One Friday evening I went out with some friends and ended up running into my son’s 6 grade teacher pouring body shots on themselves for the patrons to enjoy.

Maybe that’s the way it works in a “resort” town.

Plus, my own experience in the public school system as a student tells me not all teachers are working 12, or even 8, hour days. Again, if you want to be a good teacher - why complain that it's hard? Just be the best teacher you can with eight hours of work. It's not like teachers are fired for being bad.

I think complaints can be useful in identifying a problem, but if your complaints have been made, just continuing to complain doesn't do anything. On the other hand, quitting, does two useful things. First, it takes you out of a bad situation letting you move on to a better one faster. Second, it helps brings the problem to a head. The administration can ignore teachers complaining, they cannot ignore teachers quitting. At some point they will have to resolve the issue.

They are.

The exception tends to be at the poorest schools where the principals have trouble hiring and keeping teachers. When I was interviewing for teaching positions, I met with the principal for a school in South Central L.A. and the only question he asked me as, “do you promise not to quit before the end of the school year?”

Elsewhere bad teachers are fired, sometimes even in the middle of the school year.

The other case is the Integrated Math curriculum which specifies lesson plans on a daily basis.

I have no direct experience with either.

But what about the adult population? I think large swaths of it are in need of more education. Math literacy, evidence-based evaluation of propaganda. Large portion of US population believes last election was stolen.

You cannot amplify the powers of a single teacher because that's not how CHILDREN function.

The children's need for 1-on-1 human interaction to support their development is the fundamental bottleneck. The reason class sizes matter is because they directly affect the quantity of direct interaction each child receives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_by_teaching

Having been thorough some schools I think the biggest impediment was that teachers didn't really get what I didn't get, my mis-conceptions.

A recent student might be able to better understand what the obstacles in leaning might be since they have been through it themselves.

The idea of Learning-By-Teaching seems to be that students learn better when they try to express the subject matter so clearly that others can understand it too. But it might also compsensate for the lack of teachers, that students can be teachers to other students.

* pay teachers a fair wage

* hire enough teachers, assistants, and admins so that teachers don't have to work at least another half a workday 'off the books'

* fund schools well enough that teachers don't have to pay out of pocket for basic supplies like chalk and paper

* feed our children a proper meal at lunch by default, instead of making them pay for a crappy meal (unless their busy parents jump through hoops to prove they're poor enough)

One of the strangest things for me as a private school student coming from the public school system was being able to go into the lunch line, get what food I wanted, as much as I wanted, and not have to pay for it. No worries about losing the lunch money I'd been given, getting beat up for my lunch money, etc.

The US is usually in the top 3 spending per student (beaten only by small countries that represent statistical outliers like Norway or Luxemburg), so really, it spends the most. Yet, as many are quick to point out, all that money results in educational outcomes well below many European countries and also many Asian countries that spend far, far less.

Luckily, this is researched extensively, and schools must publish budgets. Typically, spending on 'instruction' is >60% of the expenditures, almost all of that is salaries and benefits. Capital outlay is usually around 8-10%, support services and administration around 10%, operations and maintenance around 10%, and around 5% for transportation/bussing.

Contrary to the typical claims that 'administration' or capital costs suck up all the money, the majority of the money does go to teachers' salary.

It would also be interesting to compare educational outcomes in particular US states to particular European countries. I suppose that the quality of education may be as unevenly distributed across the US as it is across Europe.

Teachers salaries are 100% a local issue. If you want to raise their salary then vote to increase taxes in your county. Teachers are state employees. The states governments are more than capable enough to solve these issues since they are local issues.

That said, my understanding is that the military budget mostly goes to salaries, so any drastic cuts would leave us with massive unemployment. You'd have to take things really slow to make that big a change in the labor force without pretty ugly side effects.

No, it's not. Russia, Israel, and Saudi Arabia all spend more as a percentage of GDP on their militaries than America.

>USA's military spending in 2021 hit $801bn a year, says the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. In comparison Russia's military spending in 2021 hit only $66bn.

US population: 329.5 million, Russian population: 144.1 million,

Per capita spending US: $24,600. Russia: $458

While I’m at it: US GDP: 20.94 trillion, 1.483 trillion

US military spending as percent of GDP: 3.8%, Russia: 4.5%

Now you can see how there is a way.

- smaller, poorer countries

- countries involved in active military conflicts or with active military conflicts near them

- petrostates

In many countries in Europe there are only public schools.

https://high-schools.com/directory/ca/cities/beverly-hills/b...

Although, after googling highest-income school district in the US, not all school districts do:

https://high-schools.com/directory/ny/school-districts/scars...

You mean funding the vacation plans of all the administration ?

