Are there any high school english teachers on here...

>You can make an impact OP

This is an extremely well-studied matter, and the consensus is that teacher quality has a tiny impact on student performance. The idea that you as a teacher have an impact is simply wishful thinking, a pathetic attempt to justify your useless job.

I am an ESL teacher, don't have a bachelors in education but I have a TEFL certificate which basically allows me to work in countries desperate enough. can't recommend it enough if you love travelling. feel free ask me anything if you are interested in that sort of stuff

Yeah I've been half thinking of bumming around Asia for a few years doing ESL but I thought everyone does that these days
Plus wo zhidao some hanyu so idk if that'll help me

That's the thing the asian market is pretty diluted. Central america is where I enjoyed teaching the most, and I suppose Argentina and Chile would be good too, which is where I plan on heading next. Less money earned but less money spent at the same time. If you really want to make bank in asia South Korea is probably the place to be from what i've heard.

Will almost certainly become a teacher in some way, perhaps a high school literature teacher. I have taught private lessons and been a substitute teacher for the past two years and am really enjoying it. It's a quietly thankful and satisfying experience to feel the progress of thought in a student, basically by the socratic method. I had a girl who literally couldn't place Hitler in a larger context and she ended up acing the final exam.

Also, I might be able to plant the seed of cultural marxism in some kids. Not even kidding.

Also, teaching is (still, somewhat) a respected and well paid vocation where I'm from (Scandinavia).

>tfw I wanted to fuck my high school English teacher
>she was 21, short and thick
>would still do it even if she 40 because it's now deeply instilled in me

Yes,brother place the seed marxism in the kids and bring in the new caliphate (scandinavia) inshallah

Haha but how will I slay mad Asian pussy in Latin America?

Argentina or Chile would be cool though, I imagine. I'm sure there's like a Borges museum in Buenos Aires or something. How diluted is Asia? I'd still rather teach there.

You don't know what you are talking about :^). CM =/= identity politics. A lot of marxist theory is deeply critical of identity-based explanations of society. See for example Zizek.

3 years deep into my Adolescent to Yound Adult Education degree, so i'm pretty close

Please take some actual education courses. It's good to be well versed in your content area, but if you can't tell me about your various students' zone of proximal developments, how your lesson plans cater to multiple intelligences and extend into culturally relevant pedagogy, etc., you have no business teaching

go for it OP.
A good teacher is quite like a good parent, so don't even obsess about whether they'll read the damn books or not. Just be a good influential literature-loving figure for them.

I'm not going into teaching but have friends that are and the way I look at it is even with that research, do you think society is anywhere near socially ready to accept not sending kids to school? In that case, if compulsory education is going to stick around, might as well have it be taught by people who want to do it and make it suck less for the kids.

I am an English/history teacher at a high school in Germany (27 years)

Nice wage, good working conditions, love it

Also this

In loco parentes my man

You literally ARE their parent while they're with you

This is why it's near impossible to find good teachers with mindsets like /pol/ and the like. You know these kids and come to find out that it's never a question of cultural deficit but just X's parents work a stupid amount to be able to keep food in the house and the like

You better care for those kids.

More like places like Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam where they are lots of english teachers as in diluted. Just be careful for jobs that ask for money upfront, south east asia is notorious for scamming. I'd still say go for and do some research before choosing a country/s. yeah I was actually planning on visiting the small museum they have and also his grave but turns out borges is buried in Switzerland, who knew

Being a teacher is a great choice. Think about it this way- even if you teach for only 2 or 3 years and you move on to a different field, it looks great on a resume. Teaching experience never hurts.

delet this

you should never put teaching experience on a resume, everyone assumes that you're a loser who had nowhere better to go

Yeah I wasn't thinking SE Asia, maybe China, Japan or Korea. I'd love Japan but something about the grimy, polluted vibes of Chinese cities draws me in. I'd love to go back to Beijing, I went there years ago ona school tour and stayed in the traditional district (hutong) in winter and it was the comfiest shit. How's the market in China? I imagine Beijing/Shanghai might be diluted but what about regional cities?

High school English teacher in the U.S. here.

The job is really what you make of it. Most of the students aren't going to be interested in literature, but some will, and, if you have the ability, you can turn more on to it.

