NEWS--I am a teacher, why am I hated? (graders, homeschooled, doctor)
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Seriously??? You find it hard to believe things have changed? The kids I teach have grown up on self esteem building exercises so they suffer from special snowflake syndrome. I will have kids come to my door when I'm in the middle of a lecture and ask "Are you busy?"...Um, yeah, I'm teaching 24 other kids . They think nothing of taking class time to deal with their absences. Often, when I give a test, a student will announce, "I wasn't here for that" as if that excuses them from the material.
Seriously, you think things haven't changed? Back when I was a kid, if I failed, I got my butt blistered. Now if a child fails, the parent and my administrators want to know what I did wrong.
I think some of this(and other posts) speak to a generational difference in how we look at all figures of authority.
The old way where we were absolutely unquestioning of those is authority didn't serve everyone well either.
If you think the answer is to blister a kids butt for failing..well feel free to raise your kids that way. I personally think there is room for asking questions.
When my oldest kid was in her first few years of elementary..she did poorly. When I tried to ask questions, or ask how they assessed her performance..I was shut down(this is a very condensed version). I practically homeschooled her for a few years. I guess I should have used your "butt blistering" technique..would have saved a lot of time
As far as no other professions being openly attacked, that simply isn't true. People who work in the financial services sector have gotten a lot of grief over the years. People who work in healthcare jobs get attacked. Attorneys get attacked. Those are just a few examples.
Ok, please show us the legislation reducing the pay of doctors, lawyers, etc.
Or some evidence that civil service doctors licenses are now 50% dependent on whether their patients are cured, and ignore completely whether the patients are AMA? Or that prosecutors are now required to win every single case they go to trial with or they lose their jobs?
Ok, please show us the legislation reducing the pay of doctors, lawyers, etc.
Or some evidence that civil service doctors licenses are now 50% dependent on whether their patients are cured, and ignore completely whether the patients are AMA? Or that prosecutors are now required to win every single case they go to trial with or they lose their jobs?
Please show us that.
Actually any healthcare worker in the public sector has been affected by budget legislation. This would include people working in the VA system at the federal level, people working in teaching hospitals at state universities.
Healthcare workers of all stripes are affected by changes in Medicare etc. IF Obama makes changes to the Medicare system...that affects care providers.
If states make budget cuts to Medicaid..that also affects the care providers.
Teachers....meh, for the most part do an adequate or better job. Like in any job, there are probably that 5-10% that, for one reason or another, should be fired......I don't think that happens in ANY profession.
Most of the blame for the idiocy of student**ds lies............erm, with the students and their parents.
What other profession is there not much accountability for?? A friend of mine, who makes over $100,000 a year took me out for dinner the other night. Tells me his son is in high school & cannot read. How did it happen? The schools passed the kid because of his football skills. Idk how the parents didn't do something about it sooner. Nevertheless who's job is it- if parents are at work all day & trust that the teachers are actually doing their jobs??
The parents should know whether or not their son can read and it reflects a high degree of negligence on their part. They were content to let their child fail and let him proceed on the basis of his athletic merits, just as the school system was. The difference is that the school system has thousands of kids to pay attention to; the parents have far more involvement on a daily basis -- or at least should.
That said, this just reflects what I've been saying. Pitting one against the other is why we're failing. The only societies I know of that make educators adversaries are those that adopted Maoist or Stalinist regimes (Khmer Rouge in Cambodia comes to mind). The rest of the world must be looking at American society right now and thinking a collective 'WTF?!' What other advanced, modern society would politicize education and use the education system as a forum for ideological warfare between right and left? Sure, China might. Japan occasionally flirts in that direction. But our modern, European counterparts? Canada? Doubtful.
Ok, please show us the legislation reducing the pay of doctors, lawyers, etc.
Or some evidence that civil service doctors licenses are now 50% dependent on whether their patients are cured, and ignore completely whether the patients are AMA? Or that prosecutors are now required to win every single case they go to trial with or they lose their jobs?
Please show us that.
