I'm currently in school to become an educator in early childhood. I'm on mobile so I'll be brief. The reason we're not seeing more teachers - and more quality teachers (because let me tell you,...
Exemplary
I'm currently in school to become an educator in early childhood. I'm on mobile so I'll be brief. The reason we're not seeing more teachers - and more quality teachers (because let me tell you, many of my peers should NOT be becoming teachers) is threefold:
It's obvious, but the pay is abysmal. Add to that the fact that the schools with the most vacancies are in poor, marginalized, and oftentimes dangerous areas, and it isn't hard to understand why many wouldn't want to become a teacher.
The sheer quantity of hoops and hurdles to getting your license and degree are not commensurate with the pay offered. I'm extremely fortunate to be in a work-based competency program since I've already been teaching prek in a private school for a decade. I don't have to do student teaching; for those that do, it is an exceptional burden. You're expected to work, for free, for a year, while also paying for school, room, and board. How is this tenable? We need an apprenticeship system, better scholarships, or grants for teacher applicants. There are some options already but realistically they don't pan out.
Public perception of teachers and educators has changed. Where we used to work in tandem with parents, or at least had a societal understanding that teachers were a supplement to parenting, increasingly it seems more parents are placing more demands on teachers. This comes with administrators also placing more and more demands on teachers in the form of extra assessments and legal requirements, extra meetings, extra supply investments, extra... Everything. Even at my relatively lowkey school, we've been forced by corporate to change our curriculum and assessment tools to one that is, frankly, complete garbage. Our director of education hates it as much as we do and gives us leeway to do our own plans (those who've proven their effectiveness, anyways) but I cringe at the thought of any new teacher honestly attempting to follow the plans, curriculum, and assessment tools provided. Yet when things go wrong because of failings like this, it isn't the curriculum or assessment tools or administrators or board members who get criticized... It's the teacher.
Teachers are being let down by society. We need a better, modernized teaching program. We need more stringent requirements for becoming a teacher. We need better incentives to become a teacher.
I'm still working on my degree because it's the only chance I have of earning a degree at this point, and because I genuinely love teaching, but I would never encourage a child to become a teacher.
Edit: if someone wants some credentials, I've worked in private education as a prek teacher for 15 years and have worked alongside and interacted with teachers and school staff that whole time.
I was in the school for ECE a few years ago and my god the quality of candidates was alarming. Even my practicum class, which was something people took near the end of their education, was full of...
(because let me tell you, many of my peers should NOT be becoming teachers)
I was in the school for ECE a few years ago and my god the quality of candidates was alarming. Even my practicum class, which was something people took near the end of their education, was full of people who had no business being in the classroom.
I think the perfect example of the kind of stuff I saw from my classmates (and frankly some of my colleagues now) is captured in this video which I encourage everyone to watch. I came across it while shopping for a book I could read for an assignment. My understanding is that this person is a teacher and this was uploaded and sent to parents during covid lockdowns. For a while, a part of me thought it was performance art, that even though I had classmates who were just as clueless about some of the most simple things, there was no way they would last at a school. But then I started working with people who are just like the person in the video. One of my classroom aides, a person who spends as much time with the students as I do, is basically illiterate. When she reads during read aloud, she is constantly corrected by my students who can read.
I know early childhood teaching qualifications are different than K-12 and that K-12 permits should, theoretically, weed out some of the candidates like my classmates, my colleague, and the person in the video, but early childhood is one of the most important stretches of a person's development. We need quality teachers as well. Unfortunately, when you pay fast food wages, you get fast food quality.
That video... It will live rent free in my mind for some time. At first I thought you were being a bit mean, she was reading for young children/toddlers. And then it was, no no no no no. Just no....
That video... It will live rent free in my mind for some time. At first I thought you were being a bit mean, she was reading for young children/toddlers. And then it was, no no no no no. Just no. Thank you for sharing.
I mean I would hope that a social studies teacher would know enough geography to figure out the locations shown in the book, but even if she didn't know something in the book, why wouldn't she...
I mean I would hope that a social studies teacher would know enough geography to figure out the locations shown in the book, but even if she didn't know something in the book, why wouldn't she look it up? It would take about 20 minutes to look up the locations, find out what language they speak, figure out how a phrase is pronounced, and learn what the "mountains" in Cairo are.
