(no subject)

[eirias]

Straight from the assmilliner: how we can solve all the education world's problems, including student learning difficulties and low teacher salaries, with nine hour school days.

*pause while I wait for the teachers in my audience to regain their composure*

Just once in this essay I would have liked to see him acknowledge that

A) students (and teachers!) have attention spans, and
B) when teachers ask for "a raise," they are not asking for "three extra hours of work each day, for which you will pay me the same lousy wages I already make."

It's a pretty old editorial that I stumbled upon while taking a break and reading WP archives; otherwise I would totally write to this guy and ask him, as politely as possible, if these things have crossed his mind.

Comments

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Yes, very much so :). Trust me, I can still feel the things that make teachers burn out (I'm in my third year), but the forces getting into my heart and making me want to stay are at least as strong. And yes, it does have to do with having autonomy to teach my own way (which is a kind of respect), and having parents who (psychotic and divorce-ridden as they may sometimes be) expect their children to behave and to learn, and having huge piles of resources (which is not to say I am highly paid -- public school teachers almost always make more than private school teachers -- but I don't have to buy stuff for my classroom and the school will fund interesting classroom things and professional development).

And, going back to that autonomy, I think it has a lot to do with creativity. Public schools are really fixated on credentials, and, while I do support the idea that teachers should know how to do what they do, I don't think credentials (or the lack thereof), as currently constituted, are an effective way to measure whether they can. It's very common in the private school world to run into people who have had a pre-teaching career and this is treated as an asset (as opposed to public school, where not having gone straight into the credentialing process in college makes it practically impossible, and anyway what kind of suck-ass teacher are you to have not been born dying to do this?). And public schools tend to centralize curricula a lot, whereas private schools tend to give you a lot of leeway. So they attract creative people, and the ability to be creative with minimal bureaucratic encumberment is in itself a form of compensation.

They also tend to have much more all-encompassing cultures (especially at a boarding school) -- which is good and bad -- but teaching at a private school is really being a member of a community, and one which *includes* administration and parents.