Who fell for the history teacher meme? I'm 5 years in and getting pretty disillusioned...

Who fell for the history teacher meme? I'm 5 years in and getting pretty disillusioned. My experience has been in affluent white suburban areas in the USA.

What you think it will be...

>do what you love
>help your country
>help kids
>be a positive role model
>summers off
>decent hours

What you get

>shit pay
>female bosses
>micromanaged to death
>asshole parents who foist their spawns off on you
>retarded state/national legislation which makes your job more difficult
>terrible curriculum that basically ensures the kids learn as little as possible
>you need to work in the summer because you don't get paid enough during the year
>grading all the time at home, if you only work 40 hours a week you are really not doing your job at all

There are some moments where you can tell you are really making a difference and the kids really appreciate what you are doing but its by no means an easy job

Is it too much to ask to be paid enough to support a family? Why doesn't this country value education?

Anyone else know the struggle?

Other urls found in this thread:

teachingchannel.org/videos/reading-like-a-historian-corroboration
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

I'm not a teacher but I can certainly see how you guys get fucked. Thanks for trying your best I guess.
I remember being in school and taking interest in certain things but not really being able to delve deeper into them with a teacher because they had no time.

>asshole parents who foist their spawn onto you
>hurrf durrf I'm gonna become a teacher even though I hate kids
You deserve all the bullshit that happens to you OP.

>You should like dealing with shitheels with no understanding of consequences

being a teacher in america in general is insufferable, the whole school system is FUBAR

Try to get into some private school, idk

You don't know what it's like.

OP take your degree and go into law, and then enable those annoying parents into suing each other while you take in a hefty pay from them both.

>not researching average payrates before you pursued the career
>caring what gender your boss is
>wah wah why do I have to do what people tell me
>wah wah why do I have to follow the educational standards of my country
>wah wah why can't I teach all my students about how hitler was right and all communists are secret jews out to make money and about how the confederates were the good guys
>wah wah why do i have to work
>wah wah why do i have to work

Thanks

Ive spent 5 years in public school in a good suburban neighborhood. The bureaucracy and office politics behind the scenes are terrible. Most state laws and requirements are just downright a huge waste of time or pointless.

Don't get me wrong I love history and I know for a fact I am a good teacher but its very draining. I like working with kids too, they can be hilarious and honestly very intelligent.

Im jumping ship to private school for quality of life.

My biggest concern is money. Im not asking to make a shit ton of money but to be able to support a wife and kids would be amazing. I dont need much but enough to live a halfway decent life.

Anyone thinking about getting into the profession should be aware that the pay is not good (obviously) and there is a ton of bureaucratic bullshit that comes from admin, state and federal that is simply a waste

>i know for a fact i am a good teacher

>I don't know what I'm doing
>Therefore trained professionals don't actually know what they're doing

Why do threads like these always bring out the retards?

I actually really like working with kids but if you've actually taught before there is always 1/100 that will ruin your year and its generally the fault of the parents

you sound like a butthurt faggot

You can have a degree and still be a shitty teacher.
The fact that you didn't have the foresight to actually research your career before hand and thought it'd be like Indiana Jones points to you having no clue what you're doing.

When kids write you letters years later and say how much they enjoyed your class you know. Also every teacher checks their ratemyteacher profile. Additionally you get parents who come up to you at back to school night and compliment you...or talk about how their older son/daughter liked your class.

Im not being egotistical its just a fact

>things that never happened

Canuck here, while I am not in the education field, I have a number of acquaintances that are. The common refrain of them working at home to grade, prepare the courses or help with extra school projects all without any extra pay or incentive. They also complain that the snotty little shits they teach are rather impolite these days and they can't do anything about it since the parents have the school board by the balls. So, yeah your story seems to fit with the general trend. I hate to think how bad it is in the US where school funding seems to always be on the rocks.

Is this the internet version of white suburban liberal chimpout?

True a degree doesn't make a good teacher.

