Why would be teaching propaganda to kids for poverty wages make you feel better? This is not the way.
Public schools are not intrinsically a bad thing and if they aren't eroded with profit-seeking and politically-motivated sabotage, they are a way to provide a fair chance to every child in society.
What is your proposed alternative? There was a time before public schools existed in the United States. The outcome for most, especially the poor, while ostensibly free of what you call "propaganda to kids," was not great.
I mean in relationship to this post and OP my proposed alternative would be to keep the cushy higher paying job and invest in mutual aid and socialism in a meaningful way then give that up to go get exploited in a school system with a shitty job.
My proposed alternative to public school in general is I'm old I don't have kids so I don't really know and not really sure my input matters.
Good for you on an individual basis.
I don't think that even you'd propose that "fuck you, got mine" is a society-wide positive alternative to public schools. That has been tried before for all the time before public schools existed.
I don't think that even you'd propose that "fuck you, got mine" is a society-wide positive alternative to public schools. That has been tried before for all the time before public schools existed.
and they never said it would be??!?!?!?!?? are we reading different comments. i don't mean that in a snarky way, i feel like i'm missing something
I don't think anyone can go into a school system in the existent west and make a difference and do anything but get exploited by that system. I don't think the school system where I live does anything but profit-seeking and politically-motivated activities and that the part that lifted children out of poverty has long been replaced with a prison pipeline while the rich people around here go to private schools.
On an individual basis becoming a teacher in that is not a great idea. Just my own personal experience from trying. That is what this thread is about and what I was talking about. I'm not happy about this or anything, it is really sad and painful as a truth.
So again are you proposing anything as an alternative to public schools, damaged and corrupted as they have been in the present status quo that also likes to preach about how worthless public schools are while also stripping the remaining metaphorical copper from the walls?
My proposed alternative to public school in general is I'm old I don't have kids so I don't really know and not really sure my input matters.
Cute, but stating what you would do on an individual basis with a "don't care, whatever" clause isn't a basis for a plan for millions of school-age children that would otherwise have nothing but the tender mercies of whatever their parents could (or couldn't) come up with to educate them.
Maybe the OP really shouldn't get into teaching because it is thanklessly hard work with diminishing rewards and less and less chance to make a positive difference for students. Even so, the attitude that it has always been worthless and that nothing can ever be done to improve it is just fatalistic bullshit.
I think you two are talking past each other. I think that hamid gave their advice to OP specifically and you are turning around and asking "What is your systemic solution to the problems you believe are present in public school" which is interesting but doesn't necessarily follow "is this a good idea Y/N?"
Maybe, but to me, even the opener came loaded with the implication that public school was worthless in general, not just as a career choice.
Why would be teaching propaganda to kids for poverty wages make you feel better? This is not the way.
What IS "the way" then? If it's all "teaching propaganda to kids" what else is there? The implications of that statement went beyond individual career choice.
I left teaching recently, myself. I know very well how bullshit it is right now.
Hey, I'm stepping back and disengaging. I find this unproductive and I'm not interested in the places you are taking this discussion, I don't think your characterization really matches what I think and I feel like it is unnecessarily hostile, I am sorry I do not agree with you or share you enthusiasm about public education or school.
I don't think teaching is a good idea for people who are already burning out. I'm am honestly glad and unironically happy for you that you seem to care a lot about public education, I hope you go into teaching and have a better experience than I did.
idk about @hamid but my proposed alternative is public schools that don't teach propaganda to kids, or at least teach propaganda that has people make good opinions
I'd love that, too. But until then teaching kids nothing is going to make them even more endangered within the prevalent system that they're going to be forced into as imminent adults.
As some have already said, it's less easy to propagandize some essential classes such as math, and throwing out the whole thing for performative "propaganda free" purity reasons isn't doing the students any favors.
??? are you trying to argue they should become a teacher or trying to argue for if public schools are a good idea? i think they shouldn't be a teacher and that public schools are a good idea, personally. and i personally think the current existence of school teachers is generally a good thing. but a comrade purposely putting themselves into the shitty situation that is the current job of teaching (the sheer difficulty of which also leads to my respect to current teachers) is not something i agree with. the fact that a significant portion of the job is teaching propaganda and / or abusing neurodivergent kids if you're assigned to a cringe instead of a based teaching position means that i wouldn't really think of it as much better than just sending a couple hundred bucks to a local pride org or something with a cushy job
the history aspect of public schools is currently undeniably basically just propaganda. this does not make other classes irrelevant or unimportant or bad! but there is also a lot of bad stuff in education in general right now (ESPECIALLY PRIVATE) that makes me hesitate to consider it an objective good to go into it compared to being an affluent comrade. full uncritical support to teachers trying to incorporate actually good and developed teaching theory in our hell world though
also i never advocated for teaching kids nothing? what the fuck do you think we're talking about??????
I swear some leftists think every teacher teaches senior history
Well depends on what they'd be teaching I guess. Math is hardly propaganda.
keep bullshit job, donate to schools
Do online teaching while on the clock at the bullshit job
I'm gonna say no. Cushy is good, a lot of people wish they had cushy.
From personal experience, I can only advise that you avoid school teaching as much as possible. It’s a horrible, thankless job that puts you in numerous no-win situations. I’ll spare you the full length report, but speak to a number of teachers and you’ll hear plenty of sorry stories. Speak to any ‘good’ teacher and they’ll tell you how much it sucks to care about the job and be powerless to do it well.
My advice, keep your cushy job, and find a hobby or something else that you can enjoy or feel fulfilled doing and use your obscene income to fund it. Teaching is generally a pretty thankless and shitty job. There are always exceptions, but you probably won't be any happier and you'll have far less money.
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summer vacation isn't as long as you think, what with keeping up with your teaching license and your turn at summer school
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Beware, the job has just as many things that make it hateful as any other, being hamstrung by policy, uncaring incompetent superiors, what/how you may teach
Source: grade school teacher friend who vents to me
While teaching is supposed to be about giving kids the best possible start in life and while it's hard to think of more critically important influences on a young mind's development, the testing industrial complex and the lobbying juggernaut that it pays for can and will go out of its way to make you feel as precarious as possible and strip you of as many opportunities to actually inspire students as it can in favor of more testing and more test preparation while paying you less to do more and to pay for more out of pocket.
I don't regret teaching, but at present, I'm in no rush to return to it.
I can't say whether this would be a good decision for you to make, and I doubt anyone here could.
However, if education is something you're passionate about, I might recommend looking into adult education to see if it's right for you.
I love my job. It's hard. It's emotionally difficult. My students have been failed by society at every level: they are in prisons, they live in tents, they are parents, they are addicts, they have learning disabilities, they are adults who cannot read full sentences or do basic arithmetic. They are people who have had every opportunity taken from them, but they are showing up, not because parents are forcing them to, but because they want to learn and grow.
Also, there is much less oversight about curriculum, so I have been able to build a curriculum that favours abolitionist viewpoints (which resonates, obviously, with many of my students who have been criminalized since childhood), Indigenous perspectives, queer ideas, and even Marxist teachings. Who will stop me? The schoolboards truly do not give a shit about these people and have already given up on them, and the educational authority of the state (not being specific so as not to dox myself) is not willing to invest the time and resources into actually providing and enforcing guidelines on my curriculum.
What I do is heartbreaking, and tiring, and deeply rewarding. