There's much more to this story. My mother, a high school calculus teacher for the last 22 years is so ready to retire.
I didn't think my mom would ever retire, she spends countless hours coming up with unique lesson plans for the kids - they usually involve games, real world use cases and many ah-ha moments. She lives for those moments when a kid lights up when they understand the value of what their learning.
Now though, over the last 8 years, she told me that parents have ruined the job she loves. Especially now that she has to post everyone's grades online, instantly emails roll in when a student didn't perform as well as the parent expected.
She told me of an email she received that said "X is trying to get into Princeton - an A- isn't going to get her in. What extra credit can she do to make this an A?".
It's endless and my mom, for fear of a lawsuit, doesn't know what to do. The teachers union in Massachusetts made all the teachers sign liability waivers and arbitration waivers if a lawsuit happens. My mom is scared stiff and either bends over, or doesn't and let's the vice principal or principal take the heat, ultimately it leading to an extra credit assignment.
My mom's job sounds miserable and if you were to ask me 15 years ago, what I might do in my retirement - I would have said taught CS at a disadvantaged high school. Now though, I'm seconding guessing that retirement plan.
My entire family are teachers (Mum, Dad, Sister, Brother), and have all had to deal with this to varying degrees, and have had it consume their lives at various times. My brother has the best work-life balance of any teacher I have ever met, and I think his approach is brilliant.
Teaching is one of those careers where the expectation is on the teacher to endlessly do more and work harder, "For the kids", and if you keep doing it, you'll work more and harder forever, endlessly.
My brother does a fantastic job, and works very hard for his students. What he does though, is walk out at 4pm and NEVER does work at home. He doesn't check his emails, he doesn't grade work and maybe only once or twice in five years has he done a lesson plan outside 8am-4pm.
If parent emails, or meetings, or "school paperwork" or whatever queue up he just makes it infinitely clear that he must choose between doing the best job for his students, or spend time with the parents or at school meetings. He does do thing pro-actively like call parents if need-be, but he does not spend hours of his personal time dealing with "helicopter parents" or stupid school meeting requirements.
It requires the right balance of "push back", but it can work very well when done correctly.
FWIW, he has quickly been promoted to the head of maths and had a real shot at a "leading teacher" position, so obviously he's very good and the entire school-body agrees.
That sounds like a great life-work balance, but it also sounds like a privileged position that is unrealistic for many teachers. My girlfriend teaches art to kids aged 8-14 at an urban public school, and she has zero time during the day for lesson planning, grading, seating plans, hanging up artwork, dealing with parents, etc. On most days she has to stay behind for several hours, and she often works throughout the weekend. She doesn't get paid overtime (nor does the school offer health insurance or 401(k)) because she's technically a contractor -- the school can't afford full time hires -- and she constantly has to spend her own money on supplies and materials for her classes. Refusing to work outside work hours would be career suicide, pretty much.
It's not unique to teaching. Your employer will take from you as much as you will give. Worse, your insane hours and effort eventually become the expected minimum. To prevent this, many years ago I started setting the timer to 8 hours and 30 minutes (the latter is to account for lunch). Once the timer beeps, I get up and GTFO. No matter what. This works great.
I've found that's how I have to do it, too. Best decision I ever made was moving an hour away from where I worked too. I never see kids out anywhere, and never feel pressure to not do things I enjoy that might be looked down on in a rural conservative community (drinking, mostly). I also never really have to deal with seeing students out so no awkward convos there, either. And it gives me time to wake up in the morning and prepare as well as dissociate from it in the evening.
I also always try to leave at 3:20,which is when we're free (7:30-3:20,tho I usually get there early to copy).
Work life is great, and I don't do anything in my breaks, either. But I'm still looking to get out for various other reasons I've documented elsewhere.
I had a teacher like that in high school. He taught AP/Honors government and had some of the highest pass rates for any teacher in the school. He stayed after school for a fixed time - 30 or 45 minutes - no longer - and most of that was spent with students. It took him FOREVER to grade tests and assignments. But, he was one of the best teachers I had in those 4 years and I, along with most of my peers, aced both exams that year (he did AP US gov in one semester and AP comparative gov in the other).
Presumably the backpresure of requests does not go away - when parents email for information, they do not stop just because they didn’t get a response. They will reach out through other methods. Do you know how that irreducible workload gets resolved, other than getting passed to colleagues who do put in extra effort/hours?
> X is trying to get into Princeton - an A- isn't going to get her in. What extra credit can she do to make this an A?
That parent is an ass. Having grown up in a family where my parents deferred to teachers over me, even when the former was wrong to the point of harassment, however, it’s an understandable instinct.
Administrators don’t protect children. Boards don’t protect children. That only leaves parents, unchecked. If students had proper means through which to pursue grievances against teachers, I’d hope these parental impulses would recede.
"She can't, because that's the grade she earned in the time alloted. The moving finger, having writ, has moved on.
"However, I'm confident that, with Janie's capabilities, a little more effort from her and help from you, she can easily demonstrate a higher level of mastery and the consequent benefits from longer-term retention.
"Princeton will NOT be a picnic, and developing excellent habits at this time will pay back many-fold. This A- is a vote of confidence that there is room and talent for improvement."
Nice try. I've seen how this goes over with those types.
The parents escalate to the adminstrators, who either involve the student counsellors or talk to the teacher directly. One of these two tell the teacher how they need to better support the student because they need a "little extra help" or can't handle the stress required to turn in homework assignments.
I wish this stuff worked, but these parents typically don't want an answer that requires their student to work harder (or differently). They want the curriculum, assignments, or grading scheme to change until their child gets an A - and they don't care about mastery.
By indicating a personal and subjective intent to be ungenerous, parents will feel (perhaps rightly) that they want to take this further.
Edited to add, my approach would be more like:
"I have graded 8bitsrule as generously as I could under the circumstances, and the grade is final.
8bitsrule will need to show a better understanding of communicating diplomatically in order to succeed in next semester's courses. 8bitsrule could try the following specific tasks over the break:"
I'm a current teacher, and I've noticed this. I have a kid who doesn't want to do anything in class except sit on his phone. Anytime I post a poor grade, his mom emails me asking what can be done to make it higher. The kid has never once asked for himself, and, even though I've told the mother multiple times that the biggest issue is her kid being lazy, nothing changes.
Okay, I get that's more work, and sounds like a hassle. So this isn't a criticism of your mom.
But on the A- and extra credit issue, I never understood the point of rigid grading schemes. I've taught at a college level, and I always give students the chance to improve their grades if they want to put in additional work. To do otherwise seems like saying "nope, even if you learn more and improve to the point of A-level knowledge, you're still getting a lower grade".
> I never understood the point of rigid grading schemes
My wife is a college psychology professor and is fairly strict with her grading scheme. She makes this clear on the first day of class and spells it out directly, in bold, on the syllabus.
Her rationale is this: The likelihood of you asking for extra credit, or excuses, or various "grade grubbing" activities is largely influenced by your socioeconomic background. Students who make special grading requests overwhelmingly skew white and female and are more likely to take place at institutions that take students from more affluent backgrounds. She doesn't want her grading inadvertently biased against males, non-whites, or less affluent students so her grades are final. Despite this inflexibility, her student evaluations are sky-high.
It’s more work, and that’s exactly the problem. A teacher deserves to go home and enjoy their family and life outside of work. The only way to make this possible is to have students and parents understand that after a certain point the grade is simply final, so if you want a good grade it’s your responsibility to learn the material prior to exams or large projects or assignments being due. Everyone knows this; there is no secret. So I don’t think it’s fair at all to expect the teacher to do more work for you when you didn’t put in the effort to learn the material the first time.
It’s obnoxious and unfair that squeaky wheels with pushy parents get do overs and normal kids get screwed. My dad travelled for work and mom was a nurse. There was no time for them to go in and harass teachers over my grades.
If little Jimmy wants to get into Princeton, he should study.
I agree with the stance that the +/- nomenclature should be taken outback and shot. It's that bad.
A+ Student has demonstrated that they have exceeded a firm grasp of the subject. (How do you measure to 11 on a scale of 1-10?)
A Student has demonstrated that they have a firm grasp of the subject. (makes sense, this means they know their stuff.)
A- Student kinda has a firm grasp of the subject. (WTF?)
Now apply that silliness to B, C, and D. A,B,C,D,F is enough. Excellent understanding, Good understanding, General understanding, Poor understanding, Does not understand.
In life there are things you won't always get second chances for.
The problem is the absurd college process that way overemphasizes clearly inflated grades in a ridiculous race to get into college. It's a shame what kids have to go through these days.