The job is much more than just literature, though. If you are going into teaching, your goal should be to do the best you can at helping your students along a path towards their best possible futures. For instance, one of my classes is Intensive Reading (see: remedial). Maybe one or two of these kids will end up in college, a good chunk won't even graduate high school. Half of them are barely literate at 15/16/17 years old. Am I really going to try and get them into Kafka and Whitman? Hell no. I'm going to improve their reading and writing skills so they can pass the standardized tests needed to graduate, then understand basic things like a lease agreement, help them figure out a plan of what they want to do after high school and how to get there, etc.

The honors classes I teach? Ok, yeah, I work to develop their appreciation of literature, but I do the same sort of things with them in terms of planning for their futures, how things like leases and loans works, how to get scholarships, etc., because nobody else is teaching them that stuff.

I also would encourage you to regularly attend their events like sporting events, band concert, whatever, even if you just show up for a minute so they see you. Thay goes a long way in developing relationships with them so they trust, respect, and listen to you.

Also get involved in sponsoring an extracurricular or two. I am my school's mock trial coach (I went to law school before becoming a teacher), and plan to start something next year that will be like a book club meets college literature seminar course. We will study works from a specific movement/time period/region/etc. each semester. These, too, give you tje opportunity to forge relationships that allow to make a greater impact with your students.

I actually had to take a personal day today, so I'll be popping back in every now and thrn throughout the day if you want to ask anything else.

Oh last thing, yeah the base salary is pretty shitty, but there are plenty of ways to significantly supplement and boost your income if you're willing to put in some extra work.

I had one history teacher who sat me aside one day before I took a test -I had solid B's in the class, but would led class discussion- and he asked me very simply: "Do you try?"

Probably changed how I view the world and myself more than any other moment. I was a lazy little shit up until that point and never focused on school that much. It took some time but I changed my tune.

I've considered this as well, considering I need a source of income and literature is my only passion.
My dilemma is, if I were to teach English I'd want to teach at the undergraduate level at least, but that would require me to get my MA and probably a PhD, the downsides of which are obvious.
On the other hand, I could try to get an MFA and try to become a creative writing professor? I think I'm more confident in my writing ability than my ability to keep my grades up, go through the song and dance of grad school apps, suffer through a PhD program while accumulating debt, and then graduate, only to be shut down by a complete dearth of college English teaching positions.

So

McDonald's it is

>I went to law school before becoming a teacher
Not sure how common this is but I think you've posted about your job on Veeky Forums before, you said something about being turned off by the immorality/shitiness of legal work? Anyway idk, I saw that post ages ago.

Also, what things specifically supplement your income while teaching? And how often do you actually get students interested in literature?

So, how much are your student loans since you didn't continue being an attorney? I just finished applying to law schools, and I considered being a teacher before that- do you have any advice for me? Why are you teaching instead of practicing?

You sound like a boring teacher.
>read this
>take notes
>test friday.

Not sure man, but I'd reccomend visiting Dave's ESL cafe job board for starters. Good luck

???

Not sure how you got that from that post, but okay

actually it does seem like it buddy

But catering to multiple intelligences and understanding zone of proximal developments allows for individualized higher level pedagogies, not direct instruction and lower order thinking

But you don't know these things, ao why bother

you're coming across as a neophyte, bro

>But catering to multiple intelligences and understanding zone of proximal developments allows for individualized higher level pedagogies, not direct instruction and lower order thinking
I didn't understand any of this. I'm 15.
You've failed at your job.

(just to clarify, I'm not really 15. dont want an underageb&)

I'm not explaining to a child, i'm explaining it to an adult who should understand that it's not just "I LIKE AND KNOW ABOUT BOOKS NOW I CAN TEACH"

from Plato to Rousseau to Piaget to Vygotsky, there's a lot of important concepts and ideas one has to understand to be an adequate teacher who ensures student success, comprehension, and connection with course content

"...ensures student success"

god, you sound like someone who just took their first class.

>Thinking buzzwords make for better teaching. Seriously, you're gonna say that your tailor your lessons to catter to your various student's zone of proximal developments? Unless you gotta some mathematic model nobody knows about, I'm imagining you making your lessons while watching the office and thinking about how Joey and his friend are kind of stupid so I got to be slower on that grammar rule.

