Last night we had my son and his new wife over for dinner. She is 5 months pregnant with our first grandchild. My wife's energy level goes up 3x when we have visitors, and 4x when it is her sons and daughter in-laws. We had takeout sushi and she loves Saki. After the kids left we watched some TV and she drank some more saki. I don't drink much these days because of health issues.
But when she drinks, she gets very opinionated. We watched an episode of the new season of The Diplomat. It was awesome. Then to calm down we watched some Youtube videos. One is a young woman and her husband hat live in Longyearbyen, Norway and record their daily life.
My wife went off during the video saying "how can they live like this? I am 63 and working doing things... and all they do is drink coffee, go on holiday and play with their dog?". She said "they don't do anything that is meaningful or productive."
I listened and then said, their jobs are to be entertainers. Just like actors on the Hollywood screen, what do those actors do for their life-meaning? The fact that they are only play-acting probably hits them at some point and that is why many of them end up being stupid in politics grasping luxury beliefs... because they are empty buckets of low life meaning that does not match up with their money and fame for being entertainers.
I told her that we used to be an industrial economy where more people invented, made, built, grew, fixed and sold real tangible products. We allowed our elite Professional Managerial Class to give away all that for more corporate profit. Then we became a tech and information economy. We have also allowed our PMC to give most of that away for more corporate profit. What is left is an attention economy. Today people are made addicted to screen content to get their attention and sell them things that they generally do not need.
The addiction is what allows this young woman and her husband to make a living as a Youtuber filming their boring regular life living in a weird place.
But the attention economy has also caused a mass psychosis of laziness where people don't live their own life but participate in the screen life of others. It is like a drug they cannot resist. Their demand to work from home, to work less, to have more government benefits... is largely related to their addiction to entertainment screen time.
I think this has also caused a lot of what we see as irrational and weird behavior with political people... generally people on the left. They are living in some mythological world in their heads... not really connected with reality of healthy human existence. The most bizarrely behaving poll as more lonely, more depressed, more with mental health diagnoses. And they now have their own media portal to show us their crazy.
Reality does not care what they think, but there are enough of them where crazy does not care what reality thinks.
Back in the day I was on our high school debate team. To argue the thesis, you had to prove the need for your plan, and argue its workability. I don't know if that even happens anymore. It seems like lots of magical thinking happens, routinely. The modern "plan" is: we want what we want, so they have to make it happen. When you try to talk about funding, and the poly centricity argument about what other program you'd have to cut to fund yours, it's blank stares time. Maybe too much screen time, where magical short cuts or cheat codes take the place of methodical planning. In my County, DEI is what is killing public education. We have to hold back the brightest so as to not highlight those who aren't learning at grade level. Only so many honors classes around, and God forbid there are certain racial groups who outscore others. Since that is the Most Important Thing, everyone's education suffers. Trump is Hitler around here, so no, reality is not practiced here.
I am a teacher and liked your comment about pay raises for teachers.
In the 80s and early 90s, there was a glut of teachers. When I first started teaching, over half of the teachers at my high school had Master's degrees and about a fourth had Ph.Ds. You had to have an advanced degree to even make it to the interview. That is what happens when 40 people applied for the same position. The advanced degrees were in the field they taught, there were few Masters and Doctorates of education. Advanced degrees in education are easy to obtain. A Masters in Science requires more work than a a Ed.D. Nothing in education requires nearly the intensive amount of work as a Ph.D in science.
I worked with a group of teachers that were good at what they did.
Now, there are probably 50 applicants for 100 teaching positions. At some schools, 25% or more of teachers are long-term subs with little to know training and often times do not have a degree in the area they are teaching.
Those that have advanced degrees are no longer pursuing a career in teaching. They can earn much more in the private sector.
That is not the complete story. Many of those with advanced degrees and highly trained would go into teaching, not for the money but because they had a passion for teaching. What has changed is the behavior of students, the lack of consequences for bad behavior, parents and students blaming teachers when a student is not performing,
Who wants to deal with all that when one can take a higher paying job in private industry and not deal with all the headaches that come with teaching.
This has resulted in those that in the past would never be considered for a teaching position to being hired because the school needs a warm body with a credential. When I started teaching, you needed at least a 3.5 GPA to be considered. Today, that has dropped to a 2.0.
Many of the younger teachers today are teaching because they do not have the skills and work ethic private industry demands.
At my school, for the very first time in my career, teachers have to check in and out at the office. A large number were arriving late to school and letting their students out early at the end of the day so they could leave a few minutes before the last bell and beat the rush. By contract we are to be on site 15 minutes before the bell rings and stay for 15 minutes after the final bell.
When I started teaching, it was not uncommon for teachers to arrive an hour or more before school and stay at least an hour after. This is the time all of those parent teacher meetings are held, and students can drop by to get help. It also gives me time to plan and prepare lessons.
Today, with AI, the Internet, and canned curriculum purchased by the district, teachers no longer have to plan lessons. They just do whatever assignment is supposed to be taught that day. The worksheets are already in the binders that one gets from the publisher. You just print them out and use them on the designated day.
I am old school. I have developed all of my curriculum and each year revise and update 25he % of it so I can keep up with the latest developments. My assignments are designed to meet the needs of my students and are not a one size fits all.
Younger teachers refuse to meet with parents. Worse yet, they believe they have to teach all the woke stuff they learned in college. They teach whatever they think is right because parents have no say. They have forgotten that we are employees of the government and so have to be politically neutral and defer to parents on many issues. The teacher may not agree with the parent, but the parent has the final say because our students are not our kids.
If schools wanted to attract more teachers, they need to provide extra incentives such as increased pay. The Catch-22 is not many are competent enough to be teacher. They are currently being paid more than they are worth.
Throwing money at education will not fix it. The first step is to start holding students to high academic and behavioral standards. Then teachers need to be held to higher standards and do their job. As teachers improve, then they can be the raises they earned, not raises based on I want to earn more money.
If a teacher is not happy with their take-home pay, they need to find another job that pays more.
I have had several teachers I have worked with leave to take a job that pays more with a lot less stress.
I am retiring after this school year. I would love to work another 5 years as I do enjoy. my job. school climate has reached the point that I no longer want to teach. I will be taking another job.
I wouldn’t be a teacher, not so much because of the pay, but because even when I went to school, they let the inmates run the asylum. You get stuck with these kids in classes who don’t want to be there, who disrupt learning for everyone else, but you can’t just kick them out. For the sake of the students that want to learn and teachers that genuinely want to teach, you have to flush the kids that are failing into special schools, out of school or into serious punishment that changes their behavior.
Five years ago I reached my breaking point, for many of the reasons you cited. I told the district I was retiring and finding another job. I had tried to transfer to a different school for several years and was blocked because it would take a few years to find a replacement for me.
So, the district gave in and let me transfer. The school I went to is better run. There is a huge effort to get the students who do not want to be there into alternative programs. There are a few good ones. The student population is very different and my most challenging student at the new school does not even come close to the average student at the school I left. I can handle 99% of everything in class. We have an in school suspension program. If.a kid is acting up in class, they go to in-school. They have to earn their way back by completing an assignment over what they need to do to stay in class. If they screw up again, they go back and do the same online assignment. About the 5th or so time they are so bored, most follow the class rules.
This year I had to teach a class I had not taught in over 15 years. It is an intensive lab course. The previous teacher left for a better paying job. He and his wife just had their first child and he realized he needed a better job so he can support his family to allow his wife stay home and raise their son. They were not going to go the route of day care.
I do not have the energy I used to have and I have several health issues that are manageable. I no longer have the time because of all the extra work I have to put in. On top of that, the district decided to go from 6 classes a day to 7. They told us that they did not need to hire more teachers. I called BS on that.
Well, when the year started, they did not have enough classes for every student. The district invoked the contract clause that allows them to force teachers to teach an extra class. Over 80% are now teaching an extra class. I am no longer able to teach up to my own expectations.
When the admin came to me and told me I would be teaching the new class, I told them they needed to start looking for someone to replace me next year, I will be retiring at the end of the school year. They were shocked when I put in for retirement. I told them I meant what I said. Then they gave me an extra class. Then they came back and offered a bonus if I put off retirement. My response was you can take this job and shove it. We are moving to be close to our son, his wife, and our first grandchild. I will then find another job that will allow me to focus on my family.
When I moved schools, I knew I was only buying a couple more years. Education is in a downfall. I tell everyone that asks that they need to take their children out of public education. The system could be fixed but there is no political will to do so.
I will be leaving CA and moving to a Red State. CA was a great place for much of my life. The lat 20 years, it has been circling the drain. CA really needs to break away and be its own country.
My wife (who is also retired science teacher) and I will home school our grandson while his parents work.
Traditional American culture has been tremendously effective at building a prosperous economy, but to do so, it's used a lot of ideas which take a horrific toll on people as individuals.
"You are your job."
"Winners get up at 4 am."
"Second place is the first loser."
"Sleep is for the weak."
"You gotta beat manhood into a boy."
"All go no quit."
"Hard work is its own reward."
"Leaders are made, not born."
"Suck it up."
"Suffering builds character."
"You gotta pay your dues."
Leftist ideas plain don't work, and usually kill people in the process. Conservative ideas have a tough-love, results-oriented approach that ignores the personal cost of getting those results.
