The general idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule
Some examples, many of which only do "work-to-rule" on certain days, not even on all of the days. https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2018/02/09/west-chicago-teacher... https://www.orlandoweekly.com/Blogs/archives/2018/01/26/oran... https://www.floridatoday.com/story/news/2018/01/04/unhappy-r... https://www.tulsaworld.com/news/local/education/tulsa-public... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2012/11/...
If two parties have already agreed that one will perform a certain amount of work and another will pay a certain amount of money, it is unreasonable for either side to demand more than what the other side agreed to.
A contract becomes meaningless if one side can arbitrarily adjust the terms.
Maybe that's a long winded way of saying that I suspect a lot of teachers are bleeding hearts and do not closely manager their time or monetary budgets closely.
That's not good for anyone.
Including software. It is also one of those reasons why the 40 hour work week is mostly a myth.
The only effective (read: doesn't cost anything to execute) strategy employers have to calibrate how much workload can be achieved in a given time is to keep increasing the amount of work until people start quitting or jobs go undone, then scale back a little bit. There are other strategies that cost more to execute or require enlightened management; but they aren't the norm in my experience.
All a teacher can really do for a class is either 1:1 time with an individual or N:1 time with a group. All the details of exactly what gets done only obscures the fact that there is always going to be a good outcome for students if the teacher puts in another half-hour of unpaid work and that teachers shouldn't do that because it is unpaid.
Online school stuff isn't perfect (looking at you blackboard and friends), but they can sure take a lot of this drudgery away if you are willing to learn a platform.
Anecdotes consistently run one way, while data consistently runs another.
This analysis would be a lot more useful if broken down by demographic categories, such as gender, marital status, age, and number/ages of children.
The demographic profile of teachers is pretty different than e.g. accountants or lawyers or engineers.
It would also be useful to break this down by salary bracket.
Anecdotally, my mother, a career primary-school teacher, worked 60+ hours/week most weeks (while school was in session; her preparation/cleanup took also took a couple full-time weeks out of every summer vacation, but the rest of the summer vacation she could travel etc.) for several decades. Much harder than most of the much-better-compensated other white-collar professionals I know.
I’m also not sure if self-reported estimates on a survey are reliable measures of time spent. Again anecdotally, people’s self-descriptions of how hard working they are seems to depend substantially on personality / identity. It would be interesting to see some more direct measurements of time use.
And there's more of those around than you might think.
That kind of job should have risk bonuses. Significant ones. Most people just can't do that and pursue anything else. Getting stuck is a real fear.
We were at a very stressful location and working at another location could be a huge relief because of lower load. I would imagine the work environment would have to go to absolute trash for the dev job to come close.
If you say restaurant, it feel like it's not fast food, and the average differences in wages, hours, stress level and customer appreciation between establishments called restaurants vs fast food places is probably quite significant.
I've been running an excavator recently to do some...yard work...and honestly that line of work seems pretty appealing, and quite lucrative.
If salary was determined based on the emotional and physical toll a job takes, I feel like a fast food worker would make more than I do as a software engineer.
It was pure bliss. Most of my time was spent relaxing in my own car with my own music, or socializing with other employees in the pizza shop. Some (very few) customers were dicks, but who gives a fuck? All I do is deliver it, I was neither expected nor in any way able to help them with anything else. There is no concept of "oh, here's a bunch of work I didn't expect to have to do today." Show up, drive around, ???, profit, leave.
Since then I've accidentally stumbled back into software development and while it certainly has its upsides, I am infinitely more stressed. I miss the pizza gig almost daily.
Good thing there's always a budget to build newer fancier schools, but not to pay teachers livable wages, cause that makes sense.
My favorite teacher was my AP calc teacher in high school. She only graded during her planning session, never worked overtime, let us not only fix a broken classroom computer that the school basically abandoned but we also take turns playing GTA on it during lectures. Almost everyone in the class passed the AP exam. She was in MENSA and left a lucrative career fixing math for defense contractors because she just wanted to teach. There just aren't enough people with those kinds of chops to go around, regardless of the salary we are willing to pay.
