[caterping]

The low pay wouldn't be so much of a problem if teachers got more support from parents and administration. For example, when a teacher has to send a student out of the room for bad behavior, the student should have hell to pay from parents and the vice principal. Instead, what often happens is parents complain about the teacher's discipline and the vice principal calls you in to "have a discussion" with the student and to "hear their side of the story". It's a fucking circus.

Also, grading is a bitch. I left the profession mostly because of the insane hours you need to spend grading (well, high school anyway). Students will nickel and dime you for every point while comparing with their peers. "Sally missed the minus sign in step C of problem 4 but got the same number of points as me? WTF?" WTF indeed.

Silly waste-of-time after-school meetings about meeting standardized testing goals is also a complete waste of time as well.

Add to that, you have to be up and out of the house every morning by 6 am or so to be on time. If you have kids, forget about seeing them for breakfast before their school day starts. And that means giving up your evenings too because you need to be in bed early.

As an aside, I knew a teacher who "retired early" basically due to a mental breakdown from the stress. I suspect most teachers know someone who's done the same.

Edit: And if you're male, all it takes is an unsubstantiated claim of impropriety from a female student to end your career immediately.

Easily the worst and most stressful job I've ever had. And it really sucks because I was an excellent teacher. Got great reviews from observers and students. My students learned a ton. I really liked teaching too.

[endtime]

>For example, when a teacher has to send a student out of the room for bad behavior, the student should have hell to pay from parents and the vice principal. Instead, what often happens is parents complain about the teacher's discipline and the vice principal calls you in to "have a discussion" with the student and to "hear their side of the story".

I had a lot of teachers with serious personality problems when I was in public school. Not all, of course, and I'm not saying you're one of them - but the implicit suggestion you're making (side with the teacher by default, don't listen to the kid's side of the story) would be even worse than the way it is now.

>Also, grading is a bitch. I left the profession mostly because of the insane hours you need to spend grading (well, high school anyway). Students will nickel and dime you for every point while comparing with their peers. "Sally missed the minus sign in step C of problem 4 but got the same number of points as me? WTF?" WTF indeed.

Suck it up. I TAed a bunch of CS classes in grad school, including a couple proof classes, and yes grading can be a bitch (CS103 was especially rough). And believe me, Stanford students know how to ask for points back. But that's part of the job. If you can't justify the grades you give, and/or you can't grade consistently, then you deserve pushback from students.

>Add to that, you have to be up and out of the house every morning by 6 am or so to be on time. If you have kids, forget about seeing them for breakfast before their school day starts. And that means giving up your evenings too because you need to be in bed early.

I agree that schools start stupidly early in the US, but when your workday ends between 2:30 and 4:00, I don't think you can really complain about having to go to bed early.

I don't mean to dispute that teaching is stressful, and I'm all for much much higher teacher salaries (and the end of seniority, teachers' unions, ridiculous benefits, rubber rooms, etc.). But your complaints don't really seem reasonable.

[scott_s]

I think you sailed past the fact that the professor for your course had a TA to help with grading. I TAed a junior level computing systems course, derived from the CMU offering: http://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/ Some weeks I would get very little research done because the grading and office hour help duties were so substantial - and that's even with farming the work out to other TAs.

If the professors in the course had to have done both teaching and grading, there's no way they could have sustained the level of instruction and assignments required by this substantial course. One or the other would have suffered. I assume the same was true for your courses.

My point: college courses with TAs don't neatly map to pre-college courses because in elementary, middle and high school, one teacher has to do it all.

[endtime]

The point of that part of my comment wasn't to issue a who-was-busiest challenge (though I'm pretty sure I'd win such a challenge, against either the OP or any of the profs I was TAing for), but to say that long hours grading and regrade requests are to be expected, and especially that the latter are not just the result of unreasonable expectations on the part of the students. Grading is not always fun, but that's why someone gives you money to do it.

And even though it's apples to oranges, I'll state for the record if I hadn't been taking three classes, working on my startup (which I launched during school), and (one quarter) interning at NASA, I think I would easily have had time to put together and deliver lectures in addition to the office hours/recitations/review sessions I was holding, problem sets I was grading, exams I was helping write, robots I was admining, class logistics I was organizing, and whatever else happened to fall under the umbrella of my TA duties any given week.

[scott_s]

Sure, if you had not been doing all of those other things, you would have had time for the remaining duties of a teacher. But you wouldn't have time for much else. And you're thinking of a work week in the same way that a grad student, professor or startup founder does: work all the time. Which brings us back to the point of the original article: if we're going to expect people to put in that much time and effort, perhaps we should pay them more to compensate.

[endtime]

I said in my comment that I think teachers should be paid more. I can think that and also think that the complaints in the comment to which I was replying were unreasonable.