This is just lazy work. I don't know how she could send this to parents and her school without feeling ashamed of herself.
Oh, absolutely. At some point she noticed she had no idea what she was talking about and started looking at the pages herself before speaking. Just embarrassing.
Oh, absolutely. At some point she noticed she had no idea what she was talking about and started looking at the pages herself before speaking. Just embarrassing.
This point is so huge and oddly self perpetuating throughout the teaching industry in my experience. Many of the people with long careers in teaching seem to place an unneeded weight on degrees...
The sheer quantity of hoops and hurdles to getting your license and degree are not commensurate with the pay offered.
This point is so huge and oddly self perpetuating throughout the teaching industry in my experience. Many of the people with long careers in teaching seem to place an unneeded weight on degrees and classes.
I know several full time teachers who have gone through major amounts of time and money to get Master's degree's for pitiful pay increases, but will argue it should probably be something others should do and the pay should go up. From my POV, I don't think they're better teachers for it. They were already great teachers, and the entire program was one of just complete time wasting nonsense on abstracts and edge cases that rarely affect the average classroom.
It doesn't help that like business teaching is an industry that LOVES to sell "Studies". Someone somewhere did something once that worked for their environment and they saw success because of it, so we better adopt that EVERYWHERE with no real thought to if this makes any sense for the environment it's going into. And like business, one of the biggest reasons you see so much of this is because the huge industry of middlemen who provide these "solutions" that cost millions and blow up in 2 years (but not after FORCING the schools to get rid of their books.....).
And that's not even getting into micromanaged lesson plans which waste tons of teacher time to do what they already know how to do.
I sincerely believe that while we might not get the best teachers, if you massively lowered the barrier to entry, and to better pay for years of good work, we'd have much less of an issue. You'd probably see good results across the board.
Instead though it feels like we're so afraid there might be 1 bad teacher, we've forced out 10 great ones. And we've got a bunch of parasites making products we don't need.
All of this is why I decided not to pursue a master's in ed and a teaching credential. I wanted to be a high school biology teacher, and have a bio degree with a minor in education for this exact...
All of this is why I decided not to pursue a master's in ed and a teaching credential. I wanted to be a high school biology teacher, and have a bio degree with a minor in education for this exact reason. I substituted for a year in a local school district and decided teaching wasn't for me, after being a dance teacher and a preschool teacher for 4 years while in college.
Thank you for working in early ed, it's definitely a field that is the most underappreciated and underpaid, but so so valuable.
I have a BA in English that just rounds out my resume. I have always wanted to go into teaching once I had enough real world experience to actually be able to offer something to students. Now that...
I don't have to do student teaching; for those that do, it is an exceptional burden. You're expected to work, for free, for a year, while also paying for school, room, and board. How is this tenable? We need an apprenticeship system, better scholarships, or grants for teacher applicants. There are some options already but realistically they don't pan out.
I have a BA in English that just rounds out my resume. I have always wanted to go into teaching once I had enough real world experience to actually be able to offer something to students. Now that I have that experience, every time I have dissatisfaction at my job I daydream about going back to school and getting a teaching certification. But I couldn't give up my salary, pay for school for at least two years, and then start at a salary that is $20K below what I am earning now. All of this, and I might find out that I actually hate the career in the end.
I agree with you, paid internship or training programs would be absolutely incredible. That said, I think at least some of the onus would be on the union to provide this structure. At least that is how it is with the electrician's union.
An aside from your comment, the huge variance in pay nationwide for teachers always strikes me when these conversations come up. I live in an area that I would think that I would feel adequately paid if I were a teacher. I have 10 years of experience in my field and I would be making ~$10k/year more as a teacher at the same level, with better time off. I think that is fine, because the job is much different from mine. But I am aware that in many states teachers may be paid very close to poverty levels.
This is why I stopped pursuing being a teacher. I wanted to teach high school government / social studies. After just a couple years of college in a teaching program, the amount of shit I would...
The sheer quantity of hoops and hurdles to getting your license and degree are not commensurate with the pay offered.
This is why I stopped pursuing being a teacher.
I wanted to teach high school government / social studies. After just a couple years of college in a teaching program, the amount of shit I would have to do for the pay I would get, and how much work I was already doing, I realized wasn't worth it. I dropped.
