About 40% of those people who major in education, get a teaching job and start teaching find another job before their tenure year. Very few who survive that five years are poor teachers. I have taught and I have worked in an office. The major difference is that when you are working in an office you do not have to be paying 100% attention 100% of the time. This isn’t a demand from the front office. It is necessary to maintain the classroom discipline and get the job done. A poor teacher pays for it in student disrespect, and they pay for it heavily.
As for summers off, there are mandatory inservice classes and meetings that take up a lot of time. And, time will be needed to work on your graduate work, since most districts have the bachelor’s track set up so that raises after about 5 years don’t keep up with inflation. The masters is pretty much necessary for a living wage. Another option is to work a summer job. A friend of mine started mowing lawns and within three years was making too much to make it sensible to come back to teaching.
And, when you leave work, you leave work. Each class requires about 20 minutes of prep time if you are revising lessons you have done before. If it’s a new lesson, an hour or two is more likely. After getting a total of 6 1/2 years of college and working for 32 years, I was making about 75% of what my nephew was two years into a sales job.
All of the ideas for improving education add about 20% to the classroom hours, and no additional money seems to be available to get extra people to help with the job. Paying the people who are doing it more might make them happy, but it’s not going to increase the quality, because it would be an overwhelming amount of work. Eventually, they are going to get to the point where no one with the intelligence to do the job is going to be dumb enough to take it.
In Finland, one must have a master’s degree to teach grade school. Plus, they pay these teachers about as substantially as the best professionals in the nation. That‘s Finland.
When i was in high school I had a very favorite teacher,he also drove school bus,worked Saturdays at the bank and a good neighbor. helped his brother farm in the summer too.Afew years later while talking to 3 young guys still in school, I asked them each to write down their vfavorite teacher and i would write mine down. I said I bet we will all have the same answer and you know what ?? WE DID Rest in peace Ed Ritterspach!!
School year in USA is about 180 days. Germany and Japan 220. Those 40 days per year mean that by the time a student reaches 9th grade in those countries he is doing the equivalent of 11th grade work in the USA. Other countries have longer school years and do similarly better than USAian students. Teachers are trained and paid better and more highly respected outside of the USA.
ddjg over 1 year ago
This was November 6, 2010; Barack Obama was president.
Diane Lee Premium Member over 1 year ago
About 40% of those people who major in education, get a teaching job and start teaching find another job before their tenure year. Very few who survive that five years are poor teachers. I have taught and I have worked in an office. The major difference is that when you are working in an office you do not have to be paying 100% attention 100% of the time. This isn’t a demand from the front office. It is necessary to maintain the classroom discipline and get the job done. A poor teacher pays for it in student disrespect, and they pay for it heavily.
As for summers off, there are mandatory inservice classes and meetings that take up a lot of time. And, time will be needed to work on your graduate work, since most districts have the bachelor’s track set up so that raises after about 5 years don’t keep up with inflation. The masters is pretty much necessary for a living wage. Another option is to work a summer job. A friend of mine started mowing lawns and within three years was making too much to make it sensible to come back to teaching.
And, when you leave work, you leave work. Each class requires about 20 minutes of prep time if you are revising lessons you have done before. If it’s a new lesson, an hour or two is more likely. After getting a total of 6 1/2 years of college and working for 32 years, I was making about 75% of what my nephew was two years into a sales job.
All of the ideas for improving education add about 20% to the classroom hours, and no additional money seems to be available to get extra people to help with the job. Paying the people who are doing it more might make them happy, but it’s not going to increase the quality, because it would be an overwhelming amount of work. Eventually, they are going to get to the point where no one with the intelligence to do the job is going to be dumb enough to take it.
ddjg over 1 year ago
In Finland, one must have a master’s degree to teach grade school. Plus, they pay these teachers about as substantially as the best professionals in the nation. That‘s Finland.
MuddyUSA Premium Member over 1 year ago
Oooops…
Sneaker over 1 year ago
When i was in high school I had a very favorite teacher,he also drove school bus,worked Saturdays at the bank and a good neighbor. helped his brother farm in the summer too.Afew years later while talking to 3 young guys still in school, I asked them each to write down their vfavorite teacher and i would write mine down. I said I bet we will all have the same answer and you know what ?? WE DID Rest in peace Ed Ritterspach!!
Teto85 Premium Member over 1 year ago
School year in USA is about 180 days. Germany and Japan 220. Those 40 days per year mean that by the time a student reaches 9th grade in those countries he is doing the equivalent of 11th grade work in the USA. Other countries have longer school years and do similarly better than USAian students. Teachers are trained and paid better and more highly respected outside of the USA.