In the real world, you don’t get a chance to get “extra credit work” when you don’t do your job at the level the job expects of you.
Why should students be coddled instead of being prepared for the real world? I have a high school student who is always getting better grades because of “extra credit” and “make up tests”. I cringe every time he does it.
If we accept that the characteristics that grades are meant to represent are dynamic, what is the benefit of recording them at all? They will be perpetually out of date as people continue to learn (and forget).
If you learn more, the improvement will be demonstrated in later grades. Grades have to be final at some point; it's more fair if that time is the same for everyone.
A better way to handle this case is to drop the student's lowest grade, or maybe even the lowest couple of grades.
> I've taught at a college level, and I always give students the chance to improve their grades if they want to put in additional work.
Isn't it 'rigid' to give only a limited amount of time( end of yr or whatever) for that chance. Seems like saying "nope, even if you learn more and improve to the point of A-level knowledge, you're still getting a lower grade".
This sounds a lot like my mom's situation. In the last decade, parents and admins have made her job terrible.
The parents make similar demands regarding grades - if their kid does poorly on an exam, it doesn't even enter into their mind that they didn't study or are super lazy, it's automatically the teacher's fault for making the test too hard or teaching the material poorly. Same goes for kids failing a class because they never turn in assignments - the teacher is failing to sufficiently motivate their student.
This would be manageable but for the fact that the administration always takes the side of the parents. If a kid cheats on a test, it's a "coping mechanism" or a "useful real world skill - there's no black and white" - this for a kid who literally broke into a filing cabinet to get the answer key. When kids fail tests, the administration or counsellors pressure the teachers to make easier versions of the test, extend the time limits, or give credit for test corrections. Several time teachers have resisted, because this totally undermines the information content of grades and takes a massive amount of extra teacher time (grading, writing, proctoring), and it's gone over poorly for the teacher.
The end result of all this is that the most entitled children or those with the most "engaged" parents get As, even if they earn a C,D, or F on the baseline system, while students who earn Bs but don't squeak get As.
I've been trying to convince her to just give the whole class As for years.
It's a pretty awful experience - I'm surprised anyone still teaches and would have quit years ago.
> I've been trying to convince her to just give the whole class As for years.
That's probably what I would do, at least if this became a problem. I'd still maintain an unofficial parallel "rank" that more corresponds to what I think a grade should be, purely for mine and my students' own benefit in knowing about information gaps, but on their official transcripts it'd be very hard not to get an A just so I don't have to deal with parents/admins as much. (Having a reputation for 'easy A' can also help in keeping the classes full.)
Some teachers are more equal than others. In all seriousness US labor unions have been infamous for going blatantly being gerontocracy on the ground they have been paying dues for the longest.
Given stuff like 'contractually they are bound to lay off multiple newer teachers before they lay off the one a year from retirement'.
While screwing over your loyal members isn't good treating the new ones like dirt is also a death spiral move - I know that everyone in High School who worked a job with a union hated it - the consensus was that they were paying a cut and openly screwed over in favor of everyone else.
I’ve never been in a union, but I’m sure not all unions are created equal. I wonder if unions get in a position where there’s no non-union competition they start to operate in the best interests of the union and not the interests of the people they represent. /shrug I’d love to hear more from the OP about this, fwiw.
If anyone has ever lived by the mantra "The worst that can happen is that they will say no.", this is what happens to a culture as a whole as more and more people behave that way.
I don't think there's anything wrong with the mantra. But the "this" you refer to doesn't really illustrate a problem with it.
Here's how these exchanges SHOULD go ...
Kid: Could I do extra credit to bring my grade up?
Teacher: No, I'm sorry, the grade won't change.
Kid: Okay. (thinks to himself, "Well, it was worth a shot")
The unhealthy thing is not the venturing to ask. It's not accepting a reasonable answer when it is given:
Kid: Could I do extra credit to bring my grade up?
Teacher: No, I'm sorry, the grade won't change.
Kid: How dare you. You'll be hearing from my parents.
(or, more likely)
Parent: Could my kid do extra credit to bring his grade up?
Teacher: No, I'm sorry, the grade won't change.
Parent: How dare you. I'm going over your head.
> Especially now that she has to post everyone's grades online, instantly emails roll in when a student didn't perform as well as the parent expected.
Not to take away from your point, which I think has merit, from the other side of the spectrum as a parent that has a child that struggled mightily to not fail for the first couple years of high school, the amount that teachers screw up the online grading is incredible. As teachers, if you're getting regular requests from parents worried about assignments showing online with zero/empty values for them that cause the grades to show F and it's just because you haven't finished entering all the work in, maybe find a workflow process that eliminates or reduces the amount of time the system shows that?
Seeing multiple F's show online for days at a time leads to tense discussions and arguments with kids, and if it's all resolved with the teacher saying "I haven't finished entering grades yet" you start to really resent the system from the other side too.
You're describing here a different problem, which I know from talking to teachers also causes them stress. The people who make the software cause this problem, not the teachers themselves. They often don't have a way to avoid this and they aren't the ones deciding what software is used.
When I was teaching, grading took so incredibly long that there would be periods of time (read: nearly always) where I was simply behind entering scores. I typically did 10 to 12 hour days plus a good 6hr day most Saturdays, and usually a few hours Sunday. I only caught up on student vacations.
But how does this work in the future. Weekly report cards in elementary. Daily live updates in high school. To a single final 100% determining your ap credit / college course?
Sounds like millennials have taken their need for instant gratification and the system is coddling them.
in a similar vein, my aunt who is going for a few more years than your mom noted that the ratio of non teaching jobs to teaching narrowed considerably and she ended moving from a city system to a county system because of all the appointees from the mayor's office which ate up funds they could use for other needs. throw in that many of the non teaching jobs are being held in higher regard and also quick to deflect the ire of parents onto the teachers and it is hard to see the reward. he latest beef in the last decade has been the rise of "student rights" - as in you have to tip toe around some who take offense at everything with mommy and daddy riding to the rescue and the admins throwning the teacher under the bus.
I had a math professor at Berkeley who used to be a high school math teacher, but started doing an MS just so he could teach at community college and not have to deal with parents. Worked out well for him, he ended up doing a PhD and on the faculty at Berkeley
I'm way late on this comment but you would likely have a completely different set of challenges at a disadvantaged high school than your mom's challenge of a parent complaining about their child's chances of getting into Princeton with an A-minus.
She told me of an email she received that said "X is trying to get into Princeton - an A- isn't going to get her in. What extra credit can she do to make this an A?"
That's a horrible thing to say ... except I could even say from bitter experience that Princeton vs whatever-public-college is indeed a jump in *perceived( quality of education (there has been discussion of 150K vs 80K programming here and while they shouldn't revolve around Princeton or not, often they do. Appearances matter, sadly).
And that's the thing right, when everyone is pushing to get to those small number of nice jobs, nice houses for rent or buy, nice etc., sure the nastiness is terrible but it's part of the fabric of it all. Hate the fabric, not the player, so to speak.
Princeton doesn’t provide any better instruction than a good state school.
What it provides is a circle of friends for your son or daughter that come from a different socioeconomic class. Which will allow your kids to operate smoothly in that class when they get out of college.
Seems reasonable; grades are only partially a function of raw potential — effort plays a huge role as well. If a student is good enough to get an A-, I see no reason why demonstrating a certain amount of additional effort (extra credit) couldn’t get her to an A.
The student demonstrated an adequate amount of effort to achieve an A-. Any "additional" effort should have been expended at that time. Alternately, the student can put that effort towards future assignments.
If the teacher wants to give out opportunities for extra credit (maybe because they feel the class is particularly challenging in general), they can do so. But students and parents are not entitled to extra credit, particularly those who already received a very respectable grade.
(I realize that for certain colleges, an A- isn't enough, but inflating everyone's grade doesn't help the situation.)
Well then, perhaps its about time to pass someone on basis of competency rather than attaching some arbitrary grade at some point in time, that has poor correlation to future skills.
Allowing someone to continue trying and learning seems much better method rather than "whoops you had test anxiety or had insomnia and flunked your singular test". And if this is what's needed and is being forced on US's teachers, so be it.
You might consider still teaching in retirement, but in another country with more respect for educators and less tolerance for the parental behavior currently exhibited in the US (Western Europe perhaps?).
As an alum who has interviewed many applicants to the school, an A- va A isn’t going to be the difference in an admissions decision. I’m just saying this so your mother may have more peace of mind regarding that email.
she told me that parents have ruined the job she loves
One of our guests for Christmas was telling us stories about this, she teaches art, and says it’s normal for her to check her work email on Monday morning and find that parents have sent a series of increasingly angry emails over the weekend demanding an instant response. This is in the UK.
My SO quit HS STEM teaching recently, so I have at least some idea of the modern teaching environment. The issue, for my SO, was pay and benefits vs. hassle. My SO has a PhD and decided to give back to the community at an 'impoverished' school. Ho boy, was that a mistake. The first school was a terrible experience and my SO went gray from the place. Though there are a few parents that are as described in the parent comment, the vast majority of parents were all but useless. The HS my SO taught at, and I am not making this up, has a mandatory grading format for every single test/HW given: multiple choice only, only 4 choices are allowed. Combining that with the faux-restorative-justice [0] grading scale, where a 25% score in a class was considered 'passing', and even a goldfish could pass the classes. Yet still, the graduation rate was ~30%, only because of the Air Force Base nearby. Just trying to get the kids to even take the test was impossible, let alone the truancy. The teacher drop-out rate by December was ~50%. Neighboring schools had teacher drop-out rates near 90%. Yes, teacher drop-out rates. Thing is, poverty and racism and violence suck really bad. The many of the parents were desperately poor, ~80% of the children were on free and reduced lunch, and many of those would not eat all weekend long, let alone the apple vs Cheetos 'food desert' debate. Then the physical abuse of the children comes in, and 'home' is not a safe place at all. Then the sexual abuse kicks in, and home is REALLY not a safe place for a some of the teen girls my SO taught. Then you have the flagrant use of phones, the sexting, the porn use, the gore, etc. in the middle of 40+ child classrooms. It was/is a mad-house. It's no wonder all the more well off folks refuse to send their kids to public schools. God knows we would/will.
And my SO, with a PhD and therefore 'top' level seniority in the union pay-scale, made ~40k in a large, expensive US city with median houses at ~0.5 million. The benefits were, otherwise, ok-ish. No dental, no vision. The pension (yes, they still have one!) has been gutted since 2008 and is massively underfunded, so a total-write off.
Now my SO works in the field that the PhD was/is in and pulls ~80k with amazing benefits/401k. Teaching, like my SO had to do, was in no way worth any of it. My SO did time in 'service' to the local community and now considers the dues paid.
[0] Actually, restorative justice models are pretty brilliant, if implemented properly. I think they should be the norm.
Don't be afraid of teaching at a poverty school. Those families need your help and won't be the ones threatening law suits over As. You'll be thankful for the few parents with the energy, knowledge, and interest to make at involvement in education at all.
I was a slow runner in high school, and in gym class a friend of mine had a habit of lapping me not only to finish the class but then looping around to keep me encouraged to finish my own lap. He did not care about his own grade, but I asked about extra credit for him because he wasn't just running his own mile, but more like a mile and a half to encourage me.
The teacher refused my request to give him extra credit, saying my physical fitness was not his responsibility so he deserved no credit for my sake. Not saying that was right or wrong, just backing up your statement of "my high school and university had no such thing" as extra credit.
Sometimes doing exactly what's required is the most you're going to get credit for.
What's sad is that all this desperate competition by parents to improve their kid's grades is zero-sum: A noisy but pointless rearrangement of positions on the socio-economic ladder.
One kid getting into Princeton means another misses out.
Very little of it results in actual useful learning or eventual public benefit.
But it isn't. The question was "X is trying to get into Princeton - an A- isn't going to get her in. What extra credit can she do to make this an A?" Presumably, the extra credit means the student will learn more. Hence, it is not zero-sum. And it actually seem fair to me; the student that works the hardest and scores the highest grades deserves to win the spot.
>She told me of an email she received that said "X is trying to get into Princeton - an A- isn't going to get her in. What extra credit can she do to make this an A?".
What did anyone expect when everyone whole-heartedly supported more mandatory testing and measurement intiatives to help failing schools, almost about a decade back?
If you start emphasizing test scores, that's all that will be optimized.
I think you have a point. But in my experience with two polar opposite schools in Massachusetts, the ones that have a lot of "helicopter parents" don't have any issue with passing rates on the mandatory state tests. They're at over 98% passing.
The tests the parents in such wealthy schools get upset about are the teacher assigned ones.
But again, I only have deep knowledge of two schools, so am happy to be corrected if I'm on off this.
Calculus? Freshman college calculus, never took it. Just read a book and started the class on sophomore calculus.
Teaching calculus? Been there; done that, as a math grad student. Easy to teach -- off the back of my hand. Zero time for preparation.
Now with D. Knuth's TeX, it would be easy to pass out very nicely polished class notes, examples, exercises, applications, etc.
Here's an application that might interest the students. At one time it literally saved FedEx from going out of business.
The BoD wanted some revenue projections for the full, planned fleet and business. So, we knew what the revenue was then and what the revenue should be for the full planned fleet. So, the projections were essentially an interpolation.
So, there would be growth, and what would drive that growth? Okay, assume the rate of growth is proportional to (1) the number of current customers talking about FedEx and (2) the number of the rest of the target customers hearing the talking.
So, for time t, with t = 0 being the present, let y(t) be the revenue per day at time t. So, we know y(0), the current revenue. Let b be the revenue per day of the full, planned fleet and business.
Then at time t, the number of customers talking is proportional to y(t) and the number of the rest of the customers listening is proportional to (b - y(t)).
So, for some constant of proportionality k, we have that the growth rate in revenue per day is
d/dt y(t) = y'(t) = k y(t) (b - y(t))
where we have y(0) and b.
So, this is an initial value problem for a first order, linear, ordinary differential equation, but just freshman calculus is plenty to solve it in closed form. Sure, the solution has some exponentials. I'll post the solution later on request!
So, one day Senior VP Planning Mike Basch and I picked a value of k that yielded a reasonable graph, and I drew the graph. That was Friday. The BoD meeting was the morning, Saturday, with Mike traveling. At noon I got a call from Senior VP Roger Frock asking if I knew about the revenue projections and could I come to the BoD meeting? I did and did. When I got there, the graph was on a table, and our two representatives of BoD member General Dynamics were standing in the hall with their bags packed. No one was happy. Roger pointed to a few places on the graph, and I used my HP calculator to reproduce the points. Everyone got happy.
Later I learned that the graph had been presented to the BoD early in the meeting; the General Dynamics guys asked how the graph was calculated; all the FedEx people at the meeting tried to learn how; near noon the Dynamics guys gave up on FedEx, got plane tickets back to Texas, went to their rented rooms and packed, and as a last resort returned to the BoD meeting and were standing in the hall when I arrived. With my results, they unpacked and stayed. Had they left, FedEx would have ended.
So, just a little calculus saved FedEx, and since I was the only one around who knew still knew calculus I was the only one who understood the solution.
The projections were a smooth curve that rose slowly, rose more quickly, had an inflection point, rose less quickly, and became asymptotic from below at b. So, the curve was a lazy S.
I suspect that the curve is the famous logistic curve also important in, say, the elements in neural networks and has long been seen as a good, first cut description of the growth of new products, e.g., TV sets when they were new.
With the way I derived the curve, it is an axiomatic approach to viral growth or word of mouth market growth.
There is lots of nice stuff that can be done with calculus.
For more with calculus, I would recommend famous texts by Apostol, Rudin, Royden, and Rudin again, through measure theory and then texts by Loeve, Breiman, Neveu, and Chung for the connections with probability. The third edition of Rudin's Priciples does very well with the modern Stokes theorem, exterior algebra of differential forms, and the inverse and implicit function theorems. The first half of Rudin's Real and Complex Analysis does well with measure theory and introductions to functional analysis. The Apostol text is Mathematical Analysis:
A Modern Approach to Advanced Calculus -- it's NOT very "modern" but gives a lot of what need to know to read mathematical physics, especially Maxwell's equations. For stochastic processes, Doob, Karatsas and Shreve. For Princeton and its department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering, the more elementary parts of stochastic optimal control via, say, Nemhauser, Dreyfus and Law, Bertsekas and Shreve, Dynkin and Yushkevich, etc.
The post has a fairly serious real world, war story example of where some calculus did something significant in business and the calculus was actually quite easy, no course in differential equations needed, and basically a routine exercise in first calculus. Students might like to see that; calculus teachers might like to show it to them. That is, just first calculus can already make some significant contact with the real world.
For the girl whose mother wants her daughter to go to Princeton, I mentioned some more in calculus that might be impressive for Princeton and make moot the student's A-.
Indeed, there was long Harvard's Math 55 where the three texts were Halmos, Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces, Rudin, Principles of Mathematical Analysis, and Spivak, Calculus on Manifolds. The course was something of a math boot camp and aimed at freshmen. There was an article on the course at
maybe no longer available. For a high school student to have done well in that material might be impressive at Princeton. Linear algebra is perfectly accessible to high school students, basically easier than calculus, although the classic by Halmos may be regarded as better for a second course. The Rudin text I mentioned. And the third edition of that Rudin text contains the core of what is in the Spivak text.
If that girl and her mother want to pursue such things, then I'd recommend that the two of them chat with a good college math prof once each three months or so, maybe once a month. Working in a small group that also chats with a college math prof occasionally would also be good.
I also mentioned some introductions to stochastic optimal control that are accessible to high school students.
For the more advanced material, the students might regard that as a destination on the horizon.
I did the high school calculus teachers and their students and that mother and her daughter a favor, possibly valuable for them and not easy to find elsewhere.
Moreover, I know what I'm talking about: I studied calculus, advanced calculus, measure theory, and probability theory based on measure theory, and much more, hold a Ph.D. in pure and applied math from a world class research university, and have published peer-reviewed original research using advanced calculus, measure theory, and probability theory based on measure theory. My Ph.D. dissertation was in stochastic optimal control. Did I mention I know what I'm talking about? I did them a favor.
That complaint doesn't make any sense. I can understand teachers complaining about kids disturbing their lessons, are unruly and threaten them with violence and so on. I can not understand teachers complaining about kids being extra ambitious and doing what they can to get the highest grades! I'll get downvoted for this, but if your moms worst problem is overachievers and parents caring about their children's education, she needs to suck it up. :)
There's a line between caring about your children and helicoptering and/or demanding special treatment for your child.
If you care about your children, you teach them to work and study, or at least approach the teacher on their own for things like extra credit.
The teacher probably has 20+ students. How much extra time per student do you expect him or her to suck up so that everyone's special child can make it into Princeton?
Plus, isn't the point of grades a measure of ability? If we can just erase any bad grade at a parent's discretion, what's the point in having grades at all?
The whole system in my opinion is rotting. We seem to be increasingly reluctant in the U.S. to measure merit - but in this case, if nobody loses, then nobody wins. Sometimes that's life. Princeton only has prestige because it is selective, and that selectiveness depends on some kind of measure of entrant ability.
Asking the teacher to set and grade extra credit work because a student didn't get the grade they wanted isn't fair to the teacher. I don't think the teacher is the one that needs to "suck it up" here ;-). The student could just try not going to Princeton - most of the world hasn't studied there and done fine.
I have a view from both sides of this issue. I have school-age kids and my wife is a math professor (though college level, not pre-college). As a parent, I'm aware how important in life it is to have a good college on your resume. And how much more important it will be 20 years from now. I have the fortune to be able to show a STEM degree from a well respected (at leas in HN world) institution; this gave me a huge boost in my career. The odds to be admitted at such a university nowadays, if you are educated in the US, are lower and lower each day. Every single day, the US gets a little bit behind in the education race. That's why lots of upper-middle class parents are totally obsessed with their kids academic performance. Tiger-parenting and all.
Now from the other side, my wife is a model of efficiency. She receives lots of emails from students disappointed with their grades (even today she got some; we are in post-exam period). She's very calm about it. She knows she did her job well, so she simply doesn't care about whiners. She never had to deal with an escalation though (i.e. lawsuit, arbitration, etc).
I guess my point is that teachers have to simply get more thick-skinned. Just do your job, and let the whiners whine all they want. They are scared stiff themselves after all.
A lot of people teach for different reasons in different environments.
I'm not sure if it's just about the whiners but also when the whiners permeate the entire institution you're working in.
The "lazy" teacher trope is a thing because the floor for teaching is so low and the ceiling can be so high while pay stays the same.
I guess I'm privileged enough(or type A enough) to want more. Sometimes I wish I could just do my job. That way, I'd be happy with being a bus driver or a cop or something(they both have really good pensions).
Haha, I just finished quitting my job teaching high school computer science today.
I went from private tutoring CS to teaching in an afterschool program to this because I really enjoyed helping students break through conceptual blocks and mental ones.
The work is emotionally exhausting but satisfying. Only recently have I wondered whether or not this was the right thing to do instead of going to industry(maybe it's because a lot of my interviewers have been asking me that exact question) but it seems blatant now that my friends are senior engineers who have almost infinite job opportunities.
The real crux of it is that teachers get put into this triangle of pressures between students, administration, and their parents which almost takes away all agency from the job. I got so tired of getting put into difficult situations that were almost always juggling acts.
At the end of the day, if you want to fix anything as a teacher it's almost like going against an institution. You risk your pension, your 401k, or maybe just your potential future in industry for what?
I wasn't in it for the money and I would imagine most teachers aren't either... but what happens when your hands are too tied to actually teach?
sigh maybe I could've done everyone justice if I had some tech money to fall back on.
Even worse is the whole 'no child left behind' structure where schools lose funding if they don't meet certain numbers. The administrators live in fear so the kids spend half the semester taking practice tests so the school district doesn't lose funding. It is such a shame and there seems to be no appetite to expend political capital on these issues.
"The real crux of it is that teachers get put into this triangle of pressures between students, administration, and their parents which almost takes away all agency from the job. I got so tired of getting put into difficult situations that were almost always juggling acts."
I think that is also happening today with medical doctors and it is an absolute travesty; the opposite of progress.
Articles like these, while only loosely related, always make me think that the software engineering bubble has to pop. You have people with ton of education busting their behind dealing with little brats all day to try to make sure they have a future... During that time, some bro who read a couple of books and hammered on his keyboard, and MAYBE did a 3 months bootcamp gets bummed if he can't pull in 100k in one of the coasts with a flex schedule and free lunches/coffee/smoothies/whatever. God forbid they get paged in the middle of the night, they'll scream bloody murder. Same contrasts with trade workers: hiring qualified carpenters/plumbers/painters/whatever is becoming incredibly difficult.
Obviously I'm only considering the extremes here, but those extremes are...very common.
Society can't go very far if the ONLY thing people do is write keywords in a text editor all day. We need to properly value other professions too.
Most people wouldn't be able to cut it in software dev, whether they did the 3 month bootcamp or even if they managed to pass a 4-year university program. 99% of the time, Little Jimmy's 4th grade English teacher would have a snowball's chance in hell as a professional developer.
Oh hell, software dev is so, so very overloaded with underskilled programmers with fragile egos. They come out of college knowing a little python and javascript and can't do jack shit for at least a year, and just come to a screeching halt with every tough issue they encounter. I'm a project manager box in an org-chart to help un-flatten the management hierarchy (I manage 20+), I am constantly having to re-assign tickets because they linger too long due to inexperience. Our review system is a joke and i have zero authority to fire, I'm supposed to "onramp" them, especially kids who just will never understand how to do this job (I give classes one week a month and they blow them off). I'm not in charge of hiring, if I was, half these kids (and I say "kids" because the 20 somethings are really immature compared to the mid-30 devs, but the latter ain't much more actualized) would have NEVER made it past the phone screen.
TL; DR - New college CS grads are mostly children who know very little and expect huge paychecks immediately because they watched Mr. Robot and maybe opened a browser on an RPi. Once.
This might have been true 20 years ago when software development meant everything from a fundamental understanding of hardware (including how pixels are laid out, how to manage gamma, etc for the front end) to knowing a lot of theory (because you had to implement your collections in house, manage the code base by hand, etc) but nowadays I'm pretty sure at least half of everyone could be pointed at a web framework and bootstrap and make a functional website in half a year.
Sure a professional would have made that in a week, but their next site will take half as long, and then half as long... until they are within striking distance of someone who does still know all those fundamentals. They will mostly be limited in what they can do, but most people don't really need developers that can do anything even if they pay for them without realizing that.
Programming is being commoditized. In the same way you don't see a doctor first thing when you go to one; you see a nurse, tech, or assistant. Not everything requires the most expensive learning investment. Most programming jobs don't require you to be able to write a proof of the code you copy paste from Stack Overflow.
I won’t make any predictions about the future of software engineering opportunities, but your line of reasoning will never have any inherent connection to job opportunities. As the cliche goes, life’s not fair, and working harder preparing yourself for your career has never meant that you will make more money than someone who didn’t work as hard.
Absolutely, there's no full correlation between how hard you work and how successful you are, there are situations where the contrast is totally out of wack. We're (unfortunately) used to execs taking home insane pays for dubious reasons, but right now we're seeing something similar with every day people.
