I have a shit load of respect for anyone that's willing to teach kids. Fuck that business. I was a cunt at school and I was one of the decent ones.
Jobs/Professions
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no country for old wainds
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- Nov 23, 2002
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i was strongly considering becoming a primary school teacher for a while, i think i'd find the actual teaching part super enjoyable but it's all the other shit that's mindnumbing, the marking and paperwork and lesson planning. it's hard to have any kind of life when you're doing that shit, and i'm not sure the vacation time makes up for it. most teachers i know seem pretty miserable.
crimsonfloyd
Active Member
I'll be the contradictory voice and say that teaching is a super fun job. To be good at it, you need to love the age group you work with, love your content, and know how to teach it well. If you don't have those three pieces in place, then yes, you will be miserable.
As far as the extra things, they are time consuming, but most of them are things I enjoy doing. I love lesson planning. It means I get to go deep on a philosophical text, a novel, or a political text and think about how I'm gonna make it accessible and relevant to a room of teenagers of various skill levels. It's like working on a really complex puzzle. The one part that is not so fun is grading. Reading about the same topic 90 times can be mind-numbing, even if the kids are doing a good job. And if they’re not, it can be truly brutal.
As far as the extra things, they are time consuming, but most of them are things I enjoy doing. I love lesson planning. It means I get to go deep on a philosophical text, a novel, or a political text and think about how I'm gonna make it accessible and relevant to a room of teenagers of various skill levels. It's like working on a really complex puzzle. The one part that is not so fun is grading. Reading about the same topic 90 times can be mind-numbing, even if the kids are doing a good job. And if they’re not, it can be truly brutal.
no country for old wainds
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i struggle to imagine how you'd love your 'content' in primary school though, as it tends to be basic coverage of every subject under the sun. but i guess if you could answer that you'd probably be a primary school teacher.
i dislike probably 80% of teenagers so i don't think high school teaching would work for me
i dislike probably 80% of teenagers so i don't think high school teaching would work for me
Phylactery
Active Member
The lesson planning is the part where you get to be creative - I think you'd enjoy that part and I think it'd be a lot easier in primary where you have one class for the whole year. I'm planning for a ridiculous range of students. Some that will achieve the highest grade at GCSE and some that will not get a GCSE. It's obscene. Even within sets the ability range is huge, especially in my top set.
But yeah, the lesson planning isn't the mindnumbing part, it's the paperwork and the marking!
I didn't choose primary for the same reason as you, because the stuff they learn is very basic. In an ideal world I'd like to teach just sixth form classes. Having said that, I love teaching my year 7s! They are so enthusiastic and have a thirst for knowledge that high school seems to suck out of them by year 8/9! I have a second to bottom set year 7 and they were so interested when I was talking about prime numbers and the largest one discovered so far. They also say cute things like "if I started counting now until I died, I'd eventually reach the last number!"
I do wish I had a much more reduced timetable than I do - teaching over 40 lessons a fortnight means I can't put the effort into them to make them all as engaging and as interactive as I'd like. I feel that teacher time should be focused on lesson planning rather than marking and other things but that's just not the way it is currently.
Einherjar86
Active Member
I enjoy lesson-planning way more than grading, and get a kick out of it honestly. It's probably different teaching college-level students, though.
This semester was rough, mainly because I had a class full of freshmen who couldn't write. A few pulled off A- papers by the end of the semester, so that's something at least.
Phylactery
Active Member
I actually don’t mind marking papers. But that’s probably because I’m Maths and it’s much quicker. It’s correct or it isn’t. There are some annoying, multi-step questions where they can gain marks for correct working with incorrect numbers. They’re particularly painful when it’s students who don’t lay their work out in a clear, logical way! I’d hate to mark English based papers.
It’s book marking I can’t stand. I have too many classes to mark it meaningful or purposeful and it’s juat so time consuming. Even at 5 minute per book that’s nearly 3 hours for your average class.
It’s book marking I can’t stand. I have too many classes to mark it meaningful or purposeful and it’s juat so time consuming. Even at 5 minute per book that’s nearly 3 hours for your average class.
Einherjar86
Active Member
English papers are tough because a) you're trying to coach them how to construct critical arguments, and b) you're also trying to clean up sentence structure, which can be difficult, especially given that it's possible to compose a grammatically and syntactically correct sentence that's still atrocious.
rms
Active Member
very surprised at how many people dont want to be teachers / can't put up with it. maybe the most self important moments in my life are at instructing younger individuals at getting better at their job/life. planned on being a history high school teacher until the gov't cut me off, but marking papers is really awesome too. I was fortunate enough to have a few history profs who spent enough time to annotate how terrible my writing was and offered their services and it has improved my abilities greatly (when i care 
).
not sure anything in this life is greater than helping your fellow man. god damn savages on here.