As far as your comment about prosecutors our county attorney is an elected position. I'd say the mood where I live is that she should not be reelected based on her performance.
I think some of this(and other posts) speak to a generational difference in how we look at all figures of authority.
The old way where we were absolutely unquestioning of those is authority didn't serve everyone well either.
If you think the answer is to blister a kids butt for failing..well feel free to raise your kids that way. I personally think there is room for asking questions.
When my oldest kid was in her first few years of elementary..she did poorly. When I tried to ask questions, or ask how they assessed her performance..I was shut down(this is a very condensed version). I practically homeschooled her for a few years. I guess I should have used your "butt blistering" technique..would have saved a lot of time
I don't think butt blistering is required, and I think teachers who actually advocate that in a literal sense should retire from the classroom forever. But there is something to be said for having high expectations for your own children, and too often parents don't seem to have them and seem content to let the school system set those expectations. It doesn't work like that. The whole American attitude of delegating responsibility for something completely to one person, one group of persons, or one entity is a major, major flawed approach, although that's our approach to a lot of things. We delegate political matters to politicians and are content not to know or understand a f*cking thing about constitutional law, human rights, history, and economics. We just delegate all responsibility for analysis of policy to elected officials and then use a symbol assessment of our own quality of life to determine whether or not they're 'doing their job'. It doesn't work that way. Neither does education. Your son could be succeeding in school and the school system might still be failing him; likewise, your son could be failing in school and the school system might be doing mostly the right things. You have to dig deeper and ask questions but to the point, both sides, all parties have to come together and work as a team. Each has to understand his/her roles and then support each other. That's not happening here, and until it does, expect America to have a completely sh*t quality of education.
I don't dislike individual teachers, but I do think the Teacher's Unions are the major problem with our nation falling behind others academically. They stonewall critical school reforms, and raise the cost of education beyond what the nation can afford (for personnel costs, rather than just all-new books every year for each student and the like.)
However, teachers do earn my ire with complaints that are underpaid. They get very good pay even, compared to full-time jobs. They seem to be unaware that most workers now work 60-80 hours a week, 50 weeks out of the year, and some (like my family) are really NEVER off work in industries that function 24/7/52. Also, aside from the time off issue, our benefits are abysmal compared to teacher's benefits, and we pay a very large part of our income for said "benefits."
We spend at least 400% more on public education today, than when I was in school (1970s and early '80s). My education was excellent, and I had no problem getting a Master's Degree. But I'm not impressed with the academic knowledge of the high school and college grads today. Yes, there are some well-educated and brilliant youngsters preparing for engineering-type jobs, but these kids are not even a significant minority. Far too much time is spent in political indoctrination.
Money is NOT the answer; so let's look at the Teacher's Unions, time spent on liberal political indoctrination, and why students in other nations far exceed our students--particularly in the hard sciences.
Finally and VERY IMPORTANTLY, here in NH we are taxing retired seniors and laid-off employees right out of their homes, even when those homes no longer have mortgages. $13,000 a year is WAY too much tax for an average colonial on less than an acre--and over 1/2 of the total tax goes to schools.
I don't dislike individual teachers, but I do think the Teacher's Unions are the major problem with our nation falling behind others academically. They stonewall critical school reforms, and raise the cost of education beyond what the nation can afford (for personnel costs, rather than just all-new books every year for each student and the like.)
I guess the question is, and always will be, are the reforms 'critical', and if so, on what basis? Reforms themselves have to have merit; they can't be implemented because of some simplistic analogy that might exist in the world of running a small business or an athletics contest.
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Originally Posted by NHartphotog
However, teachers do earn my ire with complaints that are underpaid. They get very good pay even, compared to full-time jobs. They seem to be unaware that most workers now work 60-80 hours a week, 50 weeks out of the year, and some (like my family) are really NEVER off work in industries that function 24/7/52. Also, aside from the time off issue, our benefits are abysmal compared to teacher's benefits, and we pay a very large part of our income for said "benefits."