Dude, people die in ditches far from their home for a tenth of what I make in a year living in comfort. Society values people based on perceived economic impact not perceived job difficulty. And that’s probably a good idea.
I think we should treat teachers better and pay them more. I agree we should value other professions too. That being said, I’m not following how attitudes in software engineering are related to the topic of this post.
The freebies, on call outrage, etc is inherent to the tech industry with venture capitalist money or otherwise insane net profits... the longer term sustainability is questionable, but fresh college grads or others early in their careers having unreasonable expectations of reality are not so different than your average political science or psychology major taking on egregious levels of debt only to struggle with making student loan payments.
Again, I agree with valuing other disciplines. I think there’s also something to be said about supply and demand. The Googles and Amazons of the world typically hire people at least somewhat competent in CS. Sure you could pick up pick up Ruby on Rails or whatever framework to join the gig economy, but your chances won’t be great at becoming a engineer at a Google caliber company.
The issue with teacher pay isn’t just about what society values but is more nuanced. My conservative friends don’t see the value in public education and insist on sending their kids to private schools. I don’t know how those teachers are paid, but for the public school system that I participated in, the argument becomes well my kid doesn’t attend so why should I pay for it?
In my opinion, it’s very short sighted and destructive for the country in the long term. It’s not only teachers we are devaluing but an entire generation of children whose parents are not able to absorb the exorbant costs of private schools.
> That being said, I’m not following how attitudes in software engineering are related to the topic of this post.
Sorry, I probably made my point poorly. It wasn't about attitude in software engineering. It was how insanely overvalued the field is, with a completely out of wack investment to reward ratio. Few to no other fields come even close, and its siphoning people from all other fields as well as creating unreasonable expectations from them. That's obviously not the root cause, but it's something to ponder.
Essentially, all I was saying is that the article made me think about how crazy the contrast between those 2 professions is.
I think we should pay teachers more as well, but not the same teachers we have now. Based on my experience in public school (and my own opinion, obviously), teachers on average earned what they deserved, or more than they deserved.
This is a very valid point. While I don't have all the answers, but it seems like if a person is pulling an honest 40 hour week they should afford at the very least a real minimum standard of living, regardless of what that person does. I know this sounds hairy and anti-capitalist and "who is going to pay for this", etc. But this is what real value is in my opinion.
I'm going to state a couple of strong opinions and hope it doesn't backfire on me:
1) Teachers should be paid more.
2) Teachers shouldn't be pressured to work so many hours off the clock (after school).
3) Teachers may continue to make their own lesson plans, but they should always have available lesson plans available to them.
4) School administrations should protect teachers from harassing parents.
5) The number of administrative employees & administrations in general should be reduced or consolidated. You have some school districts with over 100 schools, and others shepherding just a few. The differences between districts can be very big (especially when it comes to lesson plans).
6) Politics is f-cking us hard here. Education should be easy to fund and a non-issue. The current situation is under-serving our children, and will create a feedback loop of underfunded/undervalued education. I personally believe a lot of allocated funds are spent wastefully on the administration and not teachers.
7) I wish we had online examinations that students could take over and over from day #1 of the school year to improve on over the year. There could be material that requires teachers be present to administer, and others that students can do on their own at home (and possibly cheat on). It would have helped me immensely to be familiar with what we were going to learn about "next month". I first encountered a syllabus with a month-to-month plan in community college.
8) Can't forget this: F-ck zero tolerance policies. Schools need a lawyer on-site looking out for the rights of students.
9) You shouldn't need a masters degree to teach 5th grade algebra. It should be easy to hire someone off the street who can pass a background check and exams against the course they might teach.
10) And then easier ways to account for students so it doesn't take 15 minutes to 'start class'. Longer days that start later (8am) & less/no homework.
I'm going to state a very strong opinion here and know that it will backfire: families should be educating their kids themselves, and society should make this financially possible (let's start off with eliminating the dual-income family). Teachers, as they are currently qualified, should be adjuncts to the family school.
That's what we've done with literacy in the US for the past few decades and literacy rates have decreased. An abject failure.
What a terrible idea for society -- religious zealots only teaching their children one religious book (whichever one they like), people afraid of math teaching their children to be afraid of math, thespians only teaching theater, violinists whose children never get to try cello.... parents who don't speak English doing what exactly in English?
It works fine if you're a shoemaker teaching your kid to make shoes. But I've seen what my kid learns from her teachers and peers. It is really fun and stuff I'd never come up with.
#5 is incompatible with #3 and #8. And probably #2. You’re basically saying you want a stronger support network for teachers and students while also reducing staff. That doesn’t make any sense.
not sure about 5, as mentioned by others, and i would split nr 9 into two parts. i agree with not needing a masters degree, but teachers certainly need serious training in educating and handling children.
This attitude towards customer-funded journalism promotes bad content and ad-driven models. It’s a valid choice. But understand the trade-offs for convenience and tracking you’re promoting.
How is he promoting tracking? The outline link has 3 cookies (0 third-party) and make 5 requests (the bad ones being Google Analytics and Doubleclick). Whereas the original article has 68 cookies (44 third party) and make 261 requests (which violates users privacy to a much greater extent).
Last time I saw a paywalled article, someone commented and mentioned the idea of (1) prohibiting those sites or (2) automatically redirecting to an outlined version.
Why not just tag the titles with [Paywall] so users can avoid them? Granted, they tend to be from the same sites, but it would be one less thing to remember.
One of my favourite hypotheticals to play out is what would be like if we somehow paid public school teachers and emergency services/law enforcement professionals an extreme of today, a million usd a year, and increased the difficulty to attain this work. I usually end up in a pretty good place but I'd be curious what others think/why this couldn't work?
> I usually end up in a pretty good place but I'd be curious why this could not work?
It would be fantastically expensive. Chicago has 21,000 teachers. Paying them $1 million per year would cost $21 billion, dwarfing the city's current $3.8 billion budget. Even paying them $100,000 per year on average would cost half the city's budget.
> And there is little reason to believe it would yield better results.
This is an important point. $100,000+ per year is not unheard of for teachers in Ontario (conveniently public sector incomes >$100,000 are required to publicly disclosed[1]), and they have problems with graduates not having even basic literacy and numeracy skills[2].
If the fully loaded headcount cost of a CPS teacher isn't north of $100,000 I'll be pretty surprised. CPS teachers are well-compensated. Their median salary is $71,000, and they get good health insurance and a defined-benefit pension plan.
I live in Oak Park, just on the outskirts of Chicago, and the median teacher cash comp at my kids' high school is something like $120,000.
I’m not an expert in the matter, but I can imagine it could attract individuals that desire high wages or high-status work. Regardless of how genuinely invested or enthusiastic they are about the impact of being a teacher.
Not that we shouldn’t compensate teachers well (as they deserve it) but I can imagine that a high compensation with strict requirements could introduce a “measure becoming a target and no longer a measure” situation.
I think a generally cheaper and easier way to manage it would be to require all children, rich and poor, go to the same schools. The economic factors would change pretty dramatically for being a public school teacher.
This is only possible if school is no longer a physical place (i.e. everyone does school online). So long as school is in a physical space, it needs to be one relatively close to you, and then you're not close to giving everyone the same experience, as prosperity and educational attainment differ in granularity by more than a school bus can travel every day.
This was tried in NYC by The Equity Project - a charter school (125K base salary, very demanding qualifications). I'm sure that it works well in niche markets and test scores aren't everything, but results (test scores) were not that stellar as you might imagine when compared with similar Charter schools to suggest it could scale.
If it were done universally, then you'd have the exact same zero-sum parent game: parents would continue to pester the $1m/yr rockstar teacher about why their kid got an A- instead of an A.
It is not mentioned in this particular article and my teacher friends say that dealing with parents is a constant pain. Of course, not all parents are a pain. Only a few.
Teachers are not in the profession to listen to why little high school age Johnny did not get an A on his paper, not the least because you, the parent, helped him write that paper.
Teachers should stop assigning tasks that necessitate parent participation, then. I was assigned to write a novella in sixth grade, for crying out loud. I like creative writing now, but I didn't back then, and the assignment sure didn't help.
My parents did my schoolwork for me so I could go out and play in nature. I think I’ll do the same for my kids. I think I turned out okay and considering they were surgeons working more then than I do now I should be able to pull it off.
Theres plenty of research showing how homework is often of negative value.