And I guess you are right on that last point I just didn't realize how shitty it could be. I just think its funny that America claims to value education and yet culturally we get walked all over and then paid like crap. Not really surprising America is circling the drain.

dude why the fuck do you care if your boss is a woman?

I have a box at home with notes kids write to me and stuff they've given me over the years.

Working with kids is great, yes they can be difficult but if you earn their respect its very rewarding

>There are some moments where you can tell you are really making a difference and the kids really appreciate what you are doing
As a student, I never felt this way before going to college. I had dealt with so much pettiness, misinformation, unprovoked unkindness, and general incompetence that I started to subconsciously stop considering school as a place to learn and instead saw it as daycare.

Shame because there actually were some very able teachers when I got to high school.

>if you let the kids walk all over you and don't hand out anything lower than a C they'll like you

Because female bosses are the worst and you would know that if you actually held different jobs before.

Its a terrible combination of insecurity and tyranny

why the fuck are you so bitter?

please stop replying to he's being a faggot, and he's not going to stop

>Dude I became a teacher and I actually have to work! WTF???!!!

not an argument.

>some people who think they're good aren't
lol I like how your little image was supposed to distract from the fact that you're basically saying
>ur dumb

>did you ever consider the fact that you're actually super shitty at your job based on a bunch of nothing I pulled out of my butt
Wow what an argument

Thats not what I said at all

For the amount of work teachers do we should be compensated more. No successful teacher gets to the job at 7 and clocks out at 3. That is impossible with the amount of stuff we are required to do. I have no problem busting my ass.

If you believe there's no room for improvement, you're wrong. Objectively. It's simple.

>you're just bitter bro! xD
not an argument

move to massachusetts if you wanna make money as a teacher fag

>its by no means an easy job
Good one, buddy. I'm sure your air-conditioned job telling people shit you've said one thousand times before is just a goddamned nightmare. You have to work over the summers? The horror! You should get a giant 3 month vacation, because your job is so incredibly hard.
Why don't you go get a different job?

Are there any teachers here or anyone thinking about the profession? I will try and help you out as best I can

>If you believe there's no room for improvement,
Nobody said this though.

I didn't call you bitter though.

>I know for a fact I'm a good teacher.

I've had many jobs. I've only had 1 really good boss. HAPPENED to be a dude. The worst two was a guy and a woman. The dude used to make me pull doubles for like a month straight because he was too busy going to the strippers and doing blow. The woman was a crazy chinese power bitch who used to scream at me all the time. The rest of them, a roughly even split of men and women, were all equally as crappy

>air conditioned

You are assuming the AC actually works, we have the power to control the temperature in our own rooms and that kids use deodorant.

You are also assuming that the curriculum never changes which would be false because every new department chair likes to resume pad so you get a new one about every 3-5 years.

Ill give you the vacation. The best is the snow days. That being said I don't think students or teachers could go a full year without killing each other so its probably better this way.

Okay and? Good doesn't mean perfect. In the Dunning-Kruger tests people who were competent also reported that they believed they were competent. Just because someone says they are good at their job doesn't make them a delusional retard.

In education the male bosses Ive had have all been very chill and relaxed, actually had some compassion.

The females have been obsessed with power and control. The female coworkers live off gossip and schools are a breeding ground for shittalking. It can actually be a really toxic work environment because people get so sensitive over the most trivial things. Maybe this is every job but whatever...

>I have to memorize a new set of chapters every 5 years.
Wow that's tough buddy.
>They don't wear deodorant
Who are you teaching? Sped kids? Elementary schoolers?

>Being a teacher sure is hard. Am I right, fellow teachers?

>memorize a new set of chapters

This isn't the 60s anymore teachers don't just read from a book. In most history classes you don't even really use a book. You would get shitcanned in a heartbeat.

You're talking out of your ass.

Bitching about your job is one of the oldest forms of commutation

Everyone shitting on him in this thread doesn't know how goddamn awful the American education system is. My dad taught music at a middle school in a very poor town, he got crap wages and the buildings were literally about to fall apart. The high school I went to was closed sometimes because of asbestos. You Eurofags/Northerners don't know how good you have it

>I just think its funny that America claims to value education
It doesn't. Americans values results, but they have no interest in investing to get those results.