>3 years deep into my Adolescent to Yound Adult Education degree

bwahahah i've never met anyone with an education degree who wasn't a big fucking dummy, i got shanghai'd into teaching some high school one semester and i came to the conclusion that anyone who would choose to work in a high school has poor mental health or is just lazy as shit and wants a secure union job but without having to lift heavy things or get dirty, either way a bunch of fucking mongs

where did this guy go

Please create a trip and start a thread teaching everyone some Veeky Forums. You probably have plenty of diversity in this community. You obviously have the skills to do it.

Remember to be creative, fun and interesting!

>relatively short work day
I'm a mediocre teacher and I work 9 hours a day. The teachers who prepare properly and have interesting lessons work far longer.

>Please take some actual education courses. It's good to be well versed in your content area, but if you can't tell me about your various students' zone of proximal developments, how your lesson plans cater to multiple intelligences and extend into culturally relevant pedagogy, etc., you have no business teaching

Actual teacher here, the education courses I took at university were fucking worthless. I work alongside brilliant teachers and they all know that the stuff you're talking about is unhelpful bullshit.
Seriously, I can't wait until you actually teach and find out what's really important.

You're just using buzzwords in an attempt to sound more intelligent. In a practical context, this is all you're suggesting :
Vary your teaching methods to include all students and help them make better progress.

>This is an extremely well-studied matter, and the consensus is that teacher quality has a tiny impact on student performance.
Do you have any sources for this? After searching around on Google/SSRN I didn't see such a consensus.

>Buying into the education buzzword meme this hard
I can tell you have not been in the classroom yet. I am not saying this to offend. I just finished my first year teaching, and it is going to be my last. Education courses are a complete and total waste of time. Focus your efforts on mastering your content area. "Differentiated Instruction", "21st century skills", etc are all buzzwords that educational "academics" use to get PhD's. For real, during one of my PD days someone from Mizzou came and played "Go Fish" with us that was based on some of their research. What a fucking joke. I am going back to school and leaving this field. Work in a private school.

Now is a GREAT time to become a teacher, as long as you start now. They don't have enough teachers because of No Child Left Behind making nobody want to be one, but NCLB is ending and they're trying to shift away from the whole ALL STANDARDIZED TESTS ALL THE TIME bullshit

Sorry, phone's been acting up and I don't have a personal computer.

It's possible, I've posted about it before.

Things like sponsoring clubs/coaching sports is the obvious one, but getting certified for things like ESE and intensive reading usually gets you an annual bonus as well, even if you don't use them. If you can get into teaching AP, you should get a small bonus for each student who passes the AP exam (my district gives the teacher $50 for each passing test score. Here in Florida we now have a huge bonus (~$8400 this year) if you scored high enough on the SAT/ACT and earn a rating of "highly effective" in the classroom.

Then you can always offer tutoring services. I plan to start that this summer for all levels of English, PSAT/SAT/ACT test prep, even LSAT prep if I can. Also, since the Duke TIP program has become a big deal in my community, I will offer services for that.

I went to FSU law, ranked somewhere around 45-50 in the U.S., one of the better schools in terms of bang for your buck, had a half scholarship for the first 2 years and walked out with about $78000 in loans. That also included $16000 I took out to put straight into buying a car, and another roughly 2000 that went towards a vacation. The rest was tuition/books/living expenses.

I decided practicing law wasn't for me. I spent time working, interning, and volunteering in a variety of fields and environments, and I was always completely miserable. Really got into teaching in large part because I wanted a steady income and benefits (spent a year couchsurfing and working random jobs, even ended up homeless for a couple weeks, didn't like how I was living anymore), but then I immediately fell in love with it and it turned out I'm really good at it.

As far as advice for you, do as much research as possible into what law school and working in the legal field is really like before you drop tens of thousands, even 100+ into the education. Figure out why you really want to go and if it will help you do what you really want to do. I went because I didn't know what else to do with my undergrad degree, thought it seemed like a good idea. If you don't really want to be there, you'll be miserable.

