Why does teaching have such a bad stigma?

Why does teaching have such a bad stigma?
I teach maths and science, mostly maths, at a selective secondary school in the UK. Studied mech e, did tutoring on the side and realised I enjoyed teaching more than I did anything else. Finished mech e, got PGCE (Postgraduate Certificate of Education) basically paid for by the gubmint.
>tons of free time
>high salary outside of london, earn more than most people my age
>have autonomy
>rewarding to see people succeed
>organise after school classes for the smarter kids, teaching things outside of the high school curriculum (calc, diff eq, lin alg, etc)
>have my own office
>high demand for work
>lots of room for advancement

Teaching has a bad stigma in countries with poor education.

I'm from australia, education is looked down upon here because its one of tge easiest courses to get into at university. Some people change into their education degrees because they fail their original degree, and many teachers dont have a degree in the area they teach. the ones that do had to get a grad diploma like you and only did that because their job prospects were bleak. So teaching here is a profession of last resort a lot of the time.

There's a lot of mediocrity in the teaching profession here, and the very best all teach at expensive private schools.

How do your pupils handle the extra curricular maths subjects? You should try guide the uni bound ones into the right career path- i had no idea what eng involved until i studied it.

Whats the gender ratio for teaching?

>I'm from australia, education is looked down upon here because its one of tge easiest courses to get into at university. Some people change into their education degrees because they fail their original degree
Here you generally need an undergrad that's relevant to what you want to teach, so if you want to teach English, you study English lit. Engineering is a bit of a special case and opens doors for both science and maths teaching, since there is so much crossover.

>teach at expensive private schools.
I want to do the same, though the school I teach at is nationally competitive with good private schools. The difference is that we have a lot more students per class (often double the amount at least) and we get paid less.

>Whats the gender ratio for teaching?
I'd say 60% men and 40% women for maths and science.

>How do your pupils handle the extra curricular maths subjects? You should try guide the uni bound ones into the right career path- i had no idea what eng involved until i studied it.
The special classes are for a few older kids I've built rapport with overtime, though anyone can come, but it's of no use to a year 7 that hasn't learned basic algebra.
Since they're not forced to do it and actually want to do it, they do well. They come on their own free time, some of them are studying the content at home by themselves and come for extra guidance. Though it's a small percentage of the total I teach generally, and I don't run the program all year round that reason.
Mostly I do general revision classes after school for everyone, but I also try to fit in stuff they'll be doing later in the year, so they're always ahead.

>mathssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss

I'm planning on becoming a uni lecturer after I finish my PhD. I enjoy teaching but I want to be able to make decent money.

I earn more than most university lecturers. I'm completely serious. Most lecturers get around 37 - 40k. Unless they're extremely exceptional or professors.

well mostly because in some places (at least here in the US) teachers are at the mercy of whatever standards the government sets
in Texas there is a statewide test students take about every year and need to pass in order to move on to their next year
if students are doing poorly in the benchmark exams, then they're just taught how to pass the state exam
they're literally pulled out of regular classes and made to attend test prep classes that just focus on navigating the state tests' questions. particularly the reading and writing sections
this means that they just learn to take an exam and skip over any other useful concepts they'll need to learn more advanced subjects

the math and science section of these exams are a complete joke. i think the last time you need to take the state test is 10th or 11th grade (or you retake during your senior year if you've failed) and the most difficult concept your tested on is basic trig and algebra. and so you pass the test and the state is happy that you passed and lawmakers say "see look at out brilliant students"
and if the passing average gets too low they even consider lowering the passing grades
meanwhile the poor kid scrapes into a 4-year university or community college and can't even do basic algebra let alone understand/write a fucking proof and drops out blaming his/her teachers

you see college professors constantly complaining that students are not prepared for even the entry level math courses

in the USA teachers get paid shit, like barely above a retail cashier

"Those that can't, teach."

It's true. Source: BS in Geology and looking into the alternative licensing program to become a public school teacher for my state.

this
teachers deserve to be treated a lot better here.
i had amazing teachers growing up and some of them have to put up with too much shit
from incompetent lawmakers and administrators to fucking animal students

Depends on a country. In Lithuania (where I llive) teachers earn barely above minimum wage, a construction worker usually earns more. The fact that the university, geared towards preparing teachers is one of the shittiest unis in the country doesn't help either.

>tons of free time
Teaching in the UK must be radically different from the US if you have any free time at all.

It depends on you really, how fast you mark stuff and how organised you are.

literally nonsense, they are paid fine
But the huge amount of shitskins means most people going into teaching quit in a year or two

But hell most teachers are liberals so this just serves to wake them up to reality.

