I taught high school for two years before I decided to cut my losses and drive a semi while retraining myself for a different field. I'm not going to say it's bad for everyone, but teaching was...
Exemplary
I taught high school for two years before I decided to cut my losses and drive a semi while retraining myself for a different field. I'm not going to say it's bad for everyone, but teaching was easily the worst decision of my life. The pay was right around $30,000, which in the area was enough to afford a 1-bedroom apartment and maybe a car payment, but it wasn't enough to ever hope to start a life. My free time was practically nonexistent between grading and documenting and planning.
The teaching itself was fun and the students were, with a couple exceptions, really great kids--it was just the sheer amount of thankless drudgery outside the classroom that was unsustainable for me. More often than not I'd get home at 4 and just continue working until I needed to sleep, then repeat until Friday, then bring a stack of ~120 essays home to grade over the weekend. And then there was the professional development.
I can't even begin to estimate how many hours of my life were wasted by unreasonably smiley people trotting out platitudes and idiotic strategies. During the summer we'd even be required to go to conferences on our own dime where we'd sit in rooms all day listening to the valium-fueled ravings of assorted superteachers and charlatans who all seemed to think that every problem in the profession could be fixed with strategy tweaks in the classroom. I remember sitting in one and listening to one of our admins straight-face say that within five years all of our classes were going to be advanced placement, and then looking around at all the smiling people nodding along with her. Positivity always overrides reality.
The fake smiles erode you after a while. You get to know the stories of the people you're working with. You know roughly how much they make, how far in debt they are, how many antidepressants they're on. There's an unwritten rule that you can't be unhappy or unsatisfied as a teacher, and if you are, then you're a bad teacher and need to be replaced. You must be constantly happy and open and agreeable and hopeful, or else. You must never burn out. You are living the dream with the most fulfilling and amazing job in the world and you are so blessed and part of such a great family... And if you don't feel that way, get out.
I knew I couldn't handle the work environment and the resulting life it was barely able to fund. The day after my second year ended I was in a classroom learning to drive trucks. I don't even remember where I sent my resignation from. Changing jobs was an immediate $15,000 raise, and even the life of a long haul trucker provided significantly more free time and peace. Once I was in my own truck I started teaching myself how to code (tip for teachers, you can turn that stuff back on yourself if you need to) and after a year on the road got myself a desk job in tech support, which I then traded for a full time developer position six months later.
I still work as a developer and make well over twice what I did as a teacher, and then with the enormous free time that comes from having a job that actually stops at a predetermined time I ended up starting a side business as well, just for the hell of it. Nothing I do now is even remotely as difficult as what teachers do, and my life is downright easy compared to theirs. It kills me when people argue they shouldn't get paid more or shouldn't have their workloads reduced.
Teachers may need other teachers to succeed, but what they really, really need is compensation and time. You can only retain so many teachers with a cult of positivity and support when their lives are falling apart from stress and debt.
Thanks for sharing your story - getting to know about this from someone who's lived it is one of the reasons I value Tildes! My mother had a 40-year teaching career in a very different time and...
Thanks for sharing your story - getting to know about this from someone who's lived it is one of the reasons I value Tildes!
My mother had a 40-year teaching career in a very different time and place. By the time she retired in the early 1990's, she was very well paid as a department head, and even had generous pension benefits. But she was already seeing class sizes increase, buildings falling apart from disinvestment, and was spending more time wrangling committees and textbook approvals than developing useful curriculum and teaching standards. [She retired early after a year in which a student robbed her at knifepoint, one of her best students dropped out due to pregnancy, and her star pupil, with a Harvard acceptance in hand, attempted suicide. These aren't new challenges, they're just showing up in suburban schools and getting more news attention now.]
Ultimately, the school system she'd taught in was direly affected by a city bankruptcy that cut pensions for people who retired only a few years later.
I don't know what kind of hopeful blindness it takes to work in your smiley-faced school administration. It sounds like the training involved the same kind of reality-divorced attention to sounds-good theory involved in MBA training, as others have described.
This article is U.S.-centric, but describes the ongoing decline in the teaching profession here. Aside from the lack of a national funding model for education, the U.S. system is suffering from a...
