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If I did not truly want to teach I wouldn't. I hate the assumption that people only teach because they can do nothing else. Teachers are very under appreciated. Of course we ask for more money. Everyone asks for more money. Who doesn't want to get a raise? We've already been told there will be no pay increase for next year. Could I go out and get a job doing something else making more, yes. However I choose not to because I love my job, and I love knowing I make a difference. So tell me what am I choosing not to do as a special educator?
If I did not truly want to teach I wouldn't. I hate the assumption that people only teach because they can do nothing else. Teachers are very under appreciated. Of course we ask for more money.
I hate the assumption that teachers are very under appreciated. I don't think anybody would argue that "those who can do/those who can't teach" applies to every single teacher, rather that perhaps its usually the case.
Regarding teachers asking for money, yeah its only natural. But when teachers are on TV complaining about not getting a raise and wanting better benefits when the rest of the nation (you know the tax payers) are getting pay cuts, benefit cuts or losing their jobs....it becomes a bit outrageous. I really do hope the tax payers put a sock in the teachers and unions mouth.
In most areas its a complete myth that teachers get "paid so poorly". Its teachers way of trying to extract more money from the tax payers. In California the average teacher pay was $64,000/year. But that is for 8 months of work, they are getting on average $8,000 a month! If they got paid 12 months at of the year they would get paid $96,000. That is not being paid "so poorly". Most areas I know of pay their teachers the same in relation to the cost of living.
Tax payers should not be paying teachers to play in the summer sun. On a monthly basis they get paid plenty, if they want more then can work in the summer.
The primary problem with teacher pay is it that pay is not associated with labor market conditions and talent. Just how long you've been on the job. Why should a physics teacher and an English teacher get paid the same when the market for physics teachers is much smaller?
Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. Isn't $64,000 low income for CA, especially areas like San Fransico? This number is an average, right? So their are many new and newer teachers making less, right? Also, are you sure they are working only 8 months?
Also, at want point do the teachers take some blame for the poor education system? They are the ones actually doing the educating. But its always the parents, the administrators, etc etc.
Hah! Ever heard of state mandated curriculum? When the state pays your salary it is kind of hard to teach whatever you would like. The education system has been broken for a very long time, and to blaim it on the people in the trenches is ridiculous! Parents can take action as well!
Yes, and people seem to think that the responsiblity solely falls on the teacher, which is sad.
I hate the assumption that teachers are very under appreciated. I don't think anybody would argue that "those who can do/those who can't teach" applies to every single teacher, rather that perhaps its usually the case.
Regarding teachers asking for money, yeah its only natural. But when teachers are on TV complaining about not getting a raise and wanting better benefits when the rest of the nation (you know the tax payers) are getting pay cuts, benefit cuts or losing their jobs....it becomes a bit outrageous. I really do hope the tax payers put a sock in the teachers and unions mouth.
I have to agree with you on that. But when the schools start cutting fieldtrips, school supplies, our benefits, guess who ends up footing the bill? Teachers.
I always took this expression to mean that those who, for whatever reason, cannot pursue their passion teach. For example, a brilliant singer with debilitating stage-fright chooses, instead, to lead the school choir. A permanantly injured athlete coaches the team. An anthropologist with a fear of flying gets his PHD and teaches college. Never did I connect this expression with the teaching profession in general and I certainly never thought it was meant to imply that teachers choose their profession because they are too unskilled or unintelligent to do anything else!
Teaching in itself is a skill, something that individuals either can or can't do. Acquiring and retaining a teaching certificate (at least in NY, where I am) takes work, dedication, and a lot of education -- and we certainly study more than pedagogy. Obviously, teachers become experts in their subject, but they also take classes on the historical, philosophical, and social foundations of education, along with the required psychology classes. Teachers receive a well-rounded education and can do many things; they choose to become teachers.
It saddens me when people knock my profession. We teachers seem to be such an easy target these days.
Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. Isn't $64,000 low income for CA, especially areas like San Fransico? This number is an average, right? So their are many new and newer teachers making less, right? Also, are you sure they are working only 8 months?
No, $64,000 is not low income for California. The median income in California is around $54,000.
San Fransisco is expensive, but you can't take the most expensive area in the state and say "well teachers can't afford it so they make to little".
And yes, they are only working around 8 months a year, perhaps more like 8.5 months. They get the summer off and have a long winter break and get a number of other holidays off. Show me another job where you get that much time off! At best in private industry you'll get 1 month off a year. So the pay really does have to be put into perspective, at the very least multiple it by 125% to get an idea how it compares to a standard job in private industry.
And yes, starting pay is not $64,000 and many are making less, many are also making more.
Nationally, the average teacher salary is about the same as the median household income, that is around $50k. The individual median is around $32,000, so teachers are making significantly more than 50% of the population....yet they always say they are "paid so little". They are a bit like leeches.
No, I don't fail to realize that. But the teachers still have a good degree of latitude in how they teach. I'm not trying to suggest the teachers are teh only problem, but they are part of the problem. And some of the blame should go their way.
And here comes the exaggerations!! As can be seen here:
The teacher/student ratio for elementary school is 20. To suggest most elementary classrooms have 34 kids per teacher is just a fabrication.
Most schools in California have ESL programs, the don't dump kids that don't speak English well in regular classes.
The system has flawed, but a big part of the failure is that the system allows bad teachers into the system. Break the teachers unions and allow teachers to be hired/fired on actual skill, experience and proven teaching ability and things will improve. Remove strict guidelines on stupid things like classroom size that have little relation to education quality. The kids in a classroom of 40 taught by an excellent teacher will perform better than kids in a classroom of 20 taught taught by a so-so teacher. This has been demonstrated a number of times, so why don't we double class size and increase teacher pay to attract better teachers? The unions.