>they're trying to shift away from the whole ALL STANDARDIZED TESTS ALL THE TIME bullshit

Who is "they"? I'm thr english teacher/law school grad, and all we do in the 4th quarter at my school is test. We have state standardized tests for reading and math that they take every year and MUST pass in 10th grade to graduate. Then they have EOCs (end-of-course exams) for practically every subject. Not to mention beginning-of-year, middle-of-year, and end-of-year tests, PSAT, ACT Plan, all tje AP courses students are encouraged to take that have exams at the end of the year. All they fucking do is test. Last year at my school, teachers lost anywhere from 20-30 days of instructional time because of testing, not including the time that the kids were actually taking the tests themselves. That was just from classes being displaced for kids to test, teachers being pulled to proctor, etc. That's 11-18% of the school year. Thankfully we have a new assistant principal for curriculum this year who went beast mode about testing and the impact was minimized, but it is still out of control how many tests these kids take.

Forgot to answer your last question. Mostly I havr no success getting kids into literature if they had zero interest before. It's pretty much just a matter of directing existing interests. For instance, kids who are always reading, but reading John Green and other YA novels can be guided towards an interest in literature of "more literary merit" or however you want to put it (I hate the phrase, but you know what I mean), or kids who are all about slam poetry can be guided towards an appreciation of "real" poetry (again, stupid label, but you know what I mean). The kids who come to me with no interest in literature, I have extremely limited success in sparking such an interest outside of getting them to actually read assigned works.

Also, captcha thinks a U-Haul truck is a recreational vehicle. Cool.

If only you had a good teacher, you wouldn't have such poor critical thinking

Do you think having an impact = improved performance on standardized tests? If so, you are in the darkness on an entire field of inquiry, and you would literally need to become my student to a actually open your mind.

Teachers work much more than people imagine. Parent phone calls, lesson planning, grading, office hours, meetings, etc. It's also just a very difficult job.

Lucky bastard, I wish I was born in Finland and became a teacher there. Good on you spreading the good word of Marx, I try to do the same.

Thank you for your service.

Also base salary in certain states is pretty solid, for public schools, and within a decade could easily be over 70k.

Lol do you not want to be an amazing teacher? I agree that we should simply hire more teachers and reduce our class requirements though.

I'm not sure what you see or read, but standardized tests are in their golden era, and it's ruining education. I'm talking about multiple tests, multiple practice runs, multiple weeks of actual testing and retesting. It's literal insanity.

I wish I could talk to you outside of Veeky Forums since I have follow up questions but are person info. Are you a teacher in NC? (since you mentioned the Duke TIP program)

This.

If you get a manageable number of smart kids who are invested in what you're doing, even if they're young, it's awesome.

But you won't. You'll get fifty dindus in a room made to hold thirty, and when you're not preparing for a standardized test you'll be reteaching eighth grade's lessons for kids who aren't ready for fifth grade's lessons.

Yeah, I'm mad.

If you're using cultural marxism in that sense you're probably too retarded to teach regular Marxism.

The term is a right-wing oogabooga.

also, don't go into teaching if u value ur liberal and leftist beliefs because after dealing with enough of these kids you'll realize minorities and poors problems are brought on by their own shitty work ethic, criminal tendencies and all around piss poor attitude

when people saycultural marxism they're talking about marxist cultural critics aka hotdog school aka zionist jew crew, if u dont know that u probably don't know enough about marxism to teach it

Both my parents were English teachers, but one taught the language itself to foreigners.

Get your Masters so you can get better money and teach higher level classes.

Well, that's because the U.S. has a perverse idea of what education is. You see, you can't put information into the heads of a crowd that illiterate and large. You are expected to try to teach them- how? How do you "teach" fifty people in one room in a limited amount of time while being paid in crumbs? Well, you don't- but you give a lecture. Yes, a lecture. You can answer questions here and there, but you give a lecture or a performance, and then follow up with any questions or concerns from your audience. Then what? Then they leave. You aren't teaching, you're lecturing.

What is teaching? Teaching is tutoring. Actually sitting down and investing time and practice with the individual, in the way Aristotle did with Alexander. That's why you see better performance out of isolated, low populated and homogeneous academic institutions. Not with government funded lab experiments- the poor are lab mice.

The concept of a "public" education is really a daycare or a center of indoctrination, and any serious academic understands that education is a personal responsibility.

No, I teach in southwest Florida. Duke TIP is pretty widespread.

If you want to create a throwaway, I can email with you.

