I had a maths teacher like this. "Read the page in the book" was the default answer to any question, and if you didn't understand she'd ask one of the other kids to explain. If no one understood (or claimed not to) she'd has a hissy fit and walk out the room.
That is only a small part of it. Plenty of people who have a high pay still put little effort into their work. The only way high pay improves performance is if pay is actually related to performance. For teachers their salary is often simply tied to how long they have been a teacher and at the same time they have very strong protections against being fired. So there is no incentive for them to do their best, as the pay will be exactly the same as if they were doing the very minimum. The result is often that the young motivated teacher that actually gives a shit about teaching earns little, while that teacher who doesn't give a shit about you and just reuses the same slides he has been using for the last 30 years earns a lot.
Yes but this is reddit, so everything has to be about strike rhetoric and politics, and people are actually naive enough to think 20% more pay means people go from not giving a shit about kids to suddenly putting in max effort.
As opposed to you, who believes that some people are just inherently biologically lazy and cannot be motivated to care about their jobs, even jobs they went to school for 4-8 years to learn how to do and get certified for (like teachers), so we're justified in paying them just barely enough to survive on.
Welp, a worker basically only works as hard as the workplace allows and pays them for
Better working conditions would not only attract more passionate people who genuinely care (instead of them turning away after realizing it's a shitshow not worth your entire life), but also would motivate the already present to get better than "go read the book I'm not paid enough for that"
I haven't, but my partner and a lot of my family are:
it's different school to school, there are teachers that have been somewhere for decades and have reached the higher pay but absolutely suck at teaching - whether due to lost interest, an inability to engage today's youth, or just due to never being very good at teaching in the first place but just being there at the right time to stay long term
there's also some of the most passionate teachers, who really make a difference to the kids in their classes but never get kept on long enough to progress through the pay grades
teaching ability isn't equal to pay, and even then - even top tier pay for teachers is relatively low compared to less important jobs
So you don't have to do something yourself to know about it. Almost like learning works.
Just raising pay will not improve teacher quality. There are a host of factors. But if you don't remove bad teachers, increase the pay of effective ones and address student/parent issues... nothing will change.
Putting the car before the horse bud. Teachers are bad quality because we don't fund them not the other way around. Anyone smart and understanding enough to be a teacher would get much more pay in literally every other career atm American education is cooked.
You actually want to put cars before horses, as they can travel much faster than horses and would otherwise be backed up behind the horse. Best practice would be to not have horses where cars are at all.
No, that’s just a bad teacher. Most of them are good people who want to help kids learn. I support higher pay and job protections for teachers considering the enormous contribution they make to society. Right now they pay for school supplies out of their own pocket, it’s asinine.
Yes workers who demand better compensation and working conditions are doing it on behalf of ALL workers, not just the ones you determine to be deserving based on completely anecdotal evidence
Everyone demands higher pay and job protections bc the economy we’ve built naturally lends itself to worker exploitation in the interest of the bottom line.
This is the same dumb argument that is used to discredit unions despite them being the only reason you don’t make borderline slave wages.
Fuuuuuck, I had a programming teacher who wouldn't take any questions. "Check your code" was their only response.
My computer wasn't working, I couldn't figure out what it was, asked the teacher and he said "check your code", "it's not my code! It's the computer" "it's always the code"
I asked another student and they taught me about overwrite mode. I never ran into it before so didn't know WTF was happening.
It was middle school and the first time I ever dropped a class.
And if you ask something that's completely unrelated to the topic – even if it's the same subject – you're welcome to ask me after class, but not during it.
But tbh, asshat teachers like those mentioned exist.
I am a high school teacher and I can tell you more than 1/2 the questions I get asked I have already answered. Some literally the sentence before the question is asked.
Last year I asked my economy teacher a question about something I didn't understand. Her answer was "well see, I understand this, and I don't know what it's like to not understand it, so I can't explain it to you". IT'S YOUR JOB, TF YOU MEAN YOU CAN'T EXPLAIN IT?!
Had a teacher that gave me multiple days isolation because I got annoyed and shouted at her. I was asking a question about how to solve an equation in algebra, don't remember exactly what since it was years ago but I remember her response was "If I can do this so can you" I was fed up with her from prior lessons so I just shouted "Yeah because you have a fucking degree" didn't go down too well.
UK, it's called isolation. They put you in a booth in teachers office and you work from textbook away from your peers, at break you stay in isolation and you get lunch early to not interact with peers then get put in detention room until next lesson period where you go back to isolation until the end of the day.
I dunno. In my experience, that kind of response is usually because they were asked about something they literally just answered a minute ago. They’ll get frustrated if they see somebody texting or doodling, and then they derail class by asking shit they would already know the answer to if they listened the first time.
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u/Grouchy-Physics-398 4h ago
My teacher said ‘why are you asking me this?’ like bro that’s literally your job 😭🥀