It, like the unhealthy hours of school for teenagers, is a product of parents wanting babysitters in many ways more than they wanted well educated children. Homework can be busywork to keep kids occupied when parents don't want to have to try to inspire them productively the third of the day they aren't in school or (should be) sleeping.
It wasn't clear in the original comment but the paper that the high school student did was not supposed to be written by the parent or receive assistance from the parent in any form. The student was in high school!
Readit News
I didn't think my mom would ever retire, she spends countless hours coming up with unique lesson plans for the kids - they usually involve games, real world use cases and many ah-ha moments. She lives for those moments when a kid lights up when they understand the value of what their learning.
Now though, over the last 8 years, she told me that parents have ruined the job she loves. Especially now that she has to post everyone's grades online, instantly emails roll in when a student didn't perform as well as the parent expected.
She told me of an email she received that said "X is trying to get into Princeton - an A- isn't going to get her in. What extra credit can she do to make this an A?".
It's endless and my mom, for fear of a lawsuit, doesn't know what to do. The teachers union in Massachusetts made all the teachers sign liability waivers and arbitration waivers if a lawsuit happens. My mom is scared stiff and either bends over, or doesn't and let's the vice principal or principal take the heat, ultimately it leading to an extra credit assignment.
My mom's job sounds miserable and if you were to ask me 15 years ago, what I might do in my retirement - I would have said taught CS at a disadvantaged high school. Now though, I'm seconding guessing that retirement plan.
Teaching is one of those careers where the expectation is on the teacher to endlessly do more and work harder, "For the kids", and if you keep doing it, you'll work more and harder forever, endlessly.
My brother does a fantastic job, and works very hard for his students. What he does though, is walk out at 4pm and NEVER does work at home. He doesn't check his emails, he doesn't grade work and maybe only once or twice in five years has he done a lesson plan outside 8am-4pm.
If parent emails, or meetings, or "school paperwork" or whatever queue up he just makes it infinitely clear that he must choose between doing the best job for his students, or spend time with the parents or at school meetings. He does do thing pro-actively like call parents if need-be, but he does not spend hours of his personal time dealing with "helicopter parents" or stupid school meeting requirements.
It requires the right balance of "push back", but it can work very well when done correctly.
FWIW, he has quickly been promoted to the head of maths and had a real shot at a "leading teacher" position, so obviously he's very good and the entire school-body agrees.
I also always try to leave at 3:20,which is when we're free (7:30-3:20,tho I usually get there early to copy).
Work life is great, and I don't do anything in my breaks, either. But I'm still looking to get out for various other reasons I've documented elsewhere.
That parent is an ass. Having grown up in a family where my parents deferred to teachers over me, even when the former was wrong to the point of harassment, however, it’s an understandable instinct.
Administrators don’t protect children. Boards don’t protect children. That only leaves parents, unchecked. If students had proper means through which to pursue grievances against teachers, I’d hope these parental impulses would recede.
"She can't, because that's the grade she earned in the time alloted. The moving finger, having writ, has moved on.
"However, I'm confident that, with Janie's capabilities, a little more effort from her and help from you, she can easily demonstrate a higher level of mastery and the consequent benefits from longer-term retention.
"Princeton will NOT be a picnic, and developing excellent habits at this time will pay back many-fold. This A- is a vote of confidence that there is room and talent for improvement."
The parents escalate to the adminstrators, who either involve the student counsellors or talk to the teacher directly. One of these two tell the teacher how they need to better support the student because they need a "little extra help" or can't handle the stress required to turn in homework assignments.
I wish this stuff worked, but these parents typically don't want an answer that requires their student to work harder (or differently). They want the curriculum, assignments, or grading scheme to change until their child gets an A - and they don't care about mastery.
And stop at that.
Otherwise you start on a losing discussion.
So all in all, students who ask for that end up with better grades and better chances where grades matter.
By indicating a personal and subjective intent to be ungenerous, parents will feel (perhaps rightly) that they want to take this further.
Edited to add, my approach would be more like:
"I have graded 8bitsrule as generously as I could under the circumstances, and the grade is final. 8bitsrule will need to show a better understanding of communicating diplomatically in order to succeed in next semester's courses. 8bitsrule could try the following specific tasks over the break:"
Why are we blaming the victims for the oppressive irrational grading system?
But on the A- and extra credit issue, I never understood the point of rigid grading schemes. I've taught at a college level, and I always give students the chance to improve their grades if they want to put in additional work. To do otherwise seems like saying "nope, even if you learn more and improve to the point of A-level knowledge, you're still getting a lower grade".
My wife is a college psychology professor and is fairly strict with her grading scheme. She makes this clear on the first day of class and spells it out directly, in bold, on the syllabus.
Her rationale is this: The likelihood of you asking for extra credit, or excuses, or various "grade grubbing" activities is largely influenced by your socioeconomic background. Students who make special grading requests overwhelmingly skew white and female and are more likely to take place at institutions that take students from more affluent backgrounds. She doesn't want her grading inadvertently biased against males, non-whites, or less affluent students so her grades are final. Despite this inflexibility, her student evaluations are sky-high.
If little Jimmy wants to get into Princeton, he should study.
A+ Student has demonstrated that they have exceeded a firm grasp of the subject. (How do you measure to 11 on a scale of 1-10?)
A Student has demonstrated that they have a firm grasp of the subject. (makes sense, this means they know their stuff.)
A- Student kinda has a firm grasp of the subject. (WTF?)
Now apply that silliness to B, C, and D. A,B,C,D,F is enough. Excellent understanding, Good understanding, General understanding, Poor understanding, Does not understand.
In life there are things you won't always get second chances for.
The problem is the absurd college process that way overemphasizes clearly inflated grades in a ridiculous race to get into college. It's a shame what kids have to go through these days.
Why should students be coddled instead of being prepared for the real world? I have a high school student who is always getting better grades because of “extra credit” and “make up tests”. I cringe every time he does it.
A better way to handle this case is to drop the student's lowest grade, or maybe even the lowest couple of grades.
You should learn more but doing it for extra grades misses the point. These kids learn you only learn for rewards.
Isn't it 'rigid' to give only a limited amount of time( end of yr or whatever) for that chance. Seems like saying "nope, even if you learn more and improve to the point of A-level knowledge, you're still getting a lower grade".
The parents make similar demands regarding grades - if their kid does poorly on an exam, it doesn't even enter into their mind that they didn't study or are super lazy, it's automatically the teacher's fault for making the test too hard or teaching the material poorly. Same goes for kids failing a class because they never turn in assignments - the teacher is failing to sufficiently motivate their student.
This would be manageable but for the fact that the administration always takes the side of the parents. If a kid cheats on a test, it's a "coping mechanism" or a "useful real world skill - there's no black and white" - this for a kid who literally broke into a filing cabinet to get the answer key. When kids fail tests, the administration or counsellors pressure the teachers to make easier versions of the test, extend the time limits, or give credit for test corrections. Several time teachers have resisted, because this totally undermines the information content of grades and takes a massive amount of extra teacher time (grading, writing, proctoring), and it's gone over poorly for the teacher.
The end result of all this is that the most entitled children or those with the most "engaged" parents get As, even if they earn a C,D, or F on the baseline system, while students who earn Bs but don't squeak get As.
I've been trying to convince her to just give the whole class As for years.
It's a pretty awful experience - I'm surprised anyone still teaches and would have quit years ago.
That's probably what I would do, at least if this became a problem. I'd still maintain an unofficial parallel "rank" that more corresponds to what I think a grade should be, purely for mine and my students' own benefit in knowing about information gaps, but on their official transcripts it'd be very hard not to get an A just so I don't have to deal with parents/admins as much. (Having a reputation for 'easy A' can also help in keeping the classes full.)
Wait what? I thought the union was supposed to at least pretend to look out for the teachers' interests.
Given stuff like 'contractually they are bound to lay off multiple newer teachers before they lay off the one a year from retirement'.
While screwing over your loyal members isn't good treating the new ones like dirt is also a death spiral move - I know that everyone in High School who worked a job with a union hated it - the consensus was that they were paying a cut and openly screwed over in favor of everyone else.
Here's how these exchanges SHOULD go ...
The unhealthy thing is not the venturing to ask. It's not accepting a reasonable answer when it is given: (or, more likely)Not to take away from your point, which I think has merit, from the other side of the spectrum as a parent that has a child that struggled mightily to not fail for the first couple years of high school, the amount that teachers screw up the online grading is incredible. As teachers, if you're getting regular requests from parents worried about assignments showing online with zero/empty values for them that cause the grades to show F and it's just because you haven't finished entering all the work in, maybe find a workflow process that eliminates or reduces the amount of time the system shows that?