>That's why you see better performance out of isolated, low populated and homogeneous academic institutions.

then shouldn't Newark NJ have the best schools since they have 90% black students, union teachers with fat pay, benefits and pensions, and small classroom sizes? i used to believe the meme about small classes until i looked at class sizes in districts and the best schools had bigger classes and lots of whites and asians

I didn't include anything in my post regarding race, but I will since you've directed your concerns there.

Yes, whites are smarter. Both of our points still stand.

[email protected]

what points? that smaller classes are better? how is that Harvard Business School has huge classes in auditoriums but is the best business school in the world then? Should some community college with 5 students in business 201 have better results then? class sizes are a spook for lazy thinkers, for all the idiotic "education phds" churned out by degree mills i can't believe this crap is still allowed to be believed

i said that education is a personal responsibility.

you continue to mention that large college classes work

it's clear from my "nonpoint," as you assume it is, that the debate was regarding young children (elementary, middle, high).

The brain of a child is different than that of a young adult, adult, and so on

>Yes, whites are smarter.

i've seen some smart black kids from africa, but the weak willed bottom feeders who allowed themselves be enslaved and sold off to whitey are clearly retarded

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Every_Student_Succeeds_Act

This is replacing/attempting to fix NCLB. We've yet to see to what EXTENT it will succeed, but it should be a significant improvement at the very least.

So, to answer directly, Yes- I think that those who want to go learn in a large group or small group should be able to do so- it should not be enforced by the government to force you to do it one way, and with a certain number of religions and ethnicities present for "diverse" effects.

Again, I will say yes that a small group of children would be better than a large mass of children learning together- as I said, homogeneity is an important factor.

Yes, it's the bell curve. You will have some smart blacks, you will find smart ones in every race, but it's few and far between. I'm not saying that there are no smart black people, i'm saying that there are far less. Not to mention the genetic predisposition of behavioral and criminal behavior of specific races

human social groups can go up to 40 or 50 people so i don't see why the classes have to be as small as a nuclear family, something that didn't exist until recently in history...prison blocks are split into sections of 50 because more than that and the inmates can't "know" each other and become a group, go bigger and you risk violence as the amount of people gets too big to be personal with each one...now don't get me wrong, if ur in the teachers union you definitely believe small classes are better, after all it means more jobs for u and ur homies, but there's not much saying that it's better for the students

yo i educate adolescents too if you catch my drift

>i don't see why the classes have to be as small as a nuclear family, something that didn't exist until recently in history

Before we go any further, would you care to elaborate what I have greentexted?

Yes, brother. Let us chop off niggers' testicles, roast them, and eat them. Hang that nigger from a lamp-post. The stupidest and worst are those who die in war. Brother, can you tell me where you live? I want to go out with you and we can find us a good nigger and bash his head against a brick wall in a dark alley. His skull will crack open and his brains will pour out, whereupon we shall dance the Macarena upon the poured out brains and, with daggers, stab out his eyeballs. Hopefully he will still be alive so he can writhe around moaning in impotent and hopeless agony as we tear off his testicles with our bare claws, grown out and sharpened with a file for just this special occasion. Likewise our teeth shall be sharpened with files (mine already are), and with them we shall bite his cock off and chew it then spit it into his gibbering mouth like a mother bird feeding its child; then we shall jump on his stomach with our full weight, taking turns (I am about 250 pounds and should cause his organs to burst), and then we can decapitate him and hang the head from a lamppost. I hate the niggers whom this happens to. The stupidest niggers are the ones who let us do this to them. Let us go kill them, brother.

i definitely get the feeling blacks have problems with long term planning and/or judging consequences of actions...also, so many of them seem to be "dyslexic" which is just a doctor's note saying this kid is too dumb to read that it's not a surprise none of them developed writing until islamic imperialists came in and enslaved them

if you have motivated and well-behaved students class size isn't that big a deal. if you're in a bad district class size is the difference between it being manageable and total chaos.

not that user, y'all are retarded
>i don't understand this guy therefore he's wrong
>i know more about teaching than a teacher
>i am not a teacher
if you don't understand it then shut up, clearly the conversation is not directed toward you since you are not going to be teachers. yall are the equivalent of layfaggots accusing a physicist of being dumb because he uses terminology

sorry, jose but i'm not mexican, the MS13 cell block is on the other side of the quad, i'm just trying to do some reading with my fellow whites

