People might want to be teachers rather than software engineers because teachers get enormous amounts of time off, have extremely high levels of job security, plus all the usual reasons that not everyone is in the very highest paying profession.

Why aren't you a hedge fund manager?

> teachers get enormous amounts of time off

Anyone who's actually been or known a teacher knows this is false.

During the school year, in the time they're not actively teaching, teachers are

- Coaching sports

- Overseeing other student extracurricular activities

- Making/updating lesson plans

- Presiding over detention

- Tutoring students who need more 1:1 time

- Serving on school committees (especially in larger districts)

During the summer, teachers generally spend a large percentage of their time laying out the curriculum for the coming year. This is especially true for those in smaller districts, where one teacher has to teach three or four different levels of the same subject (or even multiple completely different subjects!).

I mean, I guess it's all relative. I'm a software engineer at a startup. On average I work about 50-55 hours a week. I get 3 weeks of vacation a year.

I certainly don't deny that teachers spend a lot of time working on their "time off". But that said, I've known more than a few teachers personally, and yes, they still do get enormous amounts of time off. Heck, a bunch of them will even admit it is the biggest perk of teaching (because otherwise there aren't many).

Teachers have plenty of real, valid complaints about the environment of teaching, and more importantly, it's clear with the current teacher shortage that something is really broken. Still, I don't think it wins them any supporters when teachers try to deny that most of them have vastly more time off than other professionals.

When I was teaching I worked a 7am to 6pm job, 5 days a week. That was actually in the school building, so that's 55 hours right there. The two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon, when I wasn't looking after 35 teenagers in a small, hot and unventilated classroom, were spent marking, planning lessons and writing reports. Have you ever had a job where you literally have to plan how much you drink, so that you don't have a full bladder in the middle of a double Science lesson?

Most weekends I'd dedicate around 5 or 6 hours to work, so that puts me up to about 61 hours a week. Of course we got those amazing holidays. Holidays when you were still expected to answer emails, mark work, write reports, plan assessments and lessons. One year, I remember working from September through to August, and my total time off was Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. In August the exam results come through, so I was expected to be in school to coach children on their options, and then write a 15 page report on the reasons my department had performed or under-performed.

I appreciate that this has turned into a rant, but don't ever think that your job is harder than a teacher, if you are a software engineer. It's not. I can testify to that. Teaching involves understanding your subject, understanding pedagogy, being a parent, councilor and sometimes prison warden to children who are often going through the most difficult times of their lives. You have to do all of that, while basically performing on stage for 5 hours a day, and your lunch break is spent ramming food down your throat so you can get out to the playground on time to supervise the kids out there.

An ex-colleague of mine has asked me to go back into teaching in his school. My response was "okay" can you pay me 150K, because I wouldn't do it for anything less.

I feel that this scales largely based on subject mater, experience, and past history teaching a particular course. I know a number of teachers and there are a lot of differences. Expectations vary by district, school, and parents. There have been many top down changes over time, mostly for the worse increasing workload.

When I was in HS, it was not uncommon to have lecture most days and a graded assignment once a week or even less. This is obviously a lot less work for teachers. In the best cases it can be a 7—4 job with summers completely off.

I’m curious about what you’re doing now. I hope it’s healthier than what you described as your experience as a teacher.

Still in education, but now I work for the Raspberry Pi Foundation in the charitable sector.

> Making/updating lesson plans

Why? Are they really better than khan academy at doing a lesson plan? Isn’t this like a software engineer complaining they have to write their own database driver in their spare time after work?

> Are they really better than khan academy at doing a lesson plan?

Yes

> like a software engineer complaining they have to write their own database driver in their spare time after work?

No

In general, it is a good idea to personalize lesson plans based on how well people did or didn’t react to the last one, and khan academy certainly doesn’t do anything like that, nor does it work for everyone.

The entire point of khan academy is that it is individually tailored to the student and can decide what lessons need additional practice vs those that can be skipped. It sounds like you aren’t at all awqre of how khan academy works.

Are you claiming teachers can personalize a lesson plan for each individual student in a class? To a granularity finer than what Khan Academy can do?

Unless you are suggesting a teacher can clone themselves to however big their class size there is, the individualization is not a realistic prospect given that you have to teach a few dozen kids in a 30-45 minute period. And given that current funding levels are having a hard time keeping teacher retention even at these levels, significantly increasing teacher numbers to make real individualization possible is not within the realm of reality.

Also, individual teaching methods don’t work well in certain subjects; as an example, you need a few people to put on a theatrical production, perform ensemble music, or have Socratic discussions.

Can you do that over summer without frequent contact with the students?

Lesson plans vary by the day, so I’m not sure how exactly you would do that without the data from the previous day.

Teachers aren't paid to personalize lessons though, if you work overtime to do that then you can only blame yourself. Teachers are paid to hold standardized lessons and answer questions help students with problems.

You could argue it would be better if teachers were paid to personalize lectures, but they aren't. Maybe some document somewhere says they should, but in practice nothing will happen to you if you just use standardized lectures so that is what most will do and that is what the expectations of the job is built around.

You say this because you don't know better, but its very common in schools for kids with learning or other disabilities to be in the same classes as other students - called 'mainstreaming' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainstreaming_(education)

Teachers are 100% supposed to teach the standardized kids, the kids with disabilities, and the kids who are a little faster than everyone else. It's simply not possible to do with one standardized lecture without individual attention to those with special needs.

It's not some document, its literally a major movement decades old in education.

Lesson plans are not standardized down to the day and order.

Sometimes, a group of students might need to speed up, slow down, or go in a wholly different direction depending on what happened with the previous lesson. There’s a lot of variation between one class of students and another, and teachers are not some kind of omniscient perfect predictor of behavior. And ultimately, you need to cover a whole curriculum.

There is a whole spectrum between teaching centrally dictated lesson plans and individually crafted tutoring, and one of the requirements of teaching is to be able to adjust lesson plans according to reality. We don’t expect software engineers to waterfall every last character in code down to the wire, but teachers are supposed to do this with unpredictable human children?

"Teachers should stop caring and just do the minimum necessary to get paid" isn't really a strong argument in favor of the status quo.

> Why would someone choose to be a teacher making around the median when you could be a software engineer and make 3x as much?

Is that a serious question?

Why indeed? Maybe because a union job with a state pension (yes, defined benefit pension) that starts at 62K and has an advancing pay scale based only on education level and seniority (yes - job performance unrelated to pay) and very high job security ain’t bad place to be if you can get it.

(And also I suspect that a lot of the people getting those teaching jobs simply would not be able to get 200K software development jobs.)

That assumes someone qualified to be a teacher is also qualified to be a software engineer. Have you met a lot of urban public school teachers?

They spend all day herding children, so they are at least qualified to be Project Managers.

You jest, but this is my suggestion to anyone who wants a career change. You can study and get a PMP or Scrum certificate and get an entry level job fairly easily. And, if successful, can be making 100k within a few years.

Of course you have to be a PM, so there’s that. I’d rather literally herd cats or manage a kindergarten class.

"So what do you do for a living?"

"I call people and ask them to do the things they said they would do, on time. Then we have meetings about it for 4-6 hours a day. Technically I'm in charge."

This post doesn't assume that, but I have met urban public school teachers who could have been software engineers since you asked.

My post does assume that the career would attract more highly qualified candidates if the pay was higher.

I’ve met some too, but I’d say that most are incapable. Or they are the same proportion of the population that is capable. I don’t think teachers are any more or less likely than a typical person.

I’d guess I’ve met and spend significant time with 100 teachers. And a handful were capable of being a professional programmer.

What has “urban” to do with it?

I think a more diverse student body, likely one with a wide range of parental income and possibly including some kids who are members or gangs or is just more likely to have a few actually violent (,mentally ill, narcissistic, borderline personality disorder, etc.) kids, with a higher student to teacher ratio, will be much more challenging than a small high-school with 400 kids that more or less fall into "middle class and above with a spattering of low income."

EDIT: found an interesting "day in the life" article by a self-labeled urban teacher.

https://theeducatorsroom.com/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-teacher-...

The parent comment answers itself. They would choose it because they actually don't have the alternative choice. In fact, aside from the transient young Teach for America type affluent idealists, most (not "all") urban public school teachers are gloried babysitters making good babysitting wages. If they teach kids anything it's usually something that should be untaught asap. By and large, the long hauler, professional urban public school teachers are not the type of people who have a ton of useful skills. In fact, the social skills useful for dealing with adults usually atrophy so even being a Software Project Manager is off the table. They become prisoners as much as the students, who at least have a definite term to serve and can get out early for bad behavior. For most kids, urban public schools are a policy solution to the social problem of young, unattended kids causing havoc, not a viable educational tool. Considered in that light they work pretty well.

And non-urban schools are somehow different?

Yes, for obvious reasons. Classroom size and the relative economic factors of urban schools make the job less desirable than non-urban schools. Urban kids are typically rich or poor. Rich kids end up in non-public schools. Non-urban schools are more often serving the middle class, who have cultural advantages over the poor when it comes to learning outcomes. Why do you think urban parents move to suburban school districts after having kids?

There are more urban teachers than rural. And pay is more for urban than rural.

True but rarely more than the difference in cost of living.

I’ve never heard of ”urban” being a code word for “black”. Is that a thing? I assume they mean “urban” as in “city” where you’re likely to have many other forms of opportunity vs “podunk” where you’re kinda stuck in one career because there’s nothing else around.

It's very much a thing.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2020/06/10/heres-h...

What has "what has 'urban'" to do with it?

What?

Huh?

Well this interaction was confusing enough that I had to check your profile. I suppose that's a hobby.

Who's profile?

Yes. And most wouldn't make a statement this dumb.

> Why would someone choose to be a teacher making around the median [1] when you could be a software engineer and make 3x as much?

Isn’t the answer to this quite obvious? It’s harder to be a software engineer. And there’s more risk to the profession.

Programming is interesting as you can be self-taught and be great. And it doesn’t require any formal training. I started as a college dropout (from a different major nothing to do with programming) and there’s lots of boot camps.

Anyone with the inclination can do what you suggest. But I think programming is hard so many are incapable.

Most teachers couldn't be software engineers, they just aren't smart enough.