper were. on the other side of that coin, there was some professor a couple weeks ago who failed his entire class because he plugged all their papers into chatgpt and asked the ai "did you write this?" and it said yes, and he just assumed it was telling the truth
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May 26, 2023 17:30
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So I'm actually in grad school to go into teaching in the US. Yay... Well, so far I've observed at four schools (three public, one private), and had a good time at each one. I'm assisting in a sign language class for grade schoolers in a couple weeks, and I've got student teaching in the fall, so we'll see how that shakes out. I also just finished a semester of TAing for one of the education professors. His undergrad course is basically social studies for aspiring elementary teachers, and... hoo boy, that was a wakeup call. He gets undergrads who want to be teachers in a 300-level course who got this far with some very basic literacy problems. As in, they have difficulty with a Core Knowledge reader aimed at third-graders. He has wept over this more than once. The Bible posted:We just have a box they put it in at the beginning of the day, and we give it back at the end of the day. quote:Edit: Thinking about it, I guess that might not be the best idea in the US. The first shooting that occurs where a kid can't call the cops to come stand impotently outside as they get murdered one-by-one would make for some really bad press. I'd suggest only allowing them those old flip-phones that don't really have much in the way of apps or internet access, but I don't know if those are even available anymore, and still doesn't address the issue of texting. My cousin got her kid a Gabb phone, which is still a smartphone, but can't access social media. There was also an article in the NYT just a few days ago about smart watches as an alternative. So I dunno, maybe the tide is turning. Hyrax Attack! posted:A buddy teaches grad school and it’s ridiculous what students still try to get away with. It’s funny hearing how AI generated papers are going to be undetectable, when students are turning in work that drastically changes voice between paragraphs, or when questioned about it have no clue what the themes or arguments of their paper were.
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May 26, 2023 17:35
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A friend in rural California is the superintendent of a small district. He didn’t have the most fun career & has been threatened with guns during pay disputes while working construction & managed a fast food place with rough clientele, so has a thick skin and isn’t afraid of parents. When one went over the line complaining about a state mandated covid restriction, even though he also didn’t like the restriction he told the parent he was going to keep it in place forever out of spite.
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May 26, 2023 18:04
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Cheesus posted:As a parent, not being able to lock down the phone during school will be a major concern of mine. Apple almost certainly has a variant of this, but on Android, there is the Family Link app where you absolutely can lock down the phone for specific time periods, put a cap on usage, control what apps are installed, etc, while still leaving the phone able to make and receive calls, which also can be restricted to specific numbers.
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May 29, 2023 00:41
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Keromaru5 posted:My mom just retired as an illustrator for a biology professor, and he's started getting some papers with AI-generated introductions, which he can tell because the writing style abruptly takes a nosedive in the second paragraph. Hyrax Attack! posted:A buddy teaches grad school and it’s ridiculous what students still try to get away with. It’s funny hearing how AI generated papers are going to be undetectable, when students are turning in work that drastically changes voice between paragraphs, or when questioned about it have no clue what the themes or arguments of their paper were. I deal with this regarding code rather than writing, and it's pretty much the same non-issue. "Alright, explain this 300-line hairball you emailed me." If they can't, I chalk it up to some GPT variant. On the rare writing assignment, it's about the same. Most of my students are fluent English speakers, but not native, and their writing is typically pretty poor. ChatGPT turns in work that is of significantly higher quality than their own writing, so it really isn't too hard to figure out when it is in play, especially if the assignment is longer and they don't carefully look it over (and they never do). The Bible fucked around with this message at 01:00 on May 29, 2023 |
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May 29, 2023 00:53
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