I went to a trade school, spent 10 months there, three years later I'm in my own vehicle and make 85K a year. I'd have been lucky to make half of that as a teacher.
I still like the idea of teaching. I'm already the go-to guy to train newbies because I'm great at giving instruction and explaining things to people who have zero knowledge of what I do. Maybe one day I'll be an HVAC instructor at a trade school, that's kinda the route I think I'm gonna go when I get older.
At least from my classmates in college, it's especially bad for early elementary grades. No wonder we have a maths crisis. Utter airheads who happened to be good with kids. I helped a few of them...
many of my peers should NOT be becoming teachers
At least from my classmates in college, it's especially bad for early elementary grades. No wonder we have a maths crisis. Utter airheads who happened to be good with kids. I helped a few of them (plus some nurses, too) with STEM gen eds—wasn't about to do the academically honest thing and let friends flunk out after accumulating 2 years of student loans.
To add to the comments already: Yes, pay in the US is abysmal. In Canada, you can start with a minimum 4 yr degree and base pay is 61k or if you have 6 yrs education it starts at 69k. Pay bumps up...
To add to the comments already:
Yes, pay in the US is abysmal. In Canada, you can start with a minimum 4 yr degree and base pay is 61k or if you have 6 yrs education it starts at 69k. Pay bumps up every year and at 10 yrs you make 97k to 105k for 6 yrs education. Principals can make up to 45k more. I don't know why anyone would go through that much university for only 40k a year in the US.
There has been a trend for years to 'mainstream' all Special Needs students into a regular classroom. When this was one or two students, it wasn't a big problem, but there are now MANY Special Needs in each class and each of them has an individual curriculum plan. So instead of a lesson plan for 30 kids, a teacher has to make 10 lesson plans per class which is an incredible additional load. It's unsustainable.
Parents are losing the ability or will to discipline. It used to be when little Johnny was disciplined in school, mom and dad would usually back the teacher and little Johnny would understand that the parents and teacher were working together and expected him to toe the line. These days its quite common for the parents to not only back little Johnny but to fight and argue with the teacher or threaten their job for daring to discipline their child. The added stress is huge.
Teachers have lost so much respect and credibility. It used to be that a good teacher could expect that their reputation would give them some protection. Now, all it takes is one accusation, even if it is proven false, for their reputation and career to be ruined. With social media and every kid having a phone, rumors and accusations fly around the school before a teacher even has time to go over the situation with administration. Even if a teacher is cleared, its so demoralizing for even the most enthusiastic teacher.
These are largely societal issues, and there are no easy fixes. Honestly, as a former principal who now has a teacher in the family, I'm not encouraging them to stay in the public school system. I think its only going to get worse and as much as we need good teachers in the system, for their own mental health and respect I hope they either move to an independent or charter school or change professions to something far less stressful. Sad. But sane.
As a teacher that generally enjoys my job, I would only ever recommend a young person get into the career with a lot of caveats. I enjoy working with kids, I like my content area, and my admin has...
As a teacher that generally enjoys my job, I would only ever recommend a young person get into the career with a lot of caveats. I enjoy working with kids, I like my content area, and my admin has been alright. Even with that very rare combination, the job itself sucks: the amount of paperwork, the lack of respect, the poor pay, and the understanding that the people running my state are working to actively make my job worse makes this a very difficult field to recommend.
With modern schooling it seems to have gone from building a curriculum and grading papers to micromanaging every tiny aspect, up to constant communication with grades and parents via apps. My exgf...
With modern schooling it seems to have gone from building a curriculum and grading papers to micromanaging every tiny aspect, up to constant communication with grades and parents via apps.
My exgf is a private school teacher in a smaller southern city. The sheer level of entitlement coming from only rich in a small town parents is staggering. Half her evenings are spent being berated by parents via email and Google classroom because their precious child (who screws around in class all day but can't get in trouble for it) got a D on a quiz yet even with middling grades has to be added to the accelerated college prep courses because they have to go to UGA... according to the mother who didn't attend. And her history teacher friend got chastised more than once because parents complained about her liberal curriculum regarding how she framed WW2...I wish I were joking.
I'm in a pretty well off area and the biggest problem kids I have are entitled brats. Another teacher in my school had a kid push her arm out of the way(she was blocking the doorway because the...
I'm in a pretty well off area and the biggest problem kids I have are entitled brats.
Another teacher in my school had a kid push her arm out of the way(she was blocking the doorway because the bell hadn't rung yet) and she gave him afterschool detention for it. His mom called the Board of Ed and got the detention rescinded.
Somewhat related and maybe a hot take but why should schooling be behind a paywall at all? Why don’t we just have learning centres where people of all ages are welcome and encouraged to learn?...
Somewhat related and maybe a hot take but why should schooling be behind a paywall at all? Why don’t we just have learning centres where people of all ages are welcome and encouraged to learn?
Have been thinking about this a lot as we have a housing crisis in Canada. I feel that if the schooling were more accessible, we would have more trades people to help the cause.
That is largely what unionized tradespeople get. Part of union dues goes towards funding the schooling of new apprentices. It's the non-unionized tradespeople who have to pay money for trade...
That is largely what unionized tradespeople get. Part of union dues goes towards funding the schooling of new apprentices. It's the non-unionized tradespeople who have to pay money for trade school.
I don't know about Canada, but in the US there are many programs to help adults learn new job skills at no or low cost. They are not publicized heavily and depend on the resources in your area, but local career centers and workforce development agencies will help adults learn and develop their skills.
I'm currently in school to become an educator in early childhood. I'm on mobile so I'll be brief. The reason we're not seeing more teachers - and more quality teachers (because let me tell you, many of my peers should NOT be becoming teachers) is threefold:
It's obvious, but the pay is abysmal. Add to that the fact that the schools with the most vacancies are in poor, marginalized, and oftentimes dangerous areas, and it isn't hard to understand why many wouldn't want to become a teacher.
The sheer quantity of hoops and hurdles to getting your license and degree are not commensurate with the pay offered. I'm extremely fortunate to be in a work-based competency program since I've already been teaching prek in a private school for a decade. I don't have to do student teaching; for those that do, it is an exceptional burden. You're expected to work, for free, for a year, while also paying for school, room, and board. How is this tenable? We need an apprenticeship system, better scholarships, or grants for teacher applicants. There are some options already but realistically they don't pan out.
Public perception of teachers and educators has changed. Where we used to work in tandem with parents, or at least had a societal understanding that teachers were a supplement to parenting, increasingly it seems more parents are placing more demands on teachers. This comes with administrators also placing more and more demands on teachers in the form of extra assessments and legal requirements, extra meetings, extra supply investments, extra... Everything. Even at my relatively lowkey school, we've been forced by corporate to change our curriculum and assessment tools to one that is, frankly, complete garbage. Our director of education hates it as much as we do and gives us leeway to do our own plans (those who've proven their effectiveness, anyways) but I cringe at the thought of any new teacher honestly attempting to follow the plans, curriculum, and assessment tools provided. Yet when things go wrong because of failings like this, it isn't the curriculum or assessment tools or administrators or board members who get criticized... It's the teacher.
Teachers are being let down by society. We need a better, modernized teaching program. We need more stringent requirements for becoming a teacher. We need better incentives to become a teacher.
I'm still working on my degree because it's the only chance I have of earning a degree at this point, and because I genuinely love teaching, but I would never encourage a child to become a teacher.
Edit: if someone wants some credentials, I've worked in private education as a prek teacher for 15 years and have worked alongside and interacted with teachers and school staff that whole time.
I was in the school for ECE a few years ago and my god the quality of candidates was alarming. Even my practicum class, which was something people took near the end of their education, was full of people who had no business being in the classroom.
I think the perfect example of the kind of stuff I saw from my classmates (and frankly some of my colleagues now) is captured in this video which I encourage everyone to watch. I came across it while shopping for a book I could read for an assignment. My understanding is that this person is a teacher and this was uploaded and sent to parents during covid lockdowns. For a while, a part of me thought it was performance art, that even though I had classmates who were just as clueless about some of the most simple things, there was no way they would last at a school. But then I started working with people who are just like the person in the video. One of my classroom aides, a person who spends as much time with the students as I do, is basically illiterate. When she reads during read aloud, she is constantly corrected by my students who can read.
I know early childhood teaching qualifications are different than K-12 and that K-12 permits should, theoretically, weed out some of the candidates like my classmates, my colleague, and the person in the video, but early childhood is one of the most important stretches of a person's development. We need quality teachers as well. Unfortunately, when you pay fast food wages, you get fast food quality.
That video... It will live rent free in my mind for some time. At first I thought you were being a bit mean, she was reading for young children/toddlers. And then it was, no no no no no. Just no. Thank you for sharing.
I hope to ski the great mountains of Giza some day.
Yeah, that was my favorite too. Other than the obvious mistakes, her emphasis on how different people are in Egypt and China is worrying.
I mean I would hope that a social studies teacher would know enough geography to figure out the locations shown in the book, but even if she didn't know something in the book, why wouldn't she look it up? It would take about 20 minutes to look up the locations, find out what language they speak, figure out how a phrase is pronounced, and learn what the "mountains" in Cairo are.
This is just lazy work. I don't know how she could send this to parents and her school without feeling ashamed of herself.
Oh, absolutely. At some point she noticed she had no idea what she was talking about and started looking at the pages herself before speaking. Just embarrassing.
This point is so huge and oddly self perpetuating throughout the teaching industry in my experience. Many of the people with long careers in teaching seem to place an unneeded weight on degrees and classes.
I know several full time teachers who have gone through major amounts of time and money to get Master's degree's for pitiful pay increases, but will argue it should probably be something others should do and the pay should go up. From my POV, I don't think they're better teachers for it. They were already great teachers, and the entire program was one of just complete time wasting nonsense on abstracts and edge cases that rarely affect the average classroom.
It doesn't help that like business teaching is an industry that LOVES to sell "Studies". Someone somewhere did something once that worked for their environment and they saw success because of it, so we better adopt that EVERYWHERE with no real thought to if this makes any sense for the environment it's going into. And like business, one of the biggest reasons you see so much of this is because the huge industry of middlemen who provide these "solutions" that cost millions and blow up in 2 years (but not after FORCING the schools to get rid of their books.....).
And that's not even getting into micromanaged lesson plans which waste tons of teacher time to do what they already know how to do.
I sincerely believe that while we might not get the best teachers, if you massively lowered the barrier to entry, and to better pay for years of good work, we'd have much less of an issue. You'd probably see good results across the board.
Instead though it feels like we're so afraid there might be 1 bad teacher, we've forced out 10 great ones. And we've got a bunch of parasites making products we don't need.
All of this is why I decided not to pursue a master's in ed and a teaching credential. I wanted to be a high school biology teacher, and have a bio degree with a minor in education for this exact reason. I substituted for a year in a local school district and decided teaching wasn't for me, after being a dance teacher and a preschool teacher for 4 years while in college.
Thank you for working in early ed, it's definitely a field that is the most underappreciated and underpaid, but so so valuable.
I have a BA in English that just rounds out my resume. I have always wanted to go into teaching once I had enough real world experience to actually be able to offer something to students. Now that I have that experience, every time I have dissatisfaction at my job I daydream about going back to school and getting a teaching certification. But I couldn't give up my salary, pay for school for at least two years, and then start at a salary that is $20K below what I am earning now. All of this, and I might find out that I actually hate the career in the end.
I agree with you, paid internship or training programs would be absolutely incredible. That said, I think at least some of the onus would be on the union to provide this structure. At least that is how it is with the electrician's union.
An aside from your comment, the huge variance in pay nationwide for teachers always strikes me when these conversations come up. I live in an area that I would think that I would feel adequately paid if I were a teacher. I have 10 years of experience in my field and I would be making ~$10k/year more as a teacher at the same level, with better time off. I think that is fine, because the job is much different from mine. But I am aware that in many states teachers may be paid very close to poverty levels.
This is why I stopped pursuing being a teacher.
I wanted to teach high school government / social studies. After just a couple years of college in a teaching program, the amount of shit I would have to do for the pay I would get, and how much work I was already doing, I realized wasn't worth it. I dropped.
I went to a trade school, spent 10 months there, three years later I'm in my own vehicle and make 85K a year. I'd have been lucky to make half of that as a teacher.
I still like the idea of teaching. I'm already the go-to guy to train newbies because I'm great at giving instruction and explaining things to people who have zero knowledge of what I do. Maybe one day I'll be an HVAC instructor at a trade school, that's kinda the route I think I'm gonna go when I get older.
At least from my classmates in college, it's especially bad for early elementary grades. No wonder we have a maths crisis. Utter airheads who happened to be good with kids. I helped a few of them (plus some nurses, too) with STEM gen eds—wasn't about to do the academically honest thing and let friends flunk out after accumulating 2 years of student loans.
To add to the comments already:
Yes, pay in the US is abysmal. In Canada, you can start with a minimum 4 yr degree and base pay is 61k or if you have 6 yrs education it starts at 69k. Pay bumps up every year and at 10 yrs you make 97k to 105k for 6 yrs education. Principals can make up to 45k more. I don't know why anyone would go through that much university for only 40k a year in the US.
There has been a trend for years to 'mainstream' all Special Needs students into a regular classroom. When this was one or two students, it wasn't a big problem, but there are now MANY Special Needs in each class and each of them has an individual curriculum plan. So instead of a lesson plan for 30 kids, a teacher has to make 10 lesson plans per class which is an incredible additional load. It's unsustainable.
Parents are losing the ability or will to discipline. It used to be when little Johnny was disciplined in school, mom and dad would usually back the teacher and little Johnny would understand that the parents and teacher were working together and expected him to toe the line. These days its quite common for the parents to not only back little Johnny but to fight and argue with the teacher or threaten their job for daring to discipline their child. The added stress is huge.
Teachers have lost so much respect and credibility. It used to be that a good teacher could expect that their reputation would give them some protection. Now, all it takes is one accusation, even if it is proven false, for their reputation and career to be ruined. With social media and every kid having a phone, rumors and accusations fly around the school before a teacher even has time to go over the situation with administration. Even if a teacher is cleared, its so demoralizing for even the most enthusiastic teacher.
These are largely societal issues, and there are no easy fixes. Honestly, as a former principal who now has a teacher in the family, I'm not encouraging them to stay in the public school system. I think its only going to get worse and as much as we need good teachers in the system, for their own mental health and respect I hope they either move to an independent or charter school or change professions to something far less stressful. Sad. But sane.
As a teacher that generally enjoys my job, I would only ever recommend a young person get into the career with a lot of caveats. I enjoy working with kids, I like my content area, and my admin has been alright. Even with that very rare combination, the job itself sucks: the amount of paperwork, the lack of respect, the poor pay, and the understanding that the people running my state are working to actively make my job worse makes this a very difficult field to recommend.
With modern schooling it seems to have gone from building a curriculum and grading papers to micromanaging every tiny aspect, up to constant communication with grades and parents via apps.
My exgf is a private school teacher in a smaller southern city. The sheer level of entitlement coming from only rich in a small town parents is staggering. Half her evenings are spent being berated by parents via email and Google classroom because their precious child (who screws around in class all day but can't get in trouble for it) got a D on a quiz yet even with middling grades has to be added to the accelerated college prep courses because they have to go to UGA... according to the mother who didn't attend. And her history teacher friend got chastised more than once because parents complained about her liberal curriculum regarding how she framed WW2...I wish I were joking.
I was a sub in a public school system in a rich area and had the same experience.
I'm in a pretty well off area and the biggest problem kids I have are entitled brats.
Another teacher in my school had a kid push her arm out of the way(she was blocking the doorway because the bell hadn't rung yet) and she gave him afterschool detention for it. His mom called the Board of Ed and got the detention rescinded.
Somewhat related and maybe a hot take but why should schooling be behind a paywall at all? Why don’t we just have learning centres where people of all ages are welcome and encouraged to learn?
Have been thinking about this a lot as we have a housing crisis in Canada. I feel that if the schooling were more accessible, we would have more trades people to help the cause.
That is largely what unionized tradespeople get. Part of union dues goes towards funding the schooling of new apprentices. It's the non-unionized tradespeople who have to pay money for trade school.
I don't know about Canada, but in the US there are many programs to help adults learn new job skills at no or low cost. They are not publicized heavily and depend on the resources in your area, but local career centers and workforce development agencies will help adults learn and develop their skills.
I don't blame them and it's not just the pay. Teachers are increasingly treated poorly and people are less willing to live with that these days.