Everyone is underpaid -- teachers are just letting everyone know that they're identifying with everyone else in that regard.
Seriously, though, I don't know if the complaint is that they are underpaid, as much as it is that their work itself is unseen and undervalued. Teachers do get lots of vacation time -- I can vouch for that. However, I frankly believe that most teachers (pick a level) deserve the time off that they get. Certainly some don't; some don't do the things that are required to be an effective teacher, and it p1sses me off when I see it. But I know that in my most recent adjunct position I frequently worked 60-70 hours a week. Preparing lessons. Preparing progress reports. Q&A with the student. Grading practice assignments. Grading homework. It all adds up. Of course some teachers skip out and don't do 'busy work' and some do but don't seem interested in giving feedback. And then make excuses for why their students didn't pass final assessments. There are high quality teachers and low quality. Most are somewhere in between. Same as any field.
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We spend at least 400% more on public education today, than when I was in school (1970s and early '80s). My education was excellent, and I had no problem getting a Master's Degree. But I'm not impressed with the academic knowledge of the high school and college grads today. Yes, there are some well-educated and brilliant youngsters preparing for engineering-type jobs, but these kids are not even a significant minority. Far too much time is spent in political indoctrination.
I just don't see political indoctrination on a wide scale. I do see more and more teachers feeling like they have a need to become political, but that might also be because more and more conservative activists have come out of the woodwork to use the education system as a field to wage their own ideological war on everything from religion to economic theory. Teachers spend less time concerned with their teaching and more time worried about whether they'll even have a job or a career. Human nature takes over at some point, I guess. It's human nature to worry about putting food on one's table right?
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Money is NOT the answer; so let's look at the Teacher's Unions, time spent on liberal political indoctrination, and why students in other nations far exceed our students--particularly in the hard sciences.
I don't know what qualifies as liberal indoctrination. Teaching children about Darwin? FDR? Lincoln? Civil Rights? That's history, right?
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Finally and VERY IMPORTANTLY, here in NH we are taxing retired seniors and laid-off employees right out of their homes, even when those homes no longer have mortgages. $13,000 a year is WAY too much tax for an average colonial on less than an acre--and over 1/2 of the total tax goes to schools.
Fine then follow Florida's lead and have a bad system.
I have no idea what state you live in; you should have home schooled them at the first inkling of the corruption in that school system. And I do agree with much of what you wrote. I've seen schools systems have that "us against them" mentality, and its an abuse of power.
On another note....
What other profession is there not much accountability for?? A friend of mine, who makes over $100,000 a year took me out for dinner the other night. Tells me his son is in high school & cannot read. How did it happen? The schools passed the kid because of his football skills. Idk how the parents didn't do something about it sooner. Nevertheless who's job is it- if parents are at work all day & trust that the teachers are actually doing their jobs??
Individual teacher accountability is difficult because it's impossible to separate the affect of one teacher from the next. In my last school, 1/3 of my students failed my class. In my current school, 1/3 get A's. Did I, suddenly, become a better teacher?
As to children not being able to read....they take standardized tests every year that should have sent up red flags. Unfortunately, some reading issues are only seen later. I had a dd who appeared to read well in 3rd grade who ended up needing intensive intervention because she couldn't decode words. She had a great memory so she could do a great job of faking that she could read. If I hadn't had her tested outside of the school this would not have been caught in time to fix her issue. I can't really fault the school for not fixing a problem that couldn't be seen yet.
I have to ask how is it that this young man's parents didn't realize he couldn't read before high school. The reason I picked up on dd's issue and her teacher didn't is that I spent more time reading with her than her teacher did. Her teacher had 30 kids to listen to every day. If she gave all of them just two minutes to read to her, that's an hour a day gone. I had my dd read to me every night for 20 minutes or so and something just didn't seem right so I had her tested. While she didn't have a problem yet, she would have by the time she entered middle school and then it miight have been too late.
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. They think nothing of taking class time to deal with their absences. Often, when I give a test, a student will announce, "I wasn't here for that" as if that excuses them from the material. 