>commutation
what did he mean by this?

Not really

When I first joined we started with a brand new curriculum. The textbooks cost thousands of dollars and we had the online version. A year later our department chair changed her mind and we didn't use the books for about 3 years.

The new codeword is "Dynamic Textbooks" which is department chair code for...go find articles online for them to read.

I would assume textbooks are still important in math class though

Which ghetto shithole high school are you teaching at that can't even afford textbooks? Compton high?

I misspelled communication.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa

>You are assuming the AC actually works, we have the power to control the temperature in our own rooms and that kids use deodorant.
No, I'm assuming that you have A/C.
>You are also assuming that the curriculum never changes which would be false because every new department chair likes to resume pad so you get a new one about every 3-5 years.
Oh, so every 4 years or so you need to memorize a high school curriculum? You realize your students are asked to memorize like 10 of those per year, right?
>Ill give you the vacation. The best is the snow days. That being said I don't think students or teachers could go a full year without killing each other so its probably better this way.
Most other jobs require you to work with people year-round. There's this guy at my job that I can't stand. Nobody can fucking stand him. We have to deal with it.
I'm not usually a big grammar Nazi, but your punctuation could use some work. I wouldn't bring it up if you weren't acting like the font of knowledge to the youth of the world.

>curriculum
>department chair
So, OP, sounds like your school administration sucks. Just finished up my internship and, aside from classes with high-stakes testing, my experience was that nobody gave a shit what you taught as long as it was age-appropriate and tied back to state standards.

We coordinated within, you could say, sub-departments (the American History people had separate meetings from the World History ones), but it was still up to you as a teacher to decide what you taught, for how long, and in what way.

You're not just reading from a book that you've transcribed to powerpoint slides, are you?

I dunno man I still kinda want to be a teacher.

Getting people to understand history, it's one of the few moments where I truly feel most alive and happy.

I know being a teacher sucks but eh. C'est la vie, no?

During college, I tried to work in an after-school program once for extra money. Holy shit, that was fucking awful. The kids weren't even that bad, there were just so fucking many of them. And the activities they were forced to do were usually so stupid and pointless that I felt bad for them while simultaneously having to control them. It reminded me of everything I hated about public education. Needless to say, I didn't sign up again the next year.

Wow. You're intelligent.

Don't do it man, you'll regret it.

Not an argument.

lol I taught in a highly affluent suburban district in New England. There are basically no blacks or mexicans.

We can afford textbooks. We waste money like crazy on stupid shit..its actually atrocious I feel bad for the taxpayers.

If you were paying attention you would understand that Im trying to tell you that department chairs think textbooks are old fashioned. They want you to build new curriculums from the ground up.

How though? I'm not interested in money beyond paying debts.

I've dealt with a lot of terrible people before, surely you can carve out enough of a space to rule in your classroom, right? Shit outside that is just auxiliary isn't it?

Should've taught at an Asian afterschool. Made me want to fucking an hero. Most of the kids worked hard because they'd be fucking beat or shamed otherwise. This one kid fucked up and was acting like an idiot so the teacher got the phone, called his mom, and went to the kid and said, "Explain to your mother how you are wasting her fucking money she works so hard for to send you here." Then 10 minutes of screaming at the kid. Then kicked the kid out of his classroom for the day.
Man that shit was embarrassing to witness.

Maybe at your school. I just graduated and we still used textbooks.

Some states do loan-forgiveness if you work at a title one school for X many years. You could also check if your state has alternative paths to certification without getting a formal degree in it.

>surely you can carve out enough of a space to rule in your classroom, right?
Your classroom is quite often your own little fiefdom. Don't draw any attention to yourself, and nobody gives a shit what happens the minute you close your door for class.

