With what I just said regarding teachers, I also wanted to mention something else after seeing D26's post. The funding in some areas is getting really, really bad. My county recently voted to cut expenditures for public school drastically and these schools now have ZERO school activities available outside of football. That is just sad. People are just too dumb to vote on certain things. If the public is going to fuck up that much and everyone who doesn't have a kid in school is just going to be a cheap asshole then fuck the public. I don't want them deciding these things. Sorry that's political, but just had to rant.
Teaching is a stressful job where thanks to the de-ballification of society, teachers have to walk around on eggshells with kids. If the kids fail, it's the teachers' faults. Never the parents. Who it usually is. I don't think that teachers should rake in six figures, but around here cops do. Most of them, actually. Even the humps who sit in their cars all night and do nothing. My city has half a million people and five murders this year. How fucking hard is their job? And they are still pissing and moaning for more money while teachers have been stripped of their rights to strike. That topic is a flame war, but I don't understand this venom towards educators lately and why. Teachers didn't get into their jobs to get rich. There's actual niceness to what they do, hell in your country some of them are so faithful they even sleep with the same student.
My new-ish favorite artist is Ben Howard. Love him. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWlKZ6C7cDY/youtube] <a class="postlink" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWlKZ6C7cDY" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWlKZ6C7cDY</a> <a class="postlink" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPU8V-nvUEk" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPU8V-nvUEk</a> Eeeek! Why can't I embed YouTube clips?
Most of the teachers I know do work year round. And it's not a 40 hour a week job during the school year either. Grading, planning, going to basketball games, etc. It's pretty much nonstop. Teaching is easier after the first few years (as is any job), but that doesn't make it easy by any stretch of the imagination. Also, I think most teachers get out of it in the first 5 years anyway. Teachers also make the biggest impact out of all the factors a school can control. And it's not totally on us to make kids give a shit, but if we don't, who will? If you haven't stood up in front of a classroom for 6 hours a day trying to get kids to do something that they would all rather not do at all, then I suggest laying off the criticism a little bit. Criticisms can be made, and are welcome if they are constructive. But it's not a fucking cakewalk. Shit is surprisingly tough. The last 12 weeks of my life haven't been champagne and bon bons.
Well, I agree to a point. I think something like $40k a year is reasonable. Yeah, it's not a lot of money, but again they have a ton of vacation time and can work over the summer if need be. Regarding parents not being blamed, I think society these days is just totally out of touch when it comes to responsibility for failures. I can't count how many times I've seen something bad happen in the news and everyone is pissed off at people who had next to nothing to do with the problem. Cops making six figures is a joke. Especially considering some of them are pussies. Nothing aggravated me more than when they stood behind their car WEARING BODY ARMOR while kids were getting slaughtered at Virginia Tech. I don't remember the exact number, but the shooting went on for something like 50 minutes because they were too afraid to go in. Apparently the cops weren't to blame for that though. The kid should have been thrown in prison before he committed a crime... or something... Edit: Ok fair enough Gravy. All I've done is tutor, which isn't really comparable. Why do they work during the summer and over other breaks though? The teachers at my school definitely didn't, and those that had extra responsibilities got more money too. I don't know how much private schools differ from public schools in those areas.
See, that is the biggest issue I've seen in teaching. It is never, ever the parents or the students, it is always the teacher, and now it is being taught that way. When I was student teaching, I received the following "advice" from my professor who was supervising me (Note that I student taught at an 'urban' school, where the vast majority of the students were on free/reduced lunch): 1) Don't give homework, they won't do it and then their grades will suffer, which will make you look bad 2) Don't expect them to be able to write reports more than 2 pages long 3) Don't expect them to have any knowledge of how to research anything outside of using wikipedia 4) Don't give them assignments that involve using the internet, computers, or technology, because you can't assume they have access to any of those. 5) Give them assignments that use the internet! Technology is great! Yes, I received BOTH of those last two pieces of advice. Fuck. I should also note I was teaching 12th grade economics and government classes. Some of the reports I got were literally copied and pasted from Wikipedia, and when I called them on it they either stared at me blankly or said they "didn't know that they couldn't do that." What. The. Fuck. Also, to the vacation time and things, let me say this: My brother is a teacher, and he is also required (not suggested, required) to coach and/or sponsor a team or club. He coaches football and wrestling, mostly because those offer a slight pay bump (very slight, we're talking maybe an extra $500 a year for each). All summer there are football practices and coach meetings. When the school year starts, he leaves home at 6 AM and gets home around 9 PM daily, then has Saturday morning and Sunday meetings. When football ends and wrestling starts, it becomes better: 6 AM til 6 PM. Once THAT is done, it is 6 Am until 4 PM daily. None of that takes into account grading on the weekends or lesson planning. Bottom line? Teaching is NOT a 40 hour a week job during the school year, it is 50 a week at least, potentially more. Edit to address question: Why do they work more over the summer? One example (again, my brother) was that they had to create a new curriculum. This involved sifting through textbooks, creating lesson plans, goals, objectives, and just basically a TON of preparation. He spent most of his summer working on it. Good teachers are constantly revising their lesson plans, updating them, or straight up changing them completely. They spend part of their summers revising and preparing for the next school year. It isn't crazy, but again, they're also working 10 hour work days during the school year.