The teachers I knew who worked until old age had developed systems to make their jobs sustainable and predictable, while younger teachers tended to scramble with new programs and initiatives.

To automate grading you first must create a general AI, because if you just do multiple choice exams, you aren't really testing or measuring someone's ability to perform the task, you're just measuring their ability to make a good guess. And some teachers do that. But not the good ones.

As for planning, some senior teachers have filing cabinets labeled by day. They just reach into the file and pull out the lesson for "day 82". But any good teacher will realize that they have to customize the learning to that year's kids, and constantly update with new teaching methodologies, new information, etc. And sometimes the school adopts a whole new curriculum, and then you have to start all over.

Getting personalized feedback (encouragement, small corrections, etc) can mean much more to a student than a simple green checkmark/red x somewhere. Good educators can know when to apply the right amount of pushing or backing off that can help a student succeed.

Ideally, of course. Lots of bad teachers out there…

Maybe I'm clashing with the specific phrasing since I haven't heard of a bias in the grading itself (i.e. a bias of the teacher), but rather a bias of the system. Schooling as a whole aligns more with girls' strengths as they're more consistent in the day-to-day (ex: organization, planning, homework) whereas boys tend to test better [0]. The weighting of assignments in a particular class could tip the benefit in either direction.

I could believe girls 'get graded higher' on written assignments due to generally better handwriting. I had poor handwriting (though recall at least one girl classmate with worse) and certainly received no credit on some correct answers as a result. I imagine a frustrated teacher reading through a chicken-scratch essay might dock some points - whether directly with a note calling it out (also happened to me), discreetly, or subconsciously.

[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/09/why-gi...

Just as a bit of feedback, starting your comment like this may have turned off the original poster to the rest of your thoughts, which I agree with.

It’s often a deeply examined prior. The people I know who are the most doubtful about software are the engineers with more than 20 years experience. They have spent most of their adult lives thinking about what software is, and isn’t, good for.

However, consider that _satire_ is, fundamentally, ridicule. And it's very public (or at least intended to be). Often satire is one of the only ways that unaccountable power can be brought to account, or institutions which have overstayed their utility can be mobilized against.

It really depends on who's the butt of the joke. On HackerNews, we're mostly anonymous as to our individual identities, but at the same time, any one of us could unwittingly end up playing the part of a public archetype, representing anything from a naive and harmless misconception all the way to a rotten, spiteful ideology that nihilistically boasts of its intent to destroy everything. Some of those ideas need to be challenged. And the people that amplify those ideas need to be challenged too. Bad faith and ill intent warrant ridicule, if not outright invective and contempt (not very often to this degree, but as a history enjoyer, I'll die on this hill). But sometimes even a genuine, bona fide contribution _ought_ to be ridiculed, if it stems from a misunderstanding which amplifies a terrible idea - especially if it's a terrible idea with actual supporters. In this case, the bad idea was _technocratic solutions to complex social problems._ The context is important too: it's HackerNews, which has some of the most brilliant minds, willing to share deep, detailed insights into complex, systemic problems, glomming onto some of the most simplistic, reductive tropes about human needs and behavior. It's a kind of paradoxical, radically individualistic groupthink, which, taken to its logical end (or even just considered half-seriously with a modicum of self-awareness), would smother the social and economic conditions for a healthy society. A small set of shallow, rote answers to complex human problems, coming from defenders of “second-order thinking.” It needs to be challenged in a way that an overclocked galaxy brain can't intellectually weasel its way out of.

As you admit, the question asker might very well have been genuinely curious. The answer to their question doesn't seem blindingly obvious to me (although I can certainly speculate about good reasons that grading isn't automated). I can't tell what you mean by "unacceptable" (perhaps there is some cultural taboo you're referring to here?). And it also doesn't seem "dangerously naive", which might apply where someone asking this question had decision making power in a critical situation, but clearly doesn't apply here.

By the very criteria you lay out, this doesn't seem like an instance in which ridicule was necessary or good. To me, it feels like a weak justification for bullying someone who thinks differently about something you obviously feel very strongly about.

Regarding all the talk about ridicule, it was intended as a rebuttal to the idea that humor at someone's expense is _never_ appropriate. It is appropriate and even healthy for a society to be composed of individuals who can withstand a bit of a ribbing when they unwittingly find themselves representing human folly in one of its many forms, and who can stop and ask, why did that happen?, and potentially learn from it, if it came from a moment of lacking self-awareness, or if it was just bad luck (everyone - everyone - winds up in the crosshairs sometimes.)

Truly no ill will meant, just wanted to defend the social function of ridicule. It probably ended up being a lot more of a well, actually thing than I intended. Which I do get teased for sometimes.