In (good) mathematics lessons, very little of the time is spent explaining the theory. Instead a lot time is spent doing exercises – both the teacher demonstrating and the students trying it out them selves. At that point the teaching becomes reactive, as the student get stuck and you help them figure it out. This requires little prep (basically finding good exercises).
In other subjects there is much more story telling and explaining. And it requires much more preparations in order to make it interesting, and keeping all kinds of details fresh in your mind.
As for grading, grading mathematics is quick and mechanical. While correcting an essay is a lot more draining.
So, I do not think talent is actually what is deciding factor here. The way you phrase it, it sounds to me like "Oh, if the teacher were better at their job they would have to work a lot less".
>"Oh, if the teacher were better at their job they would have to work a lot less".
I'm 100% saying exactly that. This is true of basically every profession. Some people are more effective/efficient/faster than others.
I gravely disagree. I spent a lot of time grading calculus exams at universities, and it is a quick and fairly mechanical procedure. A group of five can churn through three hundred final exams in a working day.
Answers in maths are quite uniform and contain a few sentences which can be quickly judged by how correct they are. Calculus and trigonometry might be difficult for the students, but for someone who has taught it a few years, it is absolutely straight forward to recognise correct solutions.
Grading say, English short stories or essays is a completely different thing. There are a lot more sentences, which have to be analysed grammatically and semantically. You have to judge how coherent the student is, which is a non-local property. Does the end match the beginning? What is the student trying to say? Do they use a clear language? If not, what feed-back can you give that will improve it. What literary effects does the student command? Allusions? Irony? Foreshadowing? Contrast?
The answers are highly personal and even using rubric grading every one is a non-trivial judgement call.
I believe that the nature of the tasks and subjects have a bigger impact on how much time it takes to grade it, than how efficient the individual grader is. I have experience correcting in groups where I have been able to compare grading speed. Yes there are differences between how fast people grade, but they are minor, and often speed is inversely correlated with quality (of feedback given to the student).
> Some people are more effective/efficient/faster than others.
Learning takes time. Students learn by doing different activities related to the topic. Sometimes listening to the teacher explaining, sometimes working on problems of their own. In mathematics, it is easy to find good examples to demonstrate and problems for the students to work with. Other subjects, it is much more difficult, and requires prep work.
Taking less time to prepare will usually mean worse teaching. For instance I had a history teacher who would just put on recordings from History Channel. He thus had to spend little time preparing the lessons. But the learning outcome was not the best.
Sometimes HN takes too much of a SV-centric view, especially in terms of wages.
So, yes, maybe median is not bad. But starting out -- especially in a city -- seems really bad.
Especially when you factor in almost all of these teachers have college debt of about $30k+ to pay off...
That same link shows that the median teacher salary in California is $82k, which is still 17% above the median household income in California [1]. The average student loan debt is right around $30k [2], so above average wages combined with average student loan debt shouldn't be construed as unlivable, unless that term is extended way beyond the plight of teachers (which may still be fair).
Again, it should be taken in context (outside the SV bubble). I know engineers who started at <$40k (albeit a few years back during the recession)
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSCAA646N
[2] https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2017-economic-we...
There are some additional reasons for this. The first is that there's not a 1-on-1 correlation between number of classes to teach and hours of work. It is assumed that teachers spend, IIRC, 30 minutes before a lesson to prepare it. The time it requires in practice, though, strongly depends on your schedule: if you have to teach five different levels of students, that means you're preparing five different lessons. If you teach five different classes, but all of them at the same level, you'll be able to spread the preparation time over all five of them, greatly lowering the average time spent.
The other complicating factor is that there are seasons: summer holiday is relatively calm (you'll have nothing to do for most of the time), whereas exam weeks can be enormously stressful. So while on average a teacher might be working close to a regular, full-time job, it's practically impossible to maintain a 1fte job, since there will regularly be weeks in which the work is simply too overwhelming.
Edit: And one additional point: teachers are really bad at negotiating. They can demand higher wages or fewer working hours, but once push comes to shove, most of them will simply put up with it for fear of harming the students.