>bad district

just say it, we're on Veeky Forums, we can be honest about

lmfao

from what do you infer that any of these people aren't teachers?

you seem to be confusing 'being a teacher' with 'being a pedagogy academic'. enjoy getting wrecked in the classroom.

t. a real flesh-and-blood person

I've been to schools all over the U.S., private, public, rural, city, poor, rich, from nearly entirely African Americans to nearly entirely White Americans, trust me, you want to move somewhere like Maine or Northern Minnesota to a small town with predominately White Americans if you want to teach; otherwise, you will likely hate your job and will want to commit suicide before a year's over.

/pol/tards are out in force. You people are mental degenerates, you know that right? You make fun of blacks , but you're dumber than a bag of hammers.

If you guys aren't just /pol/tards, stay away from the classroom, your needs and society's need would be better suited it you became a street sweeper in the desert. Away from everyone else, with no street to actually sweep, but too stupid to realize it.

it's probably the case that there is a natural intelligence difference between blacks and whites, however much you or i might dislike it.

there are, however, some few reasons for optimism. there's that study of half-black germans born to black american soldiers who as a group scored on intelligence testing equal to native born germans. and there's james flynn's contention that the linguistic environment very young blacks face at home rather than genetics is responsible for a large chunk of the IQ gap, which can be amenable to cultural change.

I think you're not being much less ridiculous than the clowns you're responding too, but I just wanted to drop into say I'll be stealing that street sweep in the desert bit. That's pretty inspired, user.

not an argument

history teacher chiming in to say i agree.

>/pol/tards are out in force. You people are mental degenerates, you know that right? You make fun of blacks , but you're dumber than a bag of hammers.

since you obviously never had to teach in a black school feel free to gtfo of the thread

Cheers for the responses, hope all goes well. Also, are the break times actually as long as most people think they are?

>Get your Masters so you can get better money and teach higher level classes.
Masters in English or Education?

Try a few months in Americorps or even a stint in Teach for America before you commit. That's the only way to really know it's for you. I've had many friends go into loan debt for masters degrees in teaching only to change careers once they get a taste for the work environment.

Also–having toyed with this same idea at 23– instead of teaching, take some online business classes instead. Apply to any internship involving a for-profit focus. Take the GMAT after a few years, get a top 25 MBA, be set for life. Enjoy extra resources to pursue your life interests.

Do not get an MFA expecting a teaching job. Those with MFAs and teaching positions obtained them through their published work, it's not a prerequisite to teach, and it's not a professional certification. Look at the employment statistics before you do this, it's a big mistake.

I have one, but I've thankfully switched career focus. They're fun, but they will add to, not pay your bills.

No one in my graduating class is employed as a professor, most got unrelated jobs, some went into entry-level publishing.

I've been trachig undeserved kids for years. The difference is I'm not a stupid racist who sees his students through such primitive analysis.

Teachers should first be able to learn, can you?

Ridicule is the only way to treat such bottom feeding scum. And thank you, I tried just a little.

lol teachers are shit , I would rather die in a fire.

Don't do it. Just don't.

HS teacher of 5 years here. Before I joined I had this image of myself being the wise but relatable figure that kids would love and rally around. I chose books that were interesting and often chose those that dealt with the teenage experience. I tried to be friendly and inspiring and attempted every day to communicate my own love for literature to kids who had the privilege of standing on the threshold of a life in which literature might play a part.

Two years in my ambitions had all but faded and each lesson became an exercise in restraint and mild authoritarianism. The only kids who related to me and who were actually interested in reading the books I assigned were those who reminded me of myself during highschool, i.e. the shy, naive and submissive edgelords who wear pinstriped fedoras and try unsuccessfully to join in the conversations of their peers by shouting memes and buzzwords. I actually feel bad for encouraging an appreciation for literature in these kids. I am burned out by paperwork and bureaucracy, training courses have taken the place of paid holidays, stewarding after-school clubs and events and all the other tedious stuff that makes people look down on teachers as nothing more than childminders hired by the state.

there are great teachers I agree. But like good writers or good actors or good professionals in general, they are far too rare. Chances are you're going to be an asshole teacher. So, try your best and don't become one of them.