).not sure anything in this life is greater than helping your fellow man. god damn savages on here.
Phylactery
Active Member
And if all students were like you and willing to take their feedback on board and use it to improve then I wouldn’t mind spending more time on it. Unfortunately that’s just not the case. Getting them to respond to their feedback is a chore.
They seem to think I spend hours marking their books and homework and giving them feedback for fun and as a way to nag at them for not showing workings out or not following my examples.
They seem to think I spend hours marking their books and homework and giving them feedback for fun and as a way to nag at them for not showing workings out or not following my examples.
Einherjar86
Active Member
I was fortunate enough to have a few history profs who spent enough time to annotate how terrible my writing was and offered their services and it has improved my abilities greatly (when i care
Which clearly isn't on a metal forum...
I had two students who, between their second and third papers, submitted worse material the next time around. It's really frustrating when students appear to not care about the comments I give them.
rms
Active Member
Dak
mentat
I feel for college instructors in the abstract. They get worse than raw material to work with, and the institutional pressure is to simply pass the bulk. It's shit turtles all the way down the educational chain. Perverse institutional incentives, apathetic parents/students, and quickly cynical educators among those that are actually competent. A good friend is a newly minted public school teacher and the shit he's relayed to me that he shows up to with a fresh face each day of his first semester is far more difficult than one on one psychotherapy, at least for my strengths and inclinations. By the time kids get to college in this country, if they don't have most of the basic skills, they are more or less beyond the help of all but the most intensive assistance. Which is why we have massive curves and functionally illiterate graduates.
Einherjar86
Active Member
Fuck all that. I flunked one student this semester. He skipped nine classes. Nine fucking classes, when all his peers were coming to class and working. And two other students got Ds. Shit writing is shit writing, no way around it.
Dak
mentat
D isn't failing at my university, and you can fail 3 out of 30 as a professor. The problem isn't even that half should fail, it's that the material has been so dumbed down that 75% just need to show up and not be on their phone to pass most classes below 3000 level. Again, for the more difficult material, you just curve the shit out of it.
Funerary_Doom
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
I actually really like teaching, but like any job there's a lot of things wrong with the way it's done. For example, very quickly I realized I'm just one person and can't fix every single fucked up thing in society no matter how much I'd like to. Also, in NYC teachers are rated on a rubric called Danielson. It's dreadful, and it doesn't include all learners. Half of my class can't read so there's a lot of teacher lead stuff I have to do, and Danielson says that's not good. But I shut my door, and do what I need to do for my students, and when observations come around I show them what they want to keep my rating good. I also use a shit ton of assistive technology (audio books) because I've read studies on how it helps struggling readers.
Sometimes I believe teaching is degrading, especially the way it's done. Teachers are not respected by administration and they pick apart things like the way the day's aim is written on your lesson plan as oppose to whether or not the students learned a skill/concept that day. Or if what you were teaching was relevant to the unit. A lesson is alive, and when it's written it's simply a template. Sometimes you make adjustments as you go, but according to administration if it's not written on your lesson it didn't happen. Also, administration at my school have no clue about special education and are often surprised when I present them with student data that shows how far behind these kids are. Ultimately, I would like to create a curriculum that incorporates 7th grade concepts, but also incorporates tier 2 and tier 3 strategies for struggling readers. To be quite frank, kids are not going to get anywhere if they do not have their foundations. So we can teach them a 7th grade skill like citing textual evidence all we want, but when it comes time for them to actually read a passage and interpret it independently they wont be able to do so without scaffolds unless they can read. There's something inherently wrong with the system is if so many kids can just fly under the radar like that.
I thought I looked too young to teach high school. But it's definitely a thought a few years from now, maybe.
Sometimes I believe teaching is degrading, especially the way it's done. Teachers are not respected by administration and they pick apart things like the way the day's aim is written on your lesson plan as oppose to whether or not the students learned a skill/concept that day. Or if what you were teaching was relevant to the unit. A lesson is alive, and when it's written it's simply a template. Sometimes you make adjustments as you go, but according to administration if it's not written on your lesson it didn't happen. Also, administration at my school have no clue about special education and are often surprised when I present them with student data that shows how far behind these kids are. Ultimately, I would like to create a curriculum that incorporates 7th grade concepts, but also incorporates tier 2 and tier 3 strategies for struggling readers. To be quite frank, kids are not going to get anywhere if they do not have their foundations. So we can teach them a 7th grade skill like citing textual evidence all we want, but when it comes time for them to actually read a passage and interpret it independently they wont be able to do so without scaffolds unless they can read. There's something inherently wrong with the system is if so many kids can just fly under the radar like that.
I thought I looked too young to teach high school. But it's definitely a thought a few years from now, maybe.
Dak
mentat
Einherjar86
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