Last night we had my son and his new wife over for dinner. She is 5 months pregnant with our first grandchild. My wife's energy level goes up 3x when we have visitors, and 4x when it is her sons and daughter in-laws. We had takeout sushi and she loves Saki. After the kids left we watched some TV and she drank some more saki. I don't drink much these days because of health issues.
But when she drinks, she gets very opinionated. We watched an episode of the new season of The Diplomat. It was awesome. Then to calm down we watched some Youtube videos. One is a young woman and her husband hat live in Longyearbyen, Norway and record their daily life.
My wife went off during the video saying "how can they live like this? I am 63 and working doing things... and all they do is drink coffee, go on holiday and play with their dog?". She said "they don't do anything that is meaningful or productive."
I listened and then said, their jobs are to be entertainers. Just like actors on the Hollywood screen, what do those actors do for their life-meaning? The fact that they are only play-acting probably hits them at some point and that is why many of them end up being stupid in politics grasping luxury beliefs... because they are empty buckets of low life meaning that does not match up with their money and fame for being entertainers.
I told her that we used to be an industrial economy where more people invented, made, built, grew, fixed and sold real tangible products. We allowed our elite Professional Managerial Class to give away all that for more corporate profit. Then we became a tech and information economy. We have also allowed our PMC to give most of that away for more corporate profit. What is left is an attention economy. Today people are made addicted to screen content to get their attention and sell them things that they generally do not need.
The addiction is what allows this young woman and her husband to make a living as a Youtuber filming their boring regular life living in a weird place.
But the attention economy has also caused a mass psychosis of laziness where people don't live their own life but participate in the screen life of others. It is like a drug they cannot resist. Their demand to work from home, to work less, to have more government benefits... is largely related to their addiction to entertainment screen time.
I think this has also caused a lot of what we see as irrational and weird behavior with political people... generally people on the left. They are living in some mythological world in their heads... not really connected with reality of healthy human existence. The most bizarrely behaving poll as more lonely, more depressed, more with mental health diagnoses. And they now have their own media portal to show us their crazy.
Reality does not care what they think, but there are enough of them where crazy does not care what reality thinks.
Back in the day I was on our high school debate team. To argue the thesis, you had to prove the need for your plan, and argue its workability. I don't know if that even happens anymore. It seems like lots of magical thinking happens, routinely. The modern "plan" is: we want what we want, so they have to make it happen. When you try to talk about funding, and the poly centricity argument about what other program you'd have to cut to fund yours, it's blank stares time. Maybe too much screen time, where magical short cuts or cheat codes take the place of methodical planning. In my County, DEI is what is killing public education. We have to hold back the brightest so as to not highlight those who aren't learning at grade level. Only so many honors classes around, and God forbid there are certain racial groups who outscore others. Since that is the Most Important Thing, everyone's education suffers. Trump is Hitler around here, so no, reality is not practiced here.
I am a teacher and liked your comment about pay raises for teachers.
In the 80s and early 90s, there was a glut of teachers. When I first started teaching, over half of the teachers at my high school had Master's degrees and about a fourth had Ph.Ds. You had to have an advanced degree to even make it to the interview. That is what happens when 40 people applied for the same position. The advanced degrees were in the field they taught, there were few Masters and Doctorates of education. Advanced degrees in education are easy to obtain. A Masters in Science requires more work than a a Ed.D. Nothing in education requires nearly the intensive amount of work as a Ph.D in science.
I worked with a group of teachers that were good at what they did.
Now, there are probably 50 applicants for 100 teaching positions. At some schools, 25% or more of teachers are long-term subs with little to know training and often times do not have a degree in the area they are teaching.
Those that have advanced degrees are no longer pursuing a career in teaching. They can earn much more in the private sector.
That is not the complete story. Many of those with advanced degrees and highly trained would go into teaching, not for the money but because they had a passion for teaching. What has changed is the behavior of students, the lack of consequences for bad behavior, parents and students blaming teachers when a student is not performing,
Who wants to deal with all that when one can take a higher paying job in private industry and not deal with all the headaches that come with teaching.
This has resulted in those that in the past would never be considered for a teaching position to being hired because the school needs a warm body with a credential. When I started teaching, you needed at least a 3.5 GPA to be considered. Today, that has dropped to a 2.0.
Many of the younger teachers today are teaching because they do not have the skills and work ethic private industry demands.
At my school, for the very first time in my career, teachers have to check in and out at the office. A large number were arriving late to school and letting their students out early at the end of the day so they could leave a few minutes before the last bell and beat the rush. By contract we are to be on site 15 minutes before the bell rings and stay for 15 minutes after the final bell.