>Sure, if you had not been doing all of those other things, you would have had time for the remaining duties of a teacher. But you wouldn't have time for much else.

Again, it's beside the point, but actually I think I would have had time for quite a lot else. Do you really think working for NASA, starting your own company, and being a full time grad student at once take up the same amount of time as preparing and delivering a couple lectures a week?

[scott_s]

I took the complaints not as "these are unreasonable expectation of a teacher," but as "these are unreasonable expectations of someone who is paid as little as teachers are."

As to your final question, to quote my freshmen year English professor, "Anything is hard if you do it well." The course I had in mind was relatively new, and as such its contents were in flux. The projects and lecture material were under constant revision. If the professors for the course I TAed had had the TA responsibilities as well, they would have had time for little else but the course.

[caterping]

> > For example, when a teacher has to send a student out of the room for bad behavior,

> I had a lot of teachers with serious personality problems when I was in public school.

During my time teaching I didn't meet any. Not saying there weren't any, just that I didn't run across any.

You must understand, high school kids are kids. They do the same stupid things we did when we were kids. They try to push bad behavior as far as they can until there are repercussions. Teachers are adults and professional educators. We've seen the behavior patterns over and over and over again. We try our damned best to let and get the student to win, but some are determined to get themselves thrown out.

Teachers and students are not on the same level, and it totally undermines the teacher's authority for administration to even hint that they are (eg, by having them sit together and "referee" a discussion).

> > Also, grading is a bitch.

> Suck it up.

Hey, you want educated professionals to take teaching jobs? I'm telling you that it's a metric ton of grading work -- and it's not fun like programming or problem-solving; it's grinding slow repetitive work that makes you miserable. I've worked plenty of other jobs. I've worked outside in the summer heat. I'm telling you that grading -- and dealing with the fallout from grading -- is miserable, and if you want good professionals to stay in the career for more than their first year, you're going to have to find ways to make it less miserable.

> I agree that schools start stupidly early in the US, but when your workday ends between 2:30 and 4:00, I don't think you can really complain about having to go to bed early.

That's the thing: it doesn't really end between 2:30 and 4. There's meetings after school on many days. There's paperwork. There's parent contact that must be carefully maintained (which provides necessary documentation if the student fails). And then there's grading. And that's if you're not doing any coaching or other after-school clubs.

> (and the end of seniority, teachers' unions, ridiculous benefits, rubber rooms, etc.)

If it weren't for teacher's unions, then any time that administration wanted a teacher gone, they would be gone. Teach a government class and point out something bad about the current local gov't? Gone. Superintendent gets a complaint about you? ("He assigns my kid too much homework!"). Gone. Superintendent simply doesn't like you? (Regardless of how good a teacher you are.) Gone. Teaching any controversial subject that a parent decides to complain about? Gone.

Yes, the health benefits are good. Perhaps this makes up to some degree for the lower pay.

I've got no idea what you mean by "rubber rooms".

[endtime]

>You must understand, high school kids are kids.

Okay, I agree with that, but...

>Teachers are adults and professional educators.

Where did you teach? I'll move there to raise my kids. Seriously - I grew up in a reasonably good school district (Livingston, NJ) and while there were some good teachers, many (I want to say most, but don't trust my memory to be undistorted) were atrocious. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livingston_Public_Schools

>I'm telling you that it's a metric ton of grading work -- and it's not fun like programming or problem-solving; it's grinding slow repetitive work that makes you miserable.

To be clear, when I say a proof class, I mean that I was grading 30 problem sets (8 TAs, 240 students - this was CS103) of 13-15 problems, around 10 of which were proofs, every week. And many of the students were learning how to write proofs in this class. Trust me, there's nothing as painful to grade as that.

>If it weren't for teacher's unions, then any time that administration wanted a teacher gone, they would be gone.

It wouldn't be perfect. But I prefer a situation with some false negatives to a situation with zero true negatives. That is, I'd rather have most bad teachers and a few good teachers get fired than have no teachers get fired. May be less fair to the teachers (if you're of the school of thought that would rather let 100 guilty men free than punish 1 innocent - depends how you define fair) but it would be far better for the students.

>Teaching any controversial subject that a parent decides to complain about? Gone.

It's not clear to me why this would follow from a lack of teachers' unions.

>I've got no idea what you mean by "rubber rooms".

Do you have no idea what I mean by "Google" either?

http://www.google.com/search?q=rubber+rooms

[caterping]

> > Teaching any controversial subject that a parent decides to complain about? Gone.

> It's not clear to me why this would follow from a lack of teachers' unions.

The union sets up fairly strict protocols that the administration must follow if they want to fire a tenured teacher (the administration can, of course, let go a non-tenured teacher at any time).

