[jacobolus]

People with years of preparation and expert practice are giving up a demanding high-skill job to do a retail clerk job that requires no special skill or pre-service training at all.

For individual workers this is fine, and people should do what they like; at scale, for society, it is incredibly wasteful: high-quality teaching has incredibly high leverage. We should get our collective shit together and fix it.

[mattmaroon]

It does require training. You have to watch several videos in the break room.

[shiroiuma]

This reminds me a lot of the fall of the Roman Empire: Romans abandoned the cities and their highly skilled professions so they could move to feudal lords' farms and work the fields. Apparently the society had deteriorated so much that it was more lucrative to work as a field laborer than live in the city doing specialized work. And of course, without skilled people to keep the city's advanced economy going, it fell apart over time.

[thaumasiotes]

Note that the result of this was a large drop in total agricultural production. It wasn't so much that people left the cities to work the fields as that the people who lived in the cities died.

Cities have never replaced themselves, by the way - urban population has always come from people leaving the countryside. When the inflow shrinks, the city will shrink even if no one leaves.

[shiroiuma]

I'm sure some people in the cities died if they couldn't find a better situation for themselves, but what I had read was that many abandoned the cities because life there had become unbearable for whatever reason, generally caused by severe mismanagement by the society's rulers.

If people are leaving academic professions to work as stockers at retail stores, this does not bode well for American society long-term. You can't have an advanced economy and society without an academic class.

[cvwright]

Counterpoint from a former tenured academic: Maybe we just have too big of an academic class.

Our universities are still trying to teach like it’s the mid 20th Century, but the economics are not in their favor. What we’re seeing is the result of them being squeezed into the new reality.

[thaumasiotes]

> high-quality teaching has incredibly high leverage.

This is not a claim supported by the literature. (Though it is a very popular one.) The results of teaching are overwhelmingly determined by the student getting taught. Variation in the teaching itself has a minor effect.

[medvezhenok]

Yes and no.

When you look at populations, it averages out, but there are definitely 10x teachers out there. It’s more of a function of teacher+student combination. The problem is actually more about the structure of schools that limits what great teachers can do.

I’m sure there are studies out there - I’m also extremely skeptical that studies can adequately measure variation in teaching performance (I come from a background in sports / circus, where scientists are always 10-20 years behind the state of the art understanding of the actual practitioners)

(I think it’s kind of like with coding - anyone can write a CRUD app, and anyone can teach basic arithmetic. But certain teaching tasks require very skilled teachers to work)

[darkwater]

Care to point to some of those studies? How do they define what a "very good teacher" is versus a "mediocre teacher"? Interviews with students? Interviews with teachers? Average results of their students?

[jacobolus]

The studies in question are stuff like: if you look at standardized test scores before/after each particular teacher's class, and then run statistical regressions throwing in a bunch of other variables, you will find that most of the variance in the improvements in student performance can be attributed to factors other than which teacher they drew.

But this is a weak way to study the most important influences teachers can have which are about inspiring and exciting students and might not be particularly observable until years or even decades later, when e.g. a student with an inspirational middle school teacher chooses their college major or career path, which might be a different choice from the counterfactual student whose teachers were just phoning it in.

[ramblenode]

That's not what high leverage means. If you teach 150 students a day then even a small effect of teaching will translate into a big difference in cumulative learning.

[thaumasiotes]

That's even less impactful. Cumulative learning is determined by the student much more strongly than per-class learning is. Years after a student took your class, the contribution to their knowledge, positive or negative, from you is negligible.

[badpun]

We don’t know if they were doing high quality teaching.