[ExI] education

Sat May 21 22:34:47 UTC 2022

I was born in the 1950s. Most of my teachers in elementary school were
women. Some were already advanced in age. One lady fresh out of college.
Most of them were married. (The one fresh out of college got married while
she was teaching my class.) A female teacher who was married did not have
to earn as much to live well as a single female would. These ladies were
quite bright and almost all of them were good teachers. In today's society,
many of these ladies would be able to earn much more money in other
professions than they would as teachers. Back in the '50s and '60s, not
many women were employed in traditionally male professions as they are
today. This is definitely a mixed blessing. I had some really excellent
female science teachers in junior high school and high school -- they
really knew their stuff.

Mike LaTorra

On Sat, May 21, 2022 at 3:44 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> Education:  no politician would say that it is anything but #1 on their
> agenda.  But what are the facts?    For a long time teaching was done by
> women, often single, and were underpaid by any standard.  Has that
> changed?  Read the following, from Quora (I did not try to validate the
> statistics - 100K, Spike?).
>
> Right now, 65% of new teachers will quit the profession within their first
> 5 years. Five years ago that figure was 50%. Over the past 5 years at my
> high school, we have had to replace 20% of the teachers each year. This is
> due to new teachers quitting, older teachers retiring, and middle-aged
> teachers taking early retirement and doing something else. A few teachers
> were assaulted so badly by students they had to take medical retirement
> because they suffered permanent injuries and can no longer carry out the
> duties of a teacher.
>
> If I am lucky, I get a 3 or 4 week summer break. I am expected to do all
> sorts of training over summer that I do not get paid for. The district will
> pay for me to attend the training but not pay my wages to go to the
> training. I have to engage in continuing education to renew my credential
> every 5 years. It is my district that signs off on the form that is
> submitted to the state to renew my credential. So if I do not do enough of
> these summer institutes, I do not get to renew my credential.
>
> This past summer, I could not attend any training because I helped my son
> move out of state to take a job and I was building on an addition to my
> house. So I have to make up those hours taking night classes. I am doing 12
> to 16 hour days and I still have to do all the lesson planning, grading,
> and attend all the meetings I normally do. I have over 40 students with
> IEPs and 504 plans so I have to attend those meetings and meet with those
> parents when they wish. My district also requires I fill out paperwork on
> all of those students to ensure we are following the legal requirements.
>
> After school today, I was called to the office because one student in a
> class is being bullied by two other students in the same class. I spent an
> hour dealing with that. I get to spend another two hours tomorrow in a
> conflict mediation meeting tomorrow with parents after school which means I
> have to cancel a doctor’s appointment, I have no choice but to cancel this
> appointment. The next slot is in two months for this specialist.
>
> My son also has an advanced degree in science like I do and he earns more
> than I do with his first job and he has much better health benefits than I
> do. I have to pay $1,000 a month for my health insurance, the district only
> pays $200 a month. If I were to quit my teaching job right now and go work
> for the company my son works for as a lab tech, I would actually get a pay
> raise and move to a part of the country where the cost of living is much
> lower.
>
> I could go back to the career I had before teaching and after brushing up
> I would earn two to three times what I do now.
>
> In CA, there is a shortage of over 100,000 science teachers. Graduates
> with science degrees will earn more than twice the money in private
> industry than teaching. Twenty or thirty years ago that was not the case.
>
> Well over half of my students are failing because they will not even pick
> up a pencil and try. They only play games on their cell phones. I am
> discouraged from confiscating them because if I ask for them the students
> refuse to hand them over. I then have to write a referral and security
> removes them from class. An administrator then confiscates the phone and
> sends the student to in-school suspension for that day and the next day.
> Parents come in and blame the teacher or the school for the policy. So I
> let the students have their phones and my policy is if your phone is out
> and you do not finish the assignment by the end of the period, you get a 0
> and no opportunity to make it up. The students that are failing are good
> with it. They tell me they do not need school. They plan to live on welfare
> like their parents or they can make more money selling drugs so they do not
> need school.
>
> The past few years, I have not been doing much teaching. That is why this
> is my last year. I am tired of parents coming in and telling me they can do
> a better job. I took a parent up on the offer and after 5 minutes the
> parent left in tears. The students ran her out with their profanity and
> complete lack of respect.
>
> I am tired of being assaulted by parents. I am tired of administrators
> telling me I have to do more to get students to pass. I am tired of every
> time I turn my back being hit with things that are thrown at me. When I do
> catch the person doing the throwing, the admin does absolutely nothing. I
> am tired of having student fights in my room and having to wait 10 or more
> minutes for admin to respond and then the students are returned the next
> day because admin does not want to suspend them. We are being told by the
> state we have to lower the number of suspensions and if we do not, we will
> lose money.
>
> I cannot be part of a dysfunctional education system. There are still
> parts in this country where education still works. I have a friend that
> moved to a place and teaches at a place that does not have these problems.
> I plan to do the same next year. The upside is I will also get a pay raise
> because there are still a few places left in this country that are willing
> to pay teachers more. It is not much more but enough to make me feel that
> my skills as a teacher are appreciated. I did not become a teacher to get
> rich. I did it to help students but I need to earn a decent salary. Where I
> am right now, I have not had a pay raise in over 10 years. Ten years ago we
> took a 10% pay cut to help the district balance the budget. Now that the
> economy is better and the state has provided them more money for COLA they
> have raised the salaries of the administration by over 30% but they claim
> they have no money to replace the money they took in the pay cut. I am
> tired of the phrase it is for the children meaning that teachers are
> supposed to work harder, longer, with less, and for less and do major
> miracles with student success when we cannot even get students to pick up a
> pencil and try. The ones that want to do school cannot because the ones
> that do not want to do school make it impossible.
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