In California one of the biggest problems are the teachers and their union.
Where have your been? All you have to do is call a school district in CA, and ask them what is their student to teacher ratio in grades 4-6, and they will tell you that the ratio is either 34 to 1, 33 to 1, 32 to 1, or 30 to 1.
Now depending on the school district, and the wealth of its tax payers, some classrooms in k-3 are still 20 to 1 teacher ratio. I think the very affluent Rancho Sante Fe School District near San Diego has a 18 to 1 ratio in all of its classroom.
But, in my school district that primarily services poor African American and Hispanic students, and some surrounding school districts here in the Inland Empire, K-3 class size reduction has all been eliminated from the 20 to 1 ratio, increased back to 32 kids, with the exception of my school district. My district kept 1st and 2nd grades 20 to 1 and increased k and 3rd back to 32 because those grades were the last grades to be reduced to 20 to 1.
Because CA is broke, they can't afford to maintain the 20 to 1 ratio, so I am not fabricating anything, all you have to do is call any local school district and they will politely tell you the facts, especially when 26,000 teachers in CA just got pink slipped because of the economic crisis here, and many school districts increasing their class sizes as a result of those massive layoffs.
As far as having a good latitude in how much I teach, you must be in a time warp when about 15-20 years ago any teacher could say that and laugh if anyone told them what to teach and how to teach it in their classrooms.
Won't you call any elementary school principal in California, especially in the inner city areas of San Diego, Los Angeles, Oakland, and the Inland Empire, and he or she will tell you how they are mandated by their school district, especially if the school distict is one like mine, A PROGRAM IMPROVEMENT DISTRICT, which basically means that more than half of our students aren't not proficient, which also means that teachers have to follow a rigid district pacing guide, assess students every 6-8 weeks to check whether or not we are teaching standards that the state has mandated for all of us to follow, and see what they tell you.
In my district too, teachers are mandated to monitor each of their student's progress who are not scoring proficiently. We are also required to work collaboratively with our colleagues meeting every other week to discuss/PLC the latest test results on those standards that we taught so that we can come up withan action plan and or more common assessments to further test kids who are burned out, and not motivated to do well on them. In fact. I just met with my principal to let her know how many of my students would score proficient this year on our state test. Because of No Child Left Behind, we are mandated, THIS SCHOOL YEAR, to HAVE 50% of our students proficient in our classrooms, and that number increases BY APPROXIMATELY 8 PERCENTAGE POINTS A YEAR until it reaches an impossible 100% of our students proficient in the year 2014.
So I don't know if you just want to teacher bash and blame us as part of the problem, but I HAVE NO CONTROL OF WHAT I DO IN MY CLASSROOM ANY MORE. I have to follow any state legislated law in regard to what latest teaching methods that I have to use with my students, as well as any strategies and techniques my principal deems necessary for us to use school wide to get our students proficient. Administrators call that BEST PRACTICES for student success, if they don't see us implementing the lastest researched BEST PRACTICES in our classrooms, we can be written up, be ridden by the principal, have one of the literacy/math coaches come into our classrooms to do demo lessons to help up do better or be moved to a different grade level.
As far as ESL, we dont call it ESL anymore. It's call ELD or English Language Development, and I have to implement 30 mandated minutes under the CA law of ELD instruction for kids who are not proficient English speakers, who by the way is almost my entire classroom. IF I DON'T PROVIDE 30 MINUTES OF ELD INSTRUCTION A DAY, I AM BREAKING THE LAW, AND MY DISTRICT CAN BE FINED OR SUED. No ELL learner is pulled out of my class for ESL instruction; that's against the law now too.
So again, I don't know where you have been or where you are getting your information about teachers, but you have been quite misinformed.
Where have your been? All you have to do is call a school district in CA, and ask them what is their student to teacher ratio in grades 4-6, and they will tell you that the ratio is either 34 to 1, 33 to 1, 32 to 1, or 30 to 1.
The information I cited is from the school system, it is the ratio on the state level. Some classes will have less than 20 some may have more than 20. Suggesting that "most" have 30+ students is wrong according to the actual data.
Quote:
Originally Posted by antredd
But, in my school district that primarily services poor African American and Hispanic students, and some surrounding school districts here in the Inland Empire, K-3 class size reduction has all been eliminated from the 20 to 1 ratio, increased back to 32 kids, with the exception of my school district.
Right as a figured you are taking your experience in one district and making generalizations about the whole state from it. Now, not to offend you, but the Inland Empire is an economic wasteland. It is only natural to see higher student ratios in that area because there is little money.
Quote:
Originally Posted by antredd
Because CA is broke, they can't afford to maintain the 20 to 1 ratio, so I am not fabricating anything,
Yes you are fabricating it, there has yet to be mass teacher lay offs in the state. Now, there is likely to be a lot of lay offs in the near future. But even if you laid off 20,000 elementary teachers (~13% of current elementary teachers) the ratio would be 23.5 on the state level.
The rest of what you said is just trying to put blame on the state, administrators etc. Yes, teachers can't do anything they want, but they spend most of their days with nobody watching them. So long as the kids do well on the stupid tests the administrators etc are happy. The teachers do not necessarily have freedom in what they teach, but they have quite a bit of freedom in how they teach.
Anyhow, I don't necessarily think you are being dishonest here, rather you trying to extend your experience in an economical deprived area and extend it to the state (or nation) as a whole. You can't do that. Improving the education in economically deprived areas is a hard problem, but again the teachers are part of the problem. I've seen the teachers in these areas and many of them are horrible, but what do you expect? Often they were educated by the very communities they are now teaching in.... Even with increased pay its hard to get "outsiders" to come in, the environment is just very alien to them. Sometimes you get folks that grew up in these communities that do very well and decide to come back and teach in them, but its not that common.
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