Seeing multiple F's show online for days at a time leads to tense discussions and arguments with kids, and if it's all resolved with the teacher saying "I haven't finished entering grades yet" you start to really resent the system from the other side too.
Sounds like millennials have taken their need for instant gratification and the system is coddling them.
Programmers are held in higher regard because they do the actual work, if you know what I mean. Everyone else is in a support role.
And yet in school administrators are paid higher and have it easier, because they don't have to deal with parents directly.
That's a horrible thing to say ... except I could even say from bitter experience that Princeton vs whatever-public-college is indeed a jump in *perceived( quality of education (there has been discussion of 150K vs 80K programming here and while they shouldn't revolve around Princeton or not, often they do. Appearances matter, sadly).
And that's the thing right, when everyone is pushing to get to those small number of nice jobs, nice houses for rent or buy, nice etc., sure the nastiness is terrible but it's part of the fabric of it all. Hate the fabric, not the player, so to speak.
What it provides is a circle of friends for your son or daughter that come from a different socioeconomic class. Which will allow your kids to operate smoothly in that class when they get out of college.
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If the teacher wants to give out opportunities for extra credit (maybe because they feel the class is particularly challenging in general), they can do so. But students and parents are not entitled to extra credit, particularly those who already received a very respectable grade.
(I realize that for certain colleges, an A- isn't enough, but inflating everyone's grade doesn't help the situation.)
Allowing someone to continue trying and learning seems much better method rather than "whoops you had test anxiety or had insomnia and flunked your singular test". And if this is what's needed and is being forced on US's teachers, so be it.
We still need good teachers as a species.
What does this mean exactly?
One of our guests for Christmas was telling us stories about this, she teaches art, and says it’s normal for her to check her work email on Monday morning and find that parents have sent a series of increasingly angry emails over the weekend demanding an instant response. This is in the UK.
And my SO, with a PhD and therefore 'top' level seniority in the union pay-scale, made ~40k in a large, expensive US city with median houses at ~0.5 million. The benefits were, otherwise, ok-ish. No dental, no vision. The pension (yes, they still have one!) has been gutted since 2008 and is massively underfunded, so a total-write off.
Now my SO works in the field that the PhD was/is in and pulls ~80k with amazing benefits/401k. Teaching, like my SO had to do, was in no way worth any of it. My SO did time in 'service' to the local community and now considers the dues paid.
[0] Actually, restorative justice models are pretty brilliant, if implemented properly. I think they should be the norm.
The teacher refused my request to give him extra credit, saying my physical fitness was not his responsibility so he deserved no credit for my sake. Not saying that was right or wrong, just backing up your statement of "my high school and university had no such thing" as extra credit.
Sometimes doing exactly what's required is the most you're going to get credit for.
One kid getting into Princeton means another misses out.
Very little of it results in actual useful learning or eventual public benefit.
Your skills are more important than the prestige of your school.
I don't think society cares who fills the position but said individuals care.
> A noisy but pointless rearrangement of positions on the socio-economic ladder.
Not pointless to the people on that ladder.
Get off your kids ass, for starters, lady
And it’s hard to argue with working harder / smarter / longer to achieve better outcomes as an option.
The tests the parents in such wealthy schools get upset about are the teacher assigned ones.
But again, I only have deep knowledge of two schools, so am happy to be corrected if I'm on off this.
Teaching calculus? Been there; done that, as a math grad student. Easy to teach -- off the back of my hand. Zero time for preparation.
Now with D. Knuth's TeX, it would be easy to pass out very nicely polished class notes, examples, exercises, applications, etc.
Here's an application that might interest the students. At one time it literally saved FedEx from going out of business.
The BoD wanted some revenue projections for the full, planned fleet and business. So, we knew what the revenue was then and what the revenue should be for the full planned fleet. So, the projections were essentially an interpolation.
So, there would be growth, and what would drive that growth? Okay, assume the rate of growth is proportional to (1) the number of current customers talking about FedEx and (2) the number of the rest of the target customers hearing the talking.
So, for time t, with t = 0 being the present, let y(t) be the revenue per day at time t. So, we know y(0), the current revenue. Let b be the revenue per day of the full, planned fleet and business.
Then at time t, the number of customers talking is proportional to y(t) and the number of the rest of the customers listening is proportional to (b - y(t)).
So, for some constant of proportionality k, we have that the growth rate in revenue per day is
d/dt y(t) = y'(t) = k y(t) (b - y(t))
where we have y(0) and b.
So, this is an initial value problem for a first order, linear, ordinary differential equation, but just freshman calculus is plenty to solve it in closed form. Sure, the solution has some exponentials. I'll post the solution later on request!
So, one day Senior VP Planning Mike Basch and I picked a value of k that yielded a reasonable graph, and I drew the graph. That was Friday. The BoD meeting was the morning, Saturday, with Mike traveling. At noon I got a call from Senior VP Roger Frock asking if I knew about the revenue projections and could I come to the BoD meeting? I did and did. When I got there, the graph was on a table, and our two representatives of BoD member General Dynamics were standing in the hall with their bags packed. No one was happy. Roger pointed to a few places on the graph, and I used my HP calculator to reproduce the points. Everyone got happy.
Later I learned that the graph had been presented to the BoD early in the meeting; the General Dynamics guys asked how the graph was calculated; all the FedEx people at the meeting tried to learn how; near noon the Dynamics guys gave up on FedEx, got plane tickets back to Texas, went to their rented rooms and packed, and as a last resort returned to the BoD meeting and were standing in the hall when I arrived. With my results, they unpacked and stayed. Had they left, FedEx would have ended.
So, just a little calculus saved FedEx, and since I was the only one around who knew still knew calculus I was the only one who understood the solution.
The projections were a smooth curve that rose slowly, rose more quickly, had an inflection point, rose less quickly, and became asymptotic from below at b. So, the curve was a lazy S.
I suspect that the curve is the famous logistic curve also important in, say, the elements in neural networks and has long been seen as a good, first cut description of the growth of new products, e.g., TV sets when they were new.
With the way I derived the curve, it is an axiomatic approach to viral growth or word of mouth market growth.
There is lots of nice stuff that can be done with calculus.
For more with calculus, I would recommend famous texts by Apostol, Rudin, Royden, and Rudin again, through measure theory and then texts by Loeve, Breiman, Neveu, and Chung for the connections with probability. The third edition of Rudin's Priciples does very well with the modern Stokes theorem, exterior algebra of differential forms, and the inverse and implicit function theorems. The first half of Rudin's Real and Complex Analysis does well with measure theory and introductions to functional analysis. The Apostol text is Mathematical Analysis: A Modern Approach to Advanced Calculus -- it's NOT very "modern" but gives a lot of what need to know to read mathematical physics, especially Maxwell's equations. For stochastic processes, Doob, Karatsas and Shreve. For Princeton and its department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering, the more elementary parts of stochastic optimal control via, say, Nemhauser, Dreyfus and Law, Bertsekas and Shreve, Dynkin and Yushkevich, etc.
For the girl whose mother wants her daughter to go to Princeton, I mentioned some more in calculus that might be impressive for Princeton and make moot the student's A-.
Indeed, there was long Harvard's Math 55 where the three texts were Halmos, Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces, Rudin, Principles of Mathematical Analysis, and Spivak, Calculus on Manifolds. The course was something of a math boot camp and aimed at freshmen. There was an article on the course at
http://www.american.com/archive/2008/march-april-magazine-co...
maybe no longer available. For a high school student to have done well in that material might be impressive at Princeton. Linear algebra is perfectly accessible to high school students, basically easier than calculus, although the classic by Halmos may be regarded as better for a second course. The Rudin text I mentioned. And the third edition of that Rudin text contains the core of what is in the Spivak text.
If that girl and her mother want to pursue such things, then I'd recommend that the two of them chat with a good college math prof once each three months or so, maybe once a month. Working in a small group that also chats with a college math prof occasionally would also be good.
I also mentioned some introductions to stochastic optimal control that are accessible to high school students.
For the more advanced material, the students might regard that as a destination on the horizon.
I did the high school calculus teachers and their students and that mother and her daughter a favor, possibly valuable for them and not easy to find elsewhere.
Moreover, I know what I'm talking about: I studied calculus, advanced calculus, measure theory, and probability theory based on measure theory, and much more, hold a Ph.D. in pure and applied math from a world class research university, and have published peer-reviewed original research using advanced calculus, measure theory, and probability theory based on measure theory. My Ph.D. dissertation was in stochastic optimal control. Did I mention I know what I'm talking about? I did them a favor.