I've never understood the "shit pay" meme that gets associated with teachers. In my state, annual pay for teachers starts off at 35k and is capped at around 70k, with a median salary of 50k. That's really not bad. Maybe I'm sightly biased because I grew up poor (parents combined income of less than 30k), and my field usually pays way less (archaeology, basically the shittiest paying job you need a lots of education for), but that seems prety solidly middle class to me. Sure, it's always nice to make more money than that, and its less than other fields, but if you can't live on that kind of salary, something's wrong with your budgeting skills.

I definitely feel for you on the kids being annoying front, though. I've spent a lot of time working with kids, and even if you like them, it gets tedious. Especially when you have difficult kids. I still enjoy the teaching I've done in the past, though, and it's still my backup plan for if I ever get sick of archaeology.

This is the internet who cares about grammar. I never claimed to be some holy prophet of wisdom.

No obviously youve got to do more than that. You need to mix it up and get the kids to do some activities but you already know that.

When its going well its really a terrific job. Just be aware there is a lot of bullshit that you will need to deal with.

You are basically treated like shit from society

Country
>teachers are fucking up
Admin
>the teachers are fucking up what can I do to unfuck them with data lol
Parents
>my child is perfect this teacher is a fucking retard
Kid
>my dad says you are a fucking retard so watch me have a temper tantrum and then admin will blame you for not controlling me

Being a teacher means that basically everyone thinks you are retarded and can do your job. When in reality you do alright and get blamed for the failures of civilization

>Your classroom is quite often your own little fiefdom. Don't draw any attention to yourself, and nobody gives a shit what happens the minute you close your door for class.

That's good enough for me. I hope it gets better for you user. I will heed these warnings for the future. I appreciate it.

Honestly, the average public school teacher deserves nothing but the public's contempt

>Some states do loan-forgiveness if you work at a title one school for X many years.
At least for the time being, there's still a federal public service loan program. If you work in the public sector for ten years, your debt is forgiven.

Middle school teachers generally get their own classrooms so theirs is more of a fiefdom

High school teachers usually share rooms so they have a pen where the teachers have a cubicle or something

Thats what happens when you make the pay shit in comparison to other jobs.

If the pay was more competitive you would get less turnover and high quality applicants

>They want you to build new curriculums from the ground up.
Good. The textbooks are old-fashioned and pretty shit. Not necessarily 100% useless, however.

teachingchannel.org/videos/reading-like-a-historian-corroboration

Because we're paid less than many fields with comparable levels of education. Then there's the issue of how many hours you work per week relative to how many hours you're paid for.... and let's not forget how you, inevitably, end up spending a significant amount of money on classroom materials to accommodate the needs of your students

That said, people rarely take a proper account of the benefits that go along with being a teacher. The value of your position isn't just measured by the dollars & cents of your paycheck.

Oh, and on the annoying kids front (not directed at this user in particular), learn some better classroom management skills. An annoying kid is sending you a message, and it's your job to respond appropriately.

Oh, I'm not OP, I just finished my own internship & degree, but I'm a 3rd generation teacher.

>Classroom management

Sure but not always.

How would you respond to this question

>Homeroom
>Admin mandated team building period
>Play a team building game recommend by guidance
>Kid gets out and you ask him politely to sit down until the next round
>Starts flipping desks, throwing binders and tells you to go fuck yourself
>Opens up the door to the outside and runs out
>Teacher next door hears commotion and call admin
>Admin comes down and yells at you for letting the kid escape even though you are not legally allowed to touch kids
>kid comes back to school and goes to guidance
>parent excuses his behavior because he's got muh ADHD

Keep in mind this happens once a month. And this is just one kid out of 100 you have to deal with lol

What do your parents say about how the profession has changed?

The vast majority aren't even competent to teach. Sorry lad.
There are some who deserve better pay, but by and large they're already teaching well

Sure I can only speak for my building but there are definitely some people that come to mind that shouldn't be teaching.