The vast majority of info about teaching as a career will vastly differ based on location. For example, it is my understanding that teaching in California is closer to a $60k salary, while here in Maine, the majority of schools are more like $40k after 20 years accrued. You get about 3 personal days a year, with just a bit more sick time, meaning teachers often have to just work sick. Teachers are also required to keep their education up with taking college level classes every few years, as well as meeting other requirements (which is a good thing) often out of their own pocket (which is bad thing). You start work not after 7:45, and are "done" by 4, unless you actually do your job as a teacher and want to not be fired, in which case you are done after 7pm. You teach hundreds of students, and often end up being the sole support figure for tens of students per year, basically adopting them and trying to contribute as much as you can to their lives. Everything you do, inside and outside of work, is scrutinized by the entire town. Every little twerp of a kid is an angel to their parents, and 80% of the parents will blame you for any problem they create. Imagine the kind of hate that the lowest retail worker gets, now imagine you went to college for 6ish years and still get that hate.
The single upside (again, here in Maine) is really really good, 100% employer paid healthcare, though no dental. Pretty much the only reason my dirt poor family didn't die on the street.
If school teachers worked how much they are paid, America would have collapsed 50 years ago.
A school where almost all the teachers are working part time sounds unusual to me, and I wonder if that contributes to what sounds like an unpleasant environment. Most schools are staffed by full time employees with nowhere near the burnout rate you stated would occur here.
The thing is, many people in 40-hour-week jobs are doing upwards of 60 hours per week. I'd offer that the better paid the job and the more responsibility the job has, the more hours per week are required. Nearly everybody is doing their equivalent of grading papers and doing lesson plans.
Why does she accept this? You get a salary, you have hours to do shit then go home and forget about work. You need to prepare things? Do it at school during work hours. Stop gifting unpaid time to a corporation which does not care.
If you studied to become a teacher for half a decade, love your job, see the impact on kids who need you, and essentially work at a non-profit, there's very little recourse but leave teaching behind entirely and do something else in the private sector.
You can cut corners and stick to contracted hours but your classes will suck, your kids will know you don't care and won't care either. Both your job becomes boring, soulless, without impact or connection as the relationship with your students goes down the drain. You'll burn out for different reasons.
I'm exaggerating some points slightly but that's the gist of it.
Netherlands btw.
Is that fair? No, but it's the moral calculus regardless. And it's at least one reason why teachers are, indeed, "underpaid".
All data indicates that teachers are working less than 40 hours a week on average, which makes me believe that the ones putting in 50+ hours are a vocal, tiny minority.
I have the impression (from my wife and her coworkers) that it's much easier for elementary and middle school teachers to work the contracted hours and not bring their work home with them.
High school just comes with a lot of extra baggage too.
I've never understood why subjects and student age aren't considered in teacher pay scales across the board. My experience is limited, but I've never seen an instance where anything other than time and credentials (generally degrees) were considered.
"Union contracts generally mandate that gym teachers must be paid the same as calculus teachers, with the predictable result of surpluses of gym teachers and shortages of calculus teachers."
Even 20% workload in grading papers (e.g., quantitative works are graded electronically) would mean so much for the entire teaching industry.
They do compare how many hours teachers work to other workers and also analyze the issue along multiple other lines that have nothing to do with hourly wage.
See, this is where things go wrong. So they've got mean wage figures which are constructed both on a fact (hourly wage) and an assumption (working hours).
I know n=1 but, my girlfriend is a teacher and I see her working about 40 hours a week, for a 24h job. She has a 0.6 FTE contracted position (and an according 60% monthly salary), she's at the school about 4 days a week. On her off-day, every single evening before work and after work, and at least one, sometimes two days of the weekend, she's grading papers, designing exams, preparing lessons, calling up parents, responding to students on their education platform (some saas application on laptop & phone) etc etc.
There's no way she can handle a 1.0 position, she'd burn-out within 1 or 2 years. She knows this, all of her colleagues know this. Almost everyone works part-time.
She does teach difficult classes (lots of kids from low socioeconomic background, crappy parents, many distractions, little socialisation skills etc etc) but even teaching 'easy' kids, you'll still top-out at 0.8 FTE for the same mental effort / working hours / strain of 1.0 FTE at a 'normal' job (like mine, corporate job at a financial institution).
Hourly wages can't be straight-up compared between jobs high in mental or physical strain (e.g. teaching or construction) versus say an administrative office job. You just can't last 40 years working the former jobs at a full-time position. Not the average person.