There’s no corruption on my part because I don’t keep the money.
If you care about your children, you teach them to work and study, or at least approach the teacher on their own for things like extra credit.
The teacher probably has 20+ students. How much extra time per student do you expect him or her to suck up so that everyone's special child can make it into Princeton?
Plus, isn't the point of grades a measure of ability? If we can just erase any bad grade at a parent's discretion, what's the point in having grades at all?
The whole system in my opinion is rotting. We seem to be increasingly reluctant in the U.S. to measure merit - but in this case, if nobody loses, then nobody wins. Sometimes that's life. Princeton only has prestige because it is selective, and that selectiveness depends on some kind of measure of entrant ability.
Now from the other side, my wife is a model of efficiency. She receives lots of emails from students disappointed with their grades (even today she got some; we are in post-exam period). She's very calm about it. She knows she did her job well, so she simply doesn't care about whiners. She never had to deal with an escalation though (i.e. lawsuit, arbitration, etc).
I guess my point is that teachers have to simply get more thick-skinned. Just do your job, and let the whiners whine all they want. They are scared stiff themselves after all.
I'm not sure if it's just about the whiners but also when the whiners permeate the entire institution you're working in.
The "lazy" teacher trope is a thing because the floor for teaching is so low and the ceiling can be so high while pay stays the same.
I guess I'm privileged enough(or type A enough) to want more. Sometimes I wish I could just do my job. That way, I'd be happy with being a bus driver or a cop or something(they both have really good pensions).
I went from private tutoring CS to teaching in an afterschool program to this because I really enjoyed helping students break through conceptual blocks and mental ones.
The work is emotionally exhausting but satisfying. Only recently have I wondered whether or not this was the right thing to do instead of going to industry(maybe it's because a lot of my interviewers have been asking me that exact question) but it seems blatant now that my friends are senior engineers who have almost infinite job opportunities.
The real crux of it is that teachers get put into this triangle of pressures between students, administration, and their parents which almost takes away all agency from the job. I got so tired of getting put into difficult situations that were almost always juggling acts.
At the end of the day, if you want to fix anything as a teacher it's almost like going against an institution. You risk your pension, your 401k, or maybe just your potential future in industry for what?
I wasn't in it for the money and I would imagine most teachers aren't either... but what happens when your hands are too tied to actually teach?
sigh maybe I could've done everyone justice if I had some tech money to fall back on.
I think that is also happening today with medical doctors and it is an absolute travesty; the opposite of progress.
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Obviously I'm only considering the extremes here, but those extremes are...very common.
Society can't go very far if the ONLY thing people do is write keywords in a text editor all day. We need to properly value other professions too.
TL; DR - New college CS grads are mostly children who know very little and expect huge paychecks immediately because they watched Mr. Robot and maybe opened a browser on an RPi. Once.
Sure a professional would have made that in a week, but their next site will take half as long, and then half as long... until they are within striking distance of someone who does still know all those fundamentals. They will mostly be limited in what they can do, but most people don't really need developers that can do anything even if they pay for them without realizing that.
Programming is being commoditized. In the same way you don't see a doctor first thing when you go to one; you see a nurse, tech, or assistant. Not everything requires the most expensive learning investment. Most programming jobs don't require you to be able to write a proof of the code you copy paste from Stack Overflow.
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Those are very loose upper bounds, too.
The freebies, on call outrage, etc is inherent to the tech industry with venture capitalist money or otherwise insane net profits... the longer term sustainability is questionable, but fresh college grads or others early in their careers having unreasonable expectations of reality are not so different than your average political science or psychology major taking on egregious levels of debt only to struggle with making student loan payments.
Again, I agree with valuing other disciplines. I think there’s also something to be said about supply and demand. The Googles and Amazons of the world typically hire people at least somewhat competent in CS. Sure you could pick up pick up Ruby on Rails or whatever framework to join the gig economy, but your chances won’t be great at becoming a engineer at a Google caliber company.
The issue with teacher pay isn’t just about what society values but is more nuanced. My conservative friends don’t see the value in public education and insist on sending their kids to private schools. I don’t know how those teachers are paid, but for the public school system that I participated in, the argument becomes well my kid doesn’t attend so why should I pay for it?
In my opinion, it’s very short sighted and destructive for the country in the long term. It’s not only teachers we are devaluing but an entire generation of children whose parents are not able to absorb the exorbant costs of private schools.
Sorry, I probably made my point poorly. It wasn't about attitude in software engineering. It was how insanely overvalued the field is, with a completely out of wack investment to reward ratio. Few to no other fields come even close, and its siphoning people from all other fields as well as creating unreasonable expectations from them. That's obviously not the root cause, but it's something to ponder.
Essentially, all I was saying is that the article made me think about how crazy the contrast between those 2 professions is.
1) Teachers should be paid more.
2) Teachers shouldn't be pressured to work so many hours off the clock (after school).
3) Teachers may continue to make their own lesson plans, but they should always have available lesson plans available to them.
4) School administrations should protect teachers from harassing parents.
5) The number of administrative employees & administrations in general should be reduced or consolidated. You have some school districts with over 100 schools, and others shepherding just a few. The differences between districts can be very big (especially when it comes to lesson plans).
6) Politics is f-cking us hard here. Education should be easy to fund and a non-issue. The current situation is under-serving our children, and will create a feedback loop of underfunded/undervalued education. I personally believe a lot of allocated funds are spent wastefully on the administration and not teachers.
7) I wish we had online examinations that students could take over and over from day #1 of the school year to improve on over the year. There could be material that requires teachers be present to administer, and others that students can do on their own at home (and possibly cheat on). It would have helped me immensely to be familiar with what we were going to learn about "next month". I first encountered a syllabus with a month-to-month plan in community college.
8) Can't forget this: F-ck zero tolerance policies. Schools need a lawyer on-site looking out for the rights of students.
9) You shouldn't need a masters degree to teach 5th grade algebra. It should be easy to hire someone off the street who can pass a background check and exams against the course they might teach.
10) And then easier ways to account for students so it doesn't take 15 minutes to 'start class'. Longer days that start later (8am) & less/no homework.
What a terrible idea for society -- religious zealots only teaching their children one religious book (whichever one they like), people afraid of math teaching their children to be afraid of math, thespians only teaching theater, violinists whose children never get to try cello.... parents who don't speak English doing what exactly in English?
It works fine if you're a shoemaker teaching your kid to make shoes. But I've seen what my kid learns from her teachers and peers. It is really fun and stuff I'd never come up with.
Expert tutors, on demand, to provide help where needed.
Some kids are hard to work with and the studies are (or should be) there to show you how to approach such mind.
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Using a workaround to circumvent the paywall seems too shady, because if the contents are worth reading, they should be worth paying the asking price.
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66 jobs have bigger licensure requirements than EMT's.
Cosmetologists spend ~400 days training, EMT's - 33.
https://www.adamtownsend.me/regulating-licensing-gig-workers...
HN loves their government regulations.
It would be fantastically expensive. Chicago has 21,000 teachers. Paying them $1 million per year would cost $21 billion, dwarfing the city's current $3.8 billion budget. Even paying them $100,000 per year on average would cost half the city's budget.
And there is little reason to believe it would yield better results. American teachers are well paid compared to other OECD countries where students do better: https://www.businessinsider.com/teacher-salaries-by-country-....
This is an important point. $100,000+ per year is not unheard of for teachers in Ontario (conveniently public sector incomes >$100,000 are required to publicly disclosed[1]), and they have problems with graduates not having even basic literacy and numeracy skills[2].
[1] https://www.ontario.ca/page/public-sector-salary-disclosure
[2] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-one-in-four-o...
I live in Oak Park, just on the outskirts of Chicago, and the median teacher cash comp at my kids' high school is something like $120,000.
Not that we shouldn’t compensate teachers well (as they deserve it) but I can imagine that a high compensation with strict requirements could introduce a “measure becoming a target and no longer a measure” situation.
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The rich would still afford private school. Public schools get more funding.
Everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state. Mussolini
Excessive pay doesn’t motivate performance.
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Teachers are not in the profession to listen to why little high school age Johnny did not get an A on his paper, not the least because you, the parent, helped him write that paper.
It, like the unhealthy hours of school for teenagers, is a product of parents wanting babysitters in many ways more than they wanted well educated children. Homework can be busywork to keep kids occupied when parents don't want to have to try to inspire them productively the third of the day they aren't in school or (should be) sleeping.