A lot of the problems facing education could be fixed with a free market application

>pay incentives for better teachers
>get rid of the unions so you can fire bad teachers
>better base salary to encourage smarter/more qualified people to consider it as a career option

I think education should also require some degree of higher morality. We should be vetted in greater depth like you would if you were applying to a government job in the FBI or something

We actually teach anti morality imo
By the time the average american student graduates, he has no concept of culture or relative morality and probably thinks the founders were le ebil slavemasters

You want pays to be higher but want to get rid of unions that fight for fair pays, and you want teachers to follow a moral standard that you think is ensured by governmental hiring processes like in the FBI but you want to outsource this selection to the free market that doesn't select for moral behaviour at all.

Unfortunately, we have such different contexts that there's not a lot to discuss on that subject. My grandfather taught a variety of subjects, but went into administration; my aunt was a science teacher, and also went into administration. She's currently a professor of educational policy. Both taught in Canada. I, on the other hand, am in North Florida.

So, instead, we tend to talk about the similarities; things like the hours, the importance of planning, and finding the balance of breadth vs. depth. Or, to put it another way, finding the balance of skills vs. content. And planning, holy shit is that the difference between loving your job and wanting to find another career. All of my best days involved lessons that were prep-heavy and driven by students; lesson types like visual discovery, inquiry lessons, and concept-formation.

Well, there are two situations there. The momentary situation is pretty easy to solve, you contact administration as quickly as you can. There's absolutely nothing else to be done.

Now, there is the underlying situation of this kid either needing to be engaged 100% of the time, or being a bad loser, or being violent. That kind of outburst is not a one-time event, so now the question is how you'll plan around that in the future. Without having observed the kid, I can't really get any deeper than that. What I can say is that, functionally, that student may as well be disabled, and you need to accommodate for his behavior. Also, you keep saying 100 kids, how many kids per class do you have and how many periods do you have a day? Because most of the teachers where I'm at are sitting at around ~150 kids a day (25 students x 6 periods of instruction).

So, ignore that pic, I was going to tie it into an anecdote, but I decided to leave it out.

>grading all the time at home
Why not just make your work easier to grade?

Well he is going to work at a private school which I assume is a harder job to get than public school meaning if nothing else he is above average.

>because people get so sensitive over the most trivial things
This is women in general, not just teachers or in a work environment. I don't know how to describe except that there's a "male mentality" for interpreting things and a "female mentality" for it. The female mentality is super sensitive and immediately reads things in the most deliberately cruel way possible and then running to HR with it as a major problem. Male mentality is to just not care about it unless it's actually important. Just an example from a place I worked at:
Male mentality
>that guy makes it really hard to cut in during a discussion, but he's nice and relaxed otherwise and he probably doesn't mean anything by it. I'll just let him finish then be sure to jump in with my ideas, and if it gets to be a real problem I'll talk to him about it.
Female mentality
>this guy never lets me talk, obviously it's some kind of intentional attempt to sabotage my input into meetings and projects and not just him lacking awareness of when other people want to talk. I should tell HR about it and also make it sound like I'm being victimized.
>later we all have to be subjected to a sensitivity seminar and I'm sure that guy got a chewing out

The place I work now though has very tomboyish women, they have the male mentality. I think it's cause of the way this company screens the people it hires, it goes for personality rather than resume so everybody is extremely amiable and easy to work with.

>private schools are hard to work at
No. Not necessarily. Especially if you include charter schools, which may as well be considered lower-level private schools with the amount of selection that goes on. In several states, charters don't need to abide all the rules of the standard education system, which includes requirements on certification. One of the "highest performing" schools in my county has some teachers with associates degrees.

I would argue that there's something different about women in a female-dominated industry than the ones you'll meet elsewhere. If men are the dominant force in the group, the group's culture will tilt in a more masculine direction. Not to say women won't act like women, but they are all reasonably capable of operating within a masculine work culture. The reverse, however, is rarely true; most men are way out of their depth when it comes to operating in a culture defined by the kind of relational aggression that women often practice.