When I started teaching, it was not uncommon for teachers to arrive an hour or more before school and stay at least an hour after. This is the time all of those parent teacher meetings are held, and students can drop by to get help. It also gives me time to plan and prepare lessons.
Today, with AI, the Internet, and canned curriculum purchased by the district, teachers no longer have to plan lessons. They just do whatever assignment is supposed to be taught that day. The worksheets are already in the binders that one gets from the publisher. You just print them out and use them on the designated day.
I am old school. I have developed all of my curriculum and each year revise and update 25he % of it so I can keep up with the latest developments. My assignments are designed to meet the needs of my students and are not a one size fits all.
Younger teachers refuse to meet with parents. Worse yet, they believe they have to teach all the woke stuff they learned in college. They teach whatever they think is right because parents have no say. They have forgotten that we are employees of the government and so have to be politically neutral and defer to parents on many issues. The teacher may not agree with the parent, but the parent has the final say because our students are not our kids.
If schools wanted to attract more teachers, they need to provide extra incentives such as increased pay. The Catch-22 is not many are competent enough to be teacher. They are currently being paid more than they are worth.
Throwing money at education will not fix it. The first step is to start holding students to high academic and behavioral standards. Then teachers need to be held to higher standards and do their job. As teachers improve, then they can be the raises they earned, not raises based on I want to earn more money.
If a teacher is not happy with their take-home pay, they need to find another job that pays more.
I have had several teachers I have worked with leave to take a job that pays more with a lot less stress.
I am retiring after this school year. I would love to work another 5 years as I do enjoy. my job. school climate has reached the point that I no longer want to teach. I will be taking another job.
I wouldn’t be a teacher, not so much because of the pay, but because even when I went to school, they let the inmates run the asylum. You get stuck with these kids in classes who don’t want to be there, who disrupt learning for everyone else, but you can’t just kick them out. For the sake of the students that want to learn and teachers that genuinely want to teach, you have to flush the kids that are failing into special schools, out of school or into serious punishment that changes their behavior.
Five years ago I reached my breaking point, for many of the reasons you cited. I told the district I was retiring and finding another job. I had tried to transfer to a different school for several years and was blocked because it would take a few years to find a replacement for me.
So, the district gave in and let me transfer. The school I went to is better run. There is a huge effort to get the students who do not want to be there into alternative programs. There are a few good ones. The student population is very different and my most challenging student at the new school does not even come close to the average student at the school I left. I can handle 99% of everything in class. We have an in school suspension program. If.a kid is acting up in class, they go to in-school. They have to earn their way back by completing an assignment over what they need to do to stay in class. If they screw up again, they go back and do the same online assignment. About the 5th or so time they are so bored, most follow the class rules.
This year I had to teach a class I had not taught in over 15 years. It is an intensive lab course. The previous teacher left for a better paying job. He and his wife just had their first child and he realized he needed a better job so he can support his family to allow his wife stay home and raise their son. They were not going to go the route of day care.
I do not have the energy I used to have and I have several health issues that are manageable. I no longer have the time because of all the extra work I have to put in. On top of that, the district decided to go from 6 classes a day to 7. They told us that they did not need to hire more teachers. I called BS on that.
Well, when the year started, they did not have enough classes for every student. The district invoked the contract clause that allows them to force teachers to teach an extra class. Over 80% are now teaching an extra class. I am no longer able to teach up to my own expectations.
When the admin came to me and told me I would be teaching the new class, I told them they needed to start looking for someone to replace me next year, I will be retiring at the end of the school year. They were shocked when I put in for retirement. I told them I meant what I said. Then they gave me an extra class. Then they came back and offered a bonus if I put off retirement. My response was you can take this job and shove it. We are moving to be close to our son, his wife, and our first grandchild. I will then find another job that will allow me to focus on my family.
When I moved schools, I knew I was only buying a couple more years. Education is in a downfall. I tell everyone that asks that they need to take their children out of public education. The system could be fixed but there is no political will to do so.
I will be leaving CA and moving to a Red State. CA was a great place for much of my life. The lat 20 years, it has been circling the drain. CA really needs to break away and be its own country.
My wife (who is also retired science teacher) and I will home school our grandson while his parents work.
Traditional American culture has been tremendously effective at building a prosperous economy, but to do so, it's used a lot of ideas which take a horrific toll on people as individuals.
"You are your job."
"Winners get up at 4 am."
"Second place is the first loser."
"Sleep is for the weak."
"You gotta beat manhood into a boy."
"All go no quit."
"Hard work is its own reward."
"Leaders are made, not born."
"Suck it up."
"Suffering builds character."
"You gotta pay your dues."
Leftist ideas plain don't work, and usually kill people in the process. Conservative ideas have a tough-love, results-oriented approach that ignores the personal cost of getting those results.