This article is U.S.-centric, but describes the ongoing decline in the teaching profession here.
Aside from the lack of a national funding model for education, the U.S. system is suffering from a fad for charter schools, the product of continuing efforts on the part of religious/private entities to carve themselves a share of public service taxes. For all of the efforts at forcing students through standardized testing, there's little effort to learn from both effective teachers and effective models of education systems internationally.
We owe a debt of gratitude to the teachers who nevertheless persist in giving the best of themselves to the next generation.
I'm under the impression that a lot different teaching methods have been tried, at least on a small scale? I remember seeing press about various new teaching methods over the years.
I'm under the impression that a lot different teaching methods have been tried, at least on a small scale? I remember seeing press about various new teaching methods over the years.
I've wondered about the efficacy of various teaching/learning methods... and why there hasn't been more effort to apply techniques validated in cognitive science. (I'm not claiming any personal...
I've wondered about the efficacy of various teaching/learning methods... and why there hasn't been more effort to apply techniques validated in cognitive science. (I'm not claiming any personal expertise, just a swipe through the Coursera series, "Learning How to Learn".)
Talking with teacher friends, the biggest obstacle (in the U.S., at least), is that you're tasked with instructing 30+ students at a time, and any given method isn't necessarily suitable or engaging for all of them. They've talked about open schools (mixed grade classrooms with more proficient students helping to teach less adept ones), project-oriented learning, and all kinds of other variations.
There are systemic changes that seem more driven by fads (I can still remember my mother's diatribe about New Math) and political climate (charter schools) than any kind of empirical observation or genuine research. As the article notes, cuts to school funding are reducing classrooms to the least effective methods - students stuck in chairs watching teachers performing education.
Because education is a public good, and there are ideological entities which seek to subject nearly all goods to market forces, preferably for their own profit; alternately, they're seeking public...
Because education is a public good, and there are ideological entities which seek to subject nearly all goods to market forces, preferably for their own profit; alternately, they're seeking public subsidy of religious schooling. [There's actually some diversity of views about this among genuine libertarians.]
I briefly considered taking up high school education as my major in college and took a preliminary EDU100 class. The professor was a retired English teacher who taught for 20+ years and loved it,...
I briefly considered taking up high school education as my major in college and took a preliminary EDU100 class. The professor was a retired English teacher who taught for 20+ years and loved it, but the longer that class went on, the less I wanted to teach high school. The pipeline is long, the pay is terrible, kids are mean, and the field is being constantly politicized. Seems brutal to me, but big love to those who push through to try and make it better.
I taught high school for two years before I decided to cut my losses and drive a semi while retraining myself for a different field. I'm not going to say it's bad for everyone, but teaching was easily the worst decision of my life. The pay was right around $30,000, which in the area was enough to afford a 1-bedroom apartment and maybe a car payment, but it wasn't enough to ever hope to start a life. My free time was practically nonexistent between grading and documenting and planning.
The teaching itself was fun and the students were, with a couple exceptions, really great kids--it was just the sheer amount of thankless drudgery outside the classroom that was unsustainable for me. More often than not I'd get home at 4 and just continue working until I needed to sleep, then repeat until Friday, then bring a stack of ~120 essays home to grade over the weekend. And then there was the professional development.
I can't even begin to estimate how many hours of my life were wasted by unreasonably smiley people trotting out platitudes and idiotic strategies. During the summer we'd even be required to go to conferences on our own dime where we'd sit in rooms all day listening to the valium-fueled ravings of assorted superteachers and charlatans who all seemed to think that every problem in the profession could be fixed with strategy tweaks in the classroom. I remember sitting in one and listening to one of our admins straight-face say that within five years all of our classes were going to be advanced placement, and then looking around at all the smiling people nodding along with her. Positivity always overrides reality.
The fake smiles erode you after a while. You get to know the stories of the people you're working with. You know roughly how much they make, how far in debt they are, how many antidepressants they're on. There's an unwritten rule that you can't be unhappy or unsatisfied as a teacher, and if you are, then you're a bad teacher and need to be replaced. You must be constantly happy and open and agreeable and hopeful, or else. You must never burn out. You are living the dream with the most fulfilling and amazing job in the world and you are so blessed and part of such a great family... And if you don't feel that way, get out.
