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Bulldinkies! Any educator who is in it for the $$$ needs to get out! The call of an educator should be to educate and feel the reward of light bulbs turning on. They get paid, just like the rest of America who collective keep our country running.
Problem, too many of our educators the light bulb hasnt turned on for them yet either! Too often we have the uneducated educating our little sponges.
There are not enough missionaries to staff all our schools. It should not require a vow of poverty to enter the teaching profession.
At what point in history was educator generally a lucrative one?
What difference does it make? Make no mistake, a teacher's own family will always take priority so of course they should be compensated accordingly. You and your kids come third or fourth if you're lucky just as a job would with any of us.
What difference does it make? Make no mistake, a teacher's own family will always take priority so of course they should be compensated accordingly. You and your kids come third or fourth if you're lucky just as a job would with any of us.
What does that have to do with how well someone does their job?
the problem isn't with teachers. It lies in the fundamentally stupid process by which we educate our children. It is an industrial model that isn't designed to actually create intelligent critical thinkers. It's designed to take a bright, curious six-year old and crush his soul until he is a docile little soldier, lawyer, factory worker, or middle-level manager. On the other hand, he becomes really good at following instructions and filling out forms.
And that's the problem. Because if education were really about education, then nothing we do today makes any sense. Why do the smart and motivated march in lockstep with the stupid and lazy? Why has the increasing amount of homework done nothing to increase test scores? Why, given the astounding amount of knowledge that can be found online with a few words into a search engine, are we still teaching our kids as if it were an 18th-century textile mill? Given that the amount of money spent per child, adjusting for inflation, has doubled in the past thirty years why have we not seen any improvement?
Answer those questions, and you begin to see the real problems with education in this country. It is a rigid, orthodox system designed chiefly to enrich bureaucrats and the parasitic education industry, while the poor teachers don't see a dime. It doesn't really allow a student's progress to be based on how well or how quickly he masters a subject, but by how many days he sits at his desk. It doesn't provide any meaningful incentive to the student to actually care, either. For if a student really masters his coursework, he just gets shunted into an ap course where he gets -- get this -- more homework.
To me, people are asking the wrong question when they worry about discipline in the classroom and the bad attitudes and dropout rates. They keep asking, "why are so many kids dropping out of the system or being so disruptive?" i'm amazed that there are so few. They're being pushed down a cattle chute and know it.
Face it. Education in this country is the most hidebound, least innovative sector of american life today. Business, religious faith, even government all have managed to change and evolve with the time, while education has actually regressed in the past century. It's a shame, too. Because we were really a great civilization for a long time.
What does that have to do with how well someone does their job?
You are A. Not going to attract or keep top talent if you don't pay accordingly. B. If you give crap you will get crap back. Your idea that light bulbs going off should be enough is absurd. That's the reward for a parent and we, as a society IMO, need to move away from the model of teachers parenting kids.
Look around your neighborhood. You probably dress like your neighbors, drive the same style vehicle as your neighbors, live in similar houses that are similarly decorated, you probably talk like them and act like them.
lol. Not hardly.
I don't own a Maserati, not do I ride a horse to Target. Several of the neighbors have more than one wife.
Not everyone lives a cookie cutter life, though it certainly sounds like you do. Which is why you can't see the inherent value of a person being an individualist. It's also probably explains why you are so determined to put everyone into your cookie jar where you've decided a conformist student, stripped of their individuality, is a happy student.
Last edited by DewDropInn; 12-16-2013 at 08:29 AM..
I still remember my sister's amazement when her son's first job out of college, as an engineer, paid $10,000 a year more than my sister earned at her job in education (as a school social worker) with 28 years of experience, a master's degree plus 30 post master's degree credits.
Hmmm, he had 4 years of college and no experience and she had 6 plus years of college and 28 years of experience and he earned $10,000 a year more in salary. There is something seriously wrong with that situation.(It is so shocking I had to write it twice!)
Not necessarily. It's not all about money, and with regard to teachers, we don't want it to be about money.
In some professions, it's about mission rather than money. For teachers, soldiers, healthcare providers and such, we ideally want it to be about mission because their service to society is immensely more valuable than we could ever afford to pay them.
But the "hygiene factors" are crucial (I'm talking about the Herzberg motivational-hygiene theory here). The military essentially gets this right by pumping up security related benefits rather than depending on salary. When I was a young military supervisor, a mentor told me, "Your job is to train 'em, motivate 'em, point 'em at the goal, and then clear the obstacles out of their way."
For teachers, we need to look hard at what makes it hard for them to pursue the mission of teaching and clear away those obstacles. Obstructing a mission-oriented person from pursuing the mission is the primary way to force her to throw up her hands and go elsewhere.
In the big picture what is the mission of the teacher? I think a major problem is the classroom is geared toward the individual rather than the whole. "It's not what your country can do for you, it's what you can do for your country".
Just look at the military schools be it the Academies or the GI training. The education is geared toward the mission of the military. Civilian education isn't so much geared toward the country rather toward the individual. That being said we know how society can be. So why are people surprised when we see schools with different standards and performance of the children.
Now as far as teachers pay goes there has to be some sort of return to gauge compensation. Society pretty much look at teachers as an assembly line worker. Just keep the kids moving forward.
I'm just saying what I see. I myself do think teachers are underpaid on many levels and are some of the most committed people to their profession.
When kids arrive in my class who do not see value in learning and do not consider it their job to learn, it's how low can we go. We keep lowering the bar for these kids and the keep going lower and lower. I know this isn't PC but it's time to start flushing them.
No can do, the "hey lets everybody feel good" party will crucify any educator who goes against the "I love myself" sensitivity movement.
Its always society or someone else's fault, never their own.
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