I don't know if you've noticed but like all teachers are white
not that it matters

It's all incompetent women now

I think is right. Here in Brazil, teaching isn't a desirable profession at all (unless you're a college professor). Teachers get bad payment, deal with troublesome students, teach at multiple schools, and have many other problems.
Therefore, teaching is seen as a profession reserved for those who failed their carreers. Like, physics teachers are seen as people who failed to get into research, and it goes on.

99.9% of math teachers teach just to wank it to the fact they know math and fuels their ego. They can't write for shit because good writing is all about simplicity and they just write for complexity so once again they do this so they can get off

>99.9% of math teachers
source

t. An entire thread of redditers

The pay isn't that bad when you consider all the time off they get. Two months off in the summer is a pretty sweet deal.

Move those goal posts any further and we'll have to divert funding for new paint to another sportsball field.

>Why does teaching have such a bad stigma?
Teachers are mostly bad, don't care, and don't know how to teach. That, and unions, leftism, and the tenure system.

>earn more than most people my age
Your wage is theft. The fact that you are happy about it is why people don't like you.
Not only do you earn more than your peers, you earn more and only work half of a year.


I also don't like you because you have likely never worked in a job that required you to be competent.

>tons of free time
Depends on the subject. There is difference between let's say language or math teacher who has no problem with lack of hours/week with dozens to hundreds of tests to check, and lot of kids write like they have epilepsy attack whenever they write which makes reading their shit take long hours, teachers of let's say IT which can just prepare specific input values to test programs written by students which makes testing programs much faster, and PE teachers who just have lessons and fuck off home.
>high salary outside of london, earn more than most people my age
Here it varies a lot. Starting wage is like minimal and lot of people try to find 2 teaching jobs to get by, but because there are several stages of teachers and it's on government payroll, it has lot of bonuses, making it range from like 400 euro to 1500 euro. Most teachers probably earn around 700-900 euro/month. Excavator operator earns more.
>have autonomy
Some of it, yeah. You still have program from above.
>rewarding to see people succeed
True.
>organise after school classes for the smarter kids, teaching things outside of the high school curriculum (calc, diff eq, lin alg, etc)
Unpaid.
>have my own office
You don't.
>high demand for work
Only for stereotypically male subjects because men backed off from school since it's shit pay and no respect job these days.
>lots of room for advancement
Depends what you mean.

Welcome to Eastern Europe. The biggest cancer about education are parents first, then the town hall, then ministry of education. Kids are mostly fine and it can be fun if you know what you're doing and can make interesting lesson.

>Why does teaching have such a bad stigma?
Low pay and because it is something women can do kinda okay it is considered to be a simple task.

I also enjoy teaching but hey, that is life. Best you can do is work at a university so at least when girls ask you at the bar you don't have to say "teacher" but instead "professor" which is more respectable and women are more likely to have banged their professors than their teachers so you have that going.

fuck off yank

I initially wanted to call you on the anti-union gateraid, but you entire post is just an insult on civilization.
Feel free to go live in the middle of nowhere.

>in the USA teachers get paid shit
~$80,000 to teach for 5 classes a week, that amounts to ~20 hour work week. Literal months worth of vacation time throughout the year, and 3+ months of continuous vacation each year.
40 minutes of the workday being a lunch break, and an extra 30-50 minutes of breaks between classes.
No requirement to be competent or effective.

If teachers worked a real job (year round, full time), they would have an effective pay rate of more than $250,000 annually.

Please, go ahead, keep buying into the brain washing that teachers are underpaid and need more gibbs.


You're a faggot.

>i had amazing teachers growing up
I had a total of 4 through all of k-12. The rest were garbage.

>some of them have to put up with too much shit from incompetent lawmakers and administrators to fucking animal students
This is true, but they are getting paid a fortune to do so.

>the anti-union gateraid
Tell me, why do immensely overpaid people with absurd benefits, no danger, and whose only potential threat to their job is kiddie diddling, need a union?

>overpaid
that's not how the meme goes

See: >If teachers worked a real job (year round, full time), they would have an effective pay rate of more than $250,000 annually.

Yeah but they have to work off hours too
marking and shit

>need a union?
In a democracy, everyone needs a union. Like it or not, in a democracy if you want to defend your own interests (whatever they may be, good or bad) you need to get directly involved in politics. When the vote is spread among hundreds of millions, your vote is worth nothing. And when your politicians are already in the pocket of someone else, your vote is worth less than nothing.

Everyone should aspire to be directly involved in politics protecting their interests. Even if they are an evil corporation. Everyone has the right to defend their interests. And if you do not defend your own interests, who is going to do it for you?

>it's not a real job because my feelings
Making sure the next generation aren't utter morons is quite important.

Ignore him, he's a retarded libertarian or/and /pol/tard.

It's not a real job because it is way less than full time and amounts to less than 8 months of working a year.

Defend mandatory unions and the repeated calls for more funding and returning worse results than the last time.

Well because to put it frankly, you're most likely bad at your subject. If you were good, you'd be a researcher or a uni professor.


It's not like that really, but more like the bad ones go into teaching and the good ones are most likely not to. Doesn't mean every teacher is an idiot with a bsc that forgot 3/4ths of what he learned in uni.

In my high-school, half the teachers were ignorant + didn't care at all. I think that's the stereotype people have of the profession

Working from home shuffling integers around on a screen for profit is a real job, though, right? What about asset stripping companies you've never seen physically? Define what a 'real job' is so I can see you make a retard of yourself (top tip: separating jobs as real and non-real because of your subjective arbitrary opinions is brainletism) .

There is nothing to defend. I already told you why, in principle, everyone needs a union. What you are then telling me is that the teacher's union's lobbyists are exceptionally good at their job, getting their people huge bonuses and benefits.

So what do you want to tell you? To revoke their right to be politically active? That is not how a democracy works. But listen to what I can take you: If you think their lobbyists are asking for too much, then start your own political movement to lobby against them. You are free to do so in a democracy.

Calm the hell down you sperg. I had plenty of shit teachers myself but even I can tell the job isn't as easy as coming to class Mon-Fri and fuck off after work.
You need to work with annoying kids during AND after school, deal with parents during AND after school, try to make sense of the batshit insane education system during AND after school and manage the teaching work itself during AND after school. It's manager-tier work and even brainlets need to respect that.

This pmuch. I've only had one teacher who flat out said "I don't care about the AP test or your grade, I do care if you learn."
He was more than honest and meant it. He was willing to stay late and help you out, and in return all he expected was for you to show up to class, read the book, and give a legitimate effort on the semi-optional homework.
By far my favorite teacher of all time.

Almost all the others were pretty bad.

How long until 90% of lower divisional professors are replaced with some recording of a famous professor?

>t. pop-sci physicspleb that only watches the Feynman lectures

>"Education"
Any idiot can be a teacher nowadays, and government schools are absolute trash that do more harm than good.

>Those than can, do. Those that can't, teach.

>work with annoying kids during AND after school
If you aren't patient, don't be a teacher.

>deal with parents during AND after school
"Your kid did/didn't do X. They should/shouldn't be doing X."

>try to make sense of the batshit insane education system during AND after school
(interrogative emoji with questioning hand placed upon chin)

>manage the teaching work itself during AND after school
Create a lesson plan. Wow, your job almost entirely done for the rest of your life...

>tons of free time
>high salary outside of london, earn more than most people my age
>have autonomy
>have my own office
>high demand for work
>lots of room for advancement

These things rarely apply to teaching in the US. Our education system is fucked for both students and instructors.

Most likely. Here in Spain, teaching is considered the lowest university degree of them all, and it's plagued by those who failed the requirements for a better degree.
Spanish education is pretty bad, so there may be a link there. Though it may be a bit of a chicken and egg problem

>because statists/marxists exist, you should be a statist/marxist too
WEW LAD, Great logic

There is nothing inherently wrong with unions. There is nothing inherently wrong with political associations.
There is something wrong when they are combined, because they are far more often than not in opposition to liberty.

What is the difference between watching a recording and sitting in a giant lecture hall for these 101 classes?

Most teachers in USA are adjuncts that don't get paid shit. God forbid you teach a class that's mandatory for the student body, it's fucking aids to teach people who would rather be anywhere else in the world than your class.

The only exception to this are the tenured professors, who get paid way too much and regulated way too little.

One is a scam, the other is a bigger scam.

>If you aren't patient, don't be a teacher.
Exactly, I would pay good money for a genuinely patient teacher.

>"Your kid did/didn't do X. They should/shouldn't be doing X."
I won't be paying you if you only offer platitudes to my kids. Do some work and actually teach them good values.

>(interrogative emoji with questioning hand placed upon chin)
My friend, education is highly politicised in many regions of the world (including yours) and there are always vested interests that do not produce good education. You would be a fool to think that teachers don't have to wrestle with those on a daily basis and on the whim of some whackjob politician deciding to implement some batshit insane propaganda in the school.

>Create a lesson plan. Wow, your job almost entirely done for the rest of your life...
HAHAAHAHAHA
Try planning shit for kids and see if they follow, I dare you.

Listen, I'm not a teacher but you're a fucking retard to think they're not worth the money they earn, if not more. They are literally helping you raise your kids and that's one of the most privileged jobs you can even fathom.

t. /pol/tard

Not everyone is willing to participate in publication rat race that being researcher in university often is.
Some people, especially women want to work with kids specifically.
Not everyone is interested in high-end science or is intelligent enough to reachhighest level. Simple physics experiments that you can actually apply in day to day life are much more enjoyable than nanotechnology or trying to cook piece of ceramics over and over again.
Besides teaching is needed anyway so lot of the argument doesn't matter. It's like saying to the trash collector that he could be CEO. Maybe, but someone has to take out the trash, otherwise in couple months city will turn into stinking shithole full of epidemics.

How the fuck do you fix education?

Depoliticize it. Make it purely about neutral education, not upbringing. That's parents job. More emphasis on practical stuff. Maybe separation between girls and boys schools.

I could see that for high school
But uni is like adult shit
Not babies anymore

This, the problem is everywhere.

>I would pay good money for a genuinely patient teacher.
I agree, the problem is that I would not be willing to pay more than good money. I am not willing to pay an absurd amount of money.

>>Do some work and actually teach them good values.
>my child belongs to the state
>my parenting faults are those of the state and not my own

>the whim of some whackjob politician deciding to implement some batshit insane propaganda in the school.
Mate, you have no idea how many times I was told whites are the root of all evil, la raza is a legitimate movement, islam is a religon of peace, the crusades were not justified and were carried out because evil catholics, socialism is good, communism is not inherently flawed, liberty is racist, etc etc etc
They're doing a pretty piss poor job at not implementing propaganda.

>Try planning shit for kids and see if they follow, I dare you.
Budgeting time is part of a lesson plan. Always plan for the least efficient use of time, and if you luck out, keep going on.

You can't just depoliticize it. It's like saying to take the corners off of a square

Sure you can.

Question was about education in general, not just higher education. When it comes to higher education alone depoliticization alone would help a lot, then you just implement some system that won't value having the biggest amount of students, or change funding mechanism to focus more on practical outcomes. It would fuck up branches like philosophy etc, but I see no reason to not to make stuff like that optional addition to already practical courses, or somehow incorporate it into other fields. For example law overlaps a lot since lot of laws are based on stuff like utilitarism and other philosophical stances.

You can. Math, biology, language etc are neutral. They just tell you how things are. Religion, ethics, those new classes about gender shit that people are trying to push now aren't neutral. They tell you how to act. Of course parents might want to have their kids have religion or some kind of basic ethics needed to function in the system in schools, but you have to remember that this is a gateway for the state to potential indoctrination. Governments change, just because right now you might have some reasonable people on the high chair doesn't mean it'll always be that way. The only political things that should be allowed in schools are history, which shouldn't really be poltical, but since winners write history and point of view matters, it will always be stained to some degree, and class about system which only tells how political system in your country works (or how is it supposed to), and why, what was the reason to adopt such system and laws. That's all.

Am I correct to assume that you seem to hate their pay packet because you seemed to have had shit teachers in the past who liked to push propaganda and didn't give a shit about the kids?

That doesn't mean that the job itself doesn't have the value or merit it receives today. I'm sorry you got shit teachers but I am more than willing to pay them more so that they have a better incentive to step their shit up.

I'm not sure why you're indulging him, he obviously only has Veeky Forums to tell him what being an educator is like.

Because I feel like LARPing as a parent for once and be the dad he never had for a couple minutes.

first reply best reply
im on board with this beimg a chicken and egg problem. the lower a society thinks of teaching the less people will actually want to be good teachers.

How do you think they got those perks?

Selling votes to the DNC.

>Am I correct to assume that you seem to hate their pay packet because you seemed to have had shit teachers in the past who liked to push propaganda and didn't give a shit about the kids?
No. I dislike it because it is many times greater than what it should be. The quality of education provided is a completely distinct issue.

>That doesn't mean that the job itself doesn't have the value or merit it receives today.
The job has merit and value. The problem is that they pay is many times greater than the value of the work done.

>I'm sorry you got shit teachers but I am more than willing to pay them more so that they have a better incentive to step their shit up.
We've been trying that for about 50 years now. It hasn't helped.


REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE FUCKING GOOK MOOT.
I DONT WANT TO SOLVE 6 NON-LEGACY CAPTCHAS

t. reddit spacing

No I'm sorry.

You are terribly missinformed.

The IQ that you posses must have a very low IQ, heh, not that IQ is science anyway. IQ is racist.

I have never used reddit, so I don't know why you would attempt to malign me like that.

Additionally, I don't believe you know what reddit spacing is.

I would even be willing to wager that you think that it isn't a mistake in formatting to not have a line break between greentext quotes.

You would have us believe that a wall of text would be preferable, and that any use of a line break is le reddit maymay

tl;dr

You are a faggot. And this is what reddit spacing is.

> The problem is that they pay is many times greater than the value of the work done.
And this is where the crux of the issue is. If you don't value the education in [X] system, find somebody and PAY that somebody better so that they don't end up relying on the system you despise. This is the entire basis of privatisation.

You can't decide to reduce teachers' pay packets in [X] and send your kids in [X] and then decide to complain. If you truly valued education, you would be backing for increase pay in the private sectors, never decrease in pay , that you've done the research in their education practice that you are satisfied with and wish to promote.

Decreasing pay in any education sector only serves to devalue education as it is and will only fuel the fire in our current system(s). You need to decry the shitty education for what it is, leading to wages falling naturally instead of lobbying for lower wages.

become a teacher:
borrow a lesson plan from another teacher.
then have the school force your students to pay for textbooks that teach the students what you're supposed to be teaching them.
then your day consists of teaching the same stuff several times during the day, instead of teaching new stuff.
then the next year, you just repeat the lessen plan again, and continue repeating the same stuff again

/thread

>5 classes a week, that amounts to ~20 hour work week
20/5 = 4
Each class is 4 hours?

Highschool courses are typically taught more than once a week. 5 1.5 hour classes 2.5 times a week. (it's actually an overestimate)

Ah, that makes sense. Here I was thinking "class" referred to the actual class session, not to the subject.

I'm a music education major AMA

>teachers deserve to be treated a lot better here.
b-but that's against Voter Suppression, one of the holy trinity

I) gerrymandering
II) voter suppression
III) whipping up the fervor of the single-issue voters and then cashing in for the 1%

Do you touch kids? That's the only thing I remember about my primary school music teacher. I barely remember interacting with him at all and years later I hear he's been arrested.

Maybe in a very bad school with a very bad teacher.

>teachers only work during the official in-class hours
>20 hour work week
Either retarded or trolling

This is how it is in PA too. A school district's performance on these tests basically dictates how much funding they get from the state and where that money goes (side note, I always thought it was fucked that more money is given to better schools...shouldn't it be the opposite?). So the district forces teachers to spend a bunch of time on this crap like every year since third grade. It's insane, standardized testing is a real problem in the US.

Agreed. Salary is also highly dependant on this as well, and that's true for many jobs. Like I remember reading there are countries where laywers/doctors (jobs seen as high-class in the US) are paid poorly because they aren't respected in some countries, I think in eastern Europe.

It's highschool. Out of class work amounts to answering simple questions, and maybe sending a few emails.
You do know that teachers get grading assistants, right?

What do you do?

Those salaries don't look like what I've seen for CS in my state.

Those aren't dollars.

>teachers get grading assistants
Not the guy you responded to but, you're wrong. Maybe if you're talking exclusively upper-class private schools. Most public schools couldn't afford that, at least not in my area of the US. I'm not even from an area with traditionally bad public schooling either.

Wow, interesting. Really makes you think

Education is so important that most people dont think they should pay for it

because it's brainlet tier and all you do is explain simple stuff to a bunch of retards
if all you care about is salary then go into petroleum engineering or something you monkey

The students are grading assistants and provide unpaid labor.

>teachers just want salary

Low iq desu

>It's highschool
>You do know that teachers get grading assistants, right?
Wrong.
US doesn't until college and elsewhere it's obviously reliant on funds they keep cutting.

this definitely tallies with what's happening in france right now

yeah let's reward bad schools!
hey, stop letting the kinds in your class do well on the test, you trying to get our funding cut?

I'm not really sure what the point here is, because they pass shit students specifically so they can pretend they're "good" schools. But they do this for the kids, for the future, for a bunch of positive buzzwords. Outside of /pol/-tier mental gymnastics, I'm not seeing a good argument for punishing students at this level.

What

As an American teacher, I think that I should take some of the blame along with all the other ones. I love my job, and I'd like to think I do it well, but I'll be one of the first to tell you that our system is broken and nobody seems willing to put the work in to fix it.