I knew I couldn't handle the work environment and the resulting life it was barely able to fund. The day after my second year ended I was in a classroom learning to drive trucks. I don't even remember where I sent my resignation from. Changing jobs was an immediate $15,000 raise, and even the life of a long haul trucker provided significantly more free time and peace. Once I was in my own truck I started teaching myself how to code (tip for teachers, you can turn that stuff back on yourself if you need to) and after a year on the road got myself a desk job in tech support, which I then traded for a full time developer position six months later.
I still work as a developer and make well over twice what I did as a teacher, and then with the enormous free time that comes from having a job that actually stops at a predetermined time I ended up starting a side business as well, just for the hell of it. Nothing I do now is even remotely as difficult as what teachers do, and my life is downright easy compared to theirs. It kills me when people argue they shouldn't get paid more or shouldn't have their workloads reduced.
Teachers may need other teachers to succeed, but what they really, really need is compensation and time. You can only retain so many teachers with a cult of positivity and support when their lives are falling apart from stress and debt.
Thanks for sharing your story - getting to know about this from someone who's lived it is one of the reasons I value Tildes!
My mother had a 40-year teaching career in a very different time and place. By the time she retired in the early 1990's, she was very well paid as a department head, and even had generous pension benefits. But she was already seeing class sizes increase, buildings falling apart from disinvestment, and was spending more time wrangling committees and textbook approvals than developing useful curriculum and teaching standards. [She retired early after a year in which a student robbed her at knifepoint, one of her best students dropped out due to pregnancy, and her star pupil, with a Harvard acceptance in hand, attempted suicide. These aren't new challenges, they're just showing up in suburban schools and getting more news attention now.]
Ultimately, the school system she'd taught in was direly affected by a city bankruptcy that cut pensions for people who retired only a few years later.
I don't know what kind of hopeful blindness it takes to work in your smiley-faced school administration. It sounds like the training involved the same kind of reality-divorced attention to sounds-good theory involved in MBA training, as others have described.
This article is U.S.-centric, but describes the ongoing decline in the teaching profession here.
Aside from the lack of a national funding model for education, the U.S. system is suffering from a fad for charter schools, the product of continuing efforts on the part of religious/private entities to carve themselves a share of public service taxes. For all of the efforts at forcing students through standardized testing, there's little effort to learn from both effective teachers and effective models of education systems internationally.
We owe a debt of gratitude to the teachers who nevertheless persist in giving the best of themselves to the next generation.
I'm under the impression that a lot different teaching methods have been tried, at least on a small scale? I remember seeing press about various new teaching methods over the years.
I've wondered about the efficacy of various teaching/learning methods... and why there hasn't been more effort to apply techniques validated in cognitive science. (I'm not claiming any personal expertise, just a swipe through the Coursera series, "Learning How to Learn".)
Talking with teacher friends, the biggest obstacle (in the U.S., at least), is that you're tasked with instructing 30+ students at a time, and any given method isn't necessarily suitable or engaging for all of them. They've talked about open schools (mixed grade classrooms with more proficient students helping to teach less adept ones), project-oriented learning, and all kinds of other variations.
There are systemic changes that seem more driven by fads (I can still remember my mother's diatribe about New Math) and political climate (charter schools) than any kind of empirical observation or genuine research. As the article notes, cuts to school funding are reducing classrooms to the least effective methods - students stuck in chairs watching teachers performing education.
It is infuriating that teachers in the US aren’t even earning a living wage in some cases.
Why isn’t America investing enough in education?
Because education is a public good, and there are ideological entities which seek to subject nearly all goods to market forces, preferably for their own profit; alternately, they're seeking public subsidy of religious schooling. [There's actually some diversity of views about this among genuine libertarians.]
I briefly considered taking up high school education as my major in college and took a preliminary EDU100 class. The professor was a retired English teacher who taught for 20+ years and loved it, but the longer that class went on, the less I wanted to teach high school. The pipeline is long, the pay is terrible, kids are mean, and the field is being constantly politicized. Seems brutal to me, but big love to those who push through to try and make it better.