The school administration is led by the superintendent of schools -- an elected position. The superintendent gets paid a lot of money and wants to get reelected. If parents complain to the super -- and they do -- then the super wants to placate them to ensure reelection.

Kids are kids, and they exaggerate (and often lie) to their parents about school. Parents want to believe that their child is telling the truth about mean Mr. Teacher picking on them, being too tough on them, grading them too harshly, or assigning too much homework. So parents quite often complain to the principal (who works directly for the super and is not part of the teacher's union), or even directly to the super.

[jacobolus]

Your arguments would be a lot more credible if they weren’t so condescending.

[endtime]

No, they wouldn't. They might be more accessible, even more effective, but they wouldn't be more credible.

In any case, I'd appreciate knowing specifically which parts you thought were condescending, since I wasn't trying to be, and it's not obvious to me on a reread where I was. Would you still have found them condescending if I hadn't said "Stanford"?

[jacobolus]

The condescending part is the “if I'm a grad student and I can read proof problem sets then all you lazy teachers should just suck it up, and if you say teaching is hard then you don’t know what you’re talking about” part (but also the part about how most teachers are shit). Your tone made you sound (a) incapable of empathy, (b) self-entitled, (c) both uninformed and uninterested in learning what people’s views are based on their own first-hand experience. All of these erode your credibility, and make holding a conversation with you unpleasant. (Notice that you also just did the same thing to me: I’m telling you straight up that your tone eroded your credibility in my eyes and you are telling me that I’m wrong.)

Anyway, I have no personal gripe and am not trying to tear you down; consider this just a friendly reminder that a little humility and open-mindedness goes a long way, especially when you’re talking about an issue about which it’s clear your analysis is coming from outside and is mainly anecdotal, and the guy you were talking to is an expert speaking from first-hand experience.

* * *

For what it’s worth, on the actual subject at hand, the vast majority of my teachers (in public schools in a mostly middle-class/upper-middle-class suburb at the edge of Los Angeles county) from elementary school through high school were frankly quite excellent, and worked their asses off for their students, easily spending 60 or 70 hours a week on school-related activity.

[anigbrowl]

Also, grading is a bitch. [...] Students will nickel and dime you for every point while comparing with their peers.

This is what comes from an over-reliance on GPA, which can be just as misleading as an over-reliance on standardized testing. We have the latter where I come from (Ireland): university placement was determined entirely on the basis of nationwide exit exam scores when I left school and my understanding is that little has changed. Your school grades are utterly irrelevant and have no other purpose than to help students, parents and teachers estimate the national examination outcomes. you could turn in no homework for 5 years, get Fs in everything, and be on permanent detention; it will have no effect whatsoever on your university admission prospects.

This is good in some respects, flawed in others. Kids that don't fit in at high school but are smart and determined to do well academically can't be held back by discriminatory attitudes among their teachers, for example; on the other hand, those with a highly developed aptitude in a single area (eg math) or who are heavily involved in relevant extracurricular activities are at a disadvantage because such things carry no weight in the admissions process. Of course, kids that don't like high-pressure test situations are really screwed even if they consistently perform well in other contexts.

[caterping]

> > Also, grading is a bitch. [...] Students will nickel and dime you for every point while comparing with their peers.

> This is what comes from an over-reliance on GPA,

Certainly true.

Also, it's necessary for when a teacher has to defend themselves for failing a student. If you need to fail a student, there is high pressure against doing so. Fail a student and parents and administration both complain loudly. You've got to have all parent contacts (throughout the year) documented (time, who you talked to, what was discussed), as well as all test and exams available for combing through by interested parties.

[tokenadult]

Why don't you go into teaching in private practice?

http://www.mackinac.org/953

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/05/31/us/new-breed-of-teachers-b...

I am a teacher in private practice. I like teaching through my community nonprofit organization much better than I would like teaching with a lot of school bureaucracy, and I can give my clients better service too.

[caterping]

Thanks. That could possibly help me personally, but I'm not sure it addresses the larger problems brought up in the original NYT article.

Also, I don't see how it helps the kids who's parents can't or won't pay for it.

[jmatt]

I know a number of teachers and administrators, and caterping's comments ring true. It sums up what I hear over and over.

At this point it comes down to what is the low hanging fruit? Of these problems what are the easiest (and/or best value) to solve? The biggest change I've seen is the relationship between teacher/school and student/parent. That same problem is all too often described as a "student's attitude" problem. But really the school administration and parents are just as complicit.

We all had the same ornery students around when we were in school. Arguably I was one of them. The way I remember it is we just had a much shorter leash. So, in the end, I was forced to just comply and "play the game". Which was a healthy life lesson. If I was given the options that these kids were, I'm sure I would have exploited fuck out of it. And I can promise I never would have learned that sometimes you just have to jump through all the hoops and "play the game" to get things done.