(Also, following through on this, if such a solution - computers planning your lessons for you, so all you have to do is what the smart computer tells you to - were to become reality, the lack of teacher appreciation / salary, which was the main point of the parent comment, would not improve at all - it would likely get worse, with teachers getting paid less for fewer available jobs. The deskilling of labor would probably follow, reducing teacher roles to individual, specialized, repetitive tasks, since it saves an enormous amount of money if low-skilled workers can simply be swapped out if they don't work out.)

I read the initial comment as asking a naive question, but I think that's great, as long as they are open to answers that contradict their assumptions. People should be able to do that and get earnest answers without backhanded comments. Asking naive questions is a big part of how I learn, personally.

That is a perfect example of bad discourse.

Why is it bad? Because it is "Ad Hominem". It attacks the person making the comment, not the reasoning in the comment.

https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ad-hominem

I’ve also found that you can usually rephrase the snark (“do you really think…?”) into a straightforward question in a neutral tone.

Great job communicating here.

I mean this seriously: why? High school math is not a rapidly changing field. Sure, you might have to slow down or speed up, depending on the class -- although, is even that true? Is the average student really changing all that much from year to year? -- but that means taking out the file for day 82 on day 87 or whatever. That's not a massive adjustment.

The material is unchanging. The students aren't going to be all that different from year to year. What's going on that it seems like common sense to so many people that teaching high school math requires a bunch of novel planning?

Are you sure? Here is a list of 16,000+ papers written about teaching high school math since 2018: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2018&q=pedagogy+up...

Also, as a teacher, you have to adopt the district standards, which change every few years. Certain areas are removed, others added, some things are more important, some less. Those standards are changing to meet new standardized testing requirements.

There is a lot of change happening. Just like in programming. People who learned Cobol still need to learn new languages once in a while, because things change, even though the principles stay the same. It's the same data structures, same algorithms, but yet software engineering is rapidly changing.

Until one has taught something that is completely new to a student, it is difficult to imagine how challenging that can be, and how individual it is. What helps Johnny understand (or even care) is often completely different from what helps Mary. It is very difficult to teach effectively without figuring out what the student does not understand. And there are as many ways to misunderstand as there are students.

That is why teachers keep revising. They want to make the material more accessible to more of their students.

Good teachers experiment - maybe something they taught last time didn't go over too well, how can that be improved? Can they make the material even more relevant this year?

Also, it makes teaching it more interesting, rather than regurgitating lessons. Teachers are human after all.

Education isn't like the naive "encoding/decoding" model of communication, where the subject matter is simply "transmitted" from teacher to students. Even if the subject matter remains stable over time, many other things do not: changes in the media of communication, signal interference (say, from the average classroom size drastically increasing over time), all kinds of changes in the teachers and students themselves, changes in society's expectations of what constitutes success or failure (e.g. rote learning is now widely seen as having many shortcomings), changes in what students actually need to move forward (a career in the trades may well require a much lower standard of understanding in the age of the pocket calculator), ... this list could go on and on. Teaching is not a "solved problem" like that.

It is true that 50 years ago a fraction of kids were learning just fine, but more recently the goal has been to make that fraction larger, in a society that actively devalues learning.

⸻

1. I’m sure that there are occasional classrooms where this is still taught, but it’s more an enrichment topic than part of the curriculum.

2. I was in high school when Illinois raised its graduation requirement from one year of math to two years of math. The year after that happened, my high school began offering Basic Math 3/4 in addition to the Basic Math 1/2 class it had previously because too many kids were unable to do fractions.

If you are saying that 100% of grading must be manual, it implies 0% effectiveness of Khan Academy (false). In practice, even if just a half of the tests can be automated, it would free the time for teachers to do the work that can't be automated.

Software can provide a great leverage.

That's not what was said though; I don't think anyone has a problem with some grading being automated (e.g. multiple-choice), and software has been used for decades for this kind of thing.

But there are serious limitations to this. If I solve a math problem in the correct way but made a silly mistake in the arithmetic leading to the wrong answer, then this is still a "correct" answer in a way, worth of some points.

And grading math is easy; how would you automate the grading of a question like "describe two reasons why the American settlers declared independence"?

Grading is not just a matter of right/wrong, even in fields like math, where questions can be given that have one correct answer. It's providing the student feedback on where their misconceptions were that led to an incorrect response. And of course, the most meaningful schoolwork assignments don't have a single correct answer.

Your students are forming a mental model of how something works. Your job is to help guide them to the correct mental model.

If their mental model goes wrong, you have to debug it: you need to figure out exactly what they've misunderstood (which could be anything, and could be from years before your lessons with them started) and help them correct.

Here's a really good detailed write-up of this idea: https://teachtogether.tech/en/index.html#s:models