> relative morality
>judges people from a different culture as being good or evil.
Choose one

At least you're out there teaching the kids because the shortage of teachers is getting worse with each year

>no concept of culture OR relative morality
You may've read that one a bit too quickly.

Took me a minute to realize the poster was suggesting that moral relativism is a good thing. Although that opens a whole can of worms.

>Listen kids, we can't say whether or not Joe Stalin was bad just because he sent all those people to the gulags. It was a different time!

I've had many shit male bosses, was it because they were male or because they were shit bosses?

The hardest thing about private schools isn't qualifications, it's politics. My mom was the principal of a K-12 private school. She caught a high school kid smoking crack in the bathroom. His lawyer father got involved and demanded she be fired. She was demoted, but apparently that wasn't good enough. After hemming and hawing, the school board acquiesced and fired her.

Epilogue: My mother was very popular with the parents. Enough of them pulled their kids out that the school collapsed.

What did the lawyer dad claim your mom was in the wrong for? I have no idea how someone could turn around "I caught a kid smoking crack" but I'm not a lawyer.

He claimed my mother was lying maliciously. No legal shit. He donated substantially to the church running the school. Therefore, he gets his way. I should've said "rich father" instead of "lawyer father".

Eh, you can still make it work; rather than condemn the man himself, you condemn the ideology. You can still have Stalin be a guy who believed in the promised goals of the Soviet utopia while arguing that rationalist ideologies, particularly ones that promise a utopia, happen to be implicitly murderous. When you believe that you can create the perfect material world, there's really no price that you wouldn't pay, or make others pay, to usher it forth.

Same idea goes for the holocaust. The belief in utopia is, itself, possibly the greatest sin of man.

>The belief in utopia is, itself, possibly the greatest sin of man.

Holy shit... This may be the single most insightful thing I've ever read on Veeky Forums.

So do evil people exist? Or are they instead only fools who believe in evil ideologies?

> (You)
>So do evil people exist?
Yes. Or, at the very least, malevolent people exist. Even if you don't want to call a lone individual evil, there are definitely people who gain pleasure from hurting others in any number of ways.

I've been catching up on Dr. Peterson's bible series, and he makes the point that if we do everything right we can become like Abel. However, if we do things wrong, and the world turns on us because we don't do the things we ought to do, we can very easily become Cain. When that happens, we are so consumed with hatred for the world and our place in it, we just might reach out and destroy our own ideal. Nihilism is a hell of a drug.

As for otherwise decent people incited to murder, ideology can play a role, but it's not the only thing. I read Ordinary Men over Christmas last year, and fuck was that chilling. Every twenty to thirty pages I had stop, get up, and walk around the room for a few minutes. It's the true story of a German police battalion in Poland who become major actors in the holocaust. To summarize for those unfamiliar, the battalion is made up of people about 40 years old, which means they all grew up before the Nazis were a serious thing; once you're over 25, you're basically immune to the transformative effects propaganda. The men are also from Hamburg, and from the working class; in other words, they're all socialist-leaning background, not the national-socialist base. Stalin argued that one man is a tragedy while a million is a statistic, and I think that also follows for the murderers. A horde of mongols is an abstraction, but a murderer who sounds like he could be your relative is a nightmare. These men did what they did out of camaraderie and because the process was gradual enough for them to acclimatize; they were sick the whole time, but it was slow enough for them to adjust.

Cont'd

In addition to the JBP stuff, one of the most interesting comments on utopia came from Brett Weinstein's interview with, I think it was Dave Rubin. His interview with Rogan was good, too, but the utopian element of Marxian ideologies came up more with Rubin.

Anyways, before he mentioned it, I had never thought of the holocaust as a utopian ideal but, within the Nazi framework, the final solution was definitely a step towards utopia. So, sadly, I can't take credit for that observation; the phrasing, maybe, but not the core idea. It's always interesting when similar ideas are presented by people who have fundamental differences in their academic training and political outlook.

>Peterson

The man is a treasure; not infallible, and makes a ton of little mistakes, but still a treasure.