Ok, well, that's way more time consuming than I thought. I stand corrected. That advice you got makes me cringe. We did some peer review in college occasionally of each other's papers for various classes, and there are some people out there borderline illiterate while in college. I fucking hate this new idea of basing teacher's salaries on their 'performance'. How is that supposed to be a good idea? Translation: Make classes easier, and reduce standards because you get more money if the kids get better grades. Fuck what those grades actually mean because if kids aren't getting As it's your fault for failing them.
Give me a minute, my daughter threw up on the bedroom floor. Oh, look! It was popcorn and milk! Be still, my beating taste buds.
If you were a good mommy, you would have shoved her head over a trashcan while she puked. Like I did with my dog earlier. PRO STYLE
To make more money. In most states teachers don't make all that much 33-40k on average I bet. Even if you have a PhD plus 60 hours you can't crack 50k where I am. Teachers aren't starving by any means, but you factor in student loans and the cost of living in some areas (for example VA pays slightly less than KS does for most first year teachers, but the cost of living is drastically higher there) and they aren't living very high on the hog. And extra responsibility generally comes with various stipends. However, if you break the stipends down by hour they don't turn out very much. I coached junior high quizbowl. I made a grand total of $600 and had to work something like 70 hours for that. Maybe a little more. And you don't know hell, until you are 5 hours into a trip with junior high kids. And private schools? Shee-it. There isn't a private school within 250+ miles of where I am I bet. That's a world I know positively jack shit about.
So, I had to buy a new vibrator because my previous one wore out. (After four years, okay? Don't judge.) I had an Amazon gift card so I decided to buy one online. But, the problem was that my mind has this block for comprehending numbers, especially measurements. They mean nothing to me and I need some kind of reference to understand them. So I was getting frustrated because the way vibrators are photographed online gives me no reference points - just vibrator on a white back ground - and even with the measurements they gave I had no idea whether I was signing up for a normal one or something like this. (Link NSFW, obviously, but at least THEY have a good reference photo.) So, I figured a good way around this was to text some dudes about their dicks. There were only two that I felt it would be okay to do so with. One I already knew the length from an earlier incident that showcases my great sense of numerical understanding, where I thought he was 9 inches and he had to tell me he was 6. So, at 3am on a Tuesday I sent him the text "Hey, how girthy are you? NO REASON." The other one I hadn't slept with in a long time and we only randomly keep in touch so it felt a bit more awkward and I sent a "Hey, could you maybe do me a favor and send me the measurements of your penis? Length and width, kthnx." Prepare yourself for some bullshit because NEITHER OF THEM KNEW THE ANSWERS TO THESE QUESTIONS. I tried to get them to admit that they were lying, because I assume every guy measures their dick on a weekly basis and knows those measurements down to the millimeter. But it was a no-go and I was left to fend for myself and to just kinda wing it. Well, it came in the mail today, and it is not the King Dong Dildo but still about three times the size I was expecting or wanting. I'm a little scared of it.
It's rural Kansas. Public can be both of those things. There just isn't enough of a population that has the kind of extra income required to support a school like that around here.
One, can you back up any claim that the cops at Vtech were making six figures that draws so much of your ire? Two, the police arrived a couple of minutes after they were contacted and the guy shot himself after they entered the building a few minutes later, the whole attack was 10 minutes. You are an idiot. Maybe it was my experiences with teachers that left me little pity but I don't think they deserve excessive pay. We had a handful of amazing teachers, a handful of completely useless teachers, and the rest were there doing a passable job. With police it's more of a love hate thing. Yeah they should focus on more important things than some of the petty shit they do. On the other hand they have to deal with the worst our society produces all day every day. My buddy is a police officer in a fairly decent area of town but he doesn't deal with the nice law abiding citizens rich folk, he deals with the criminals, liars, dregs, and low lives. It'd be hard not to become jaded dealing with that day in and day out. I always wondered why the whole class warfare argument wasn't turned on the public sector. I mean police and teachers are on the lowest pay grade there is. How about taking the upper pay grade folks, say judges, mayors, you know the management that would be demonized at the 1% in the private sector, and lop off parts of their pay to fund the budget gaps? Sorry if it causes a brain drain, should have done a better job in the first place.
Jesus Christ. Excuse me for failing to remember the details of something that happened five years ago Mr. internet tough guy. Ok, so it wasn't nearly as bad I remembered I specifically remembered the delay being criticized. Five minutes is a damn long time while kids are getting shot. Also, I never said those cops were making six figures did I? I said cops making six figures is ridiculous. No, it's not nearly as bad as I remembered, but a lot of experts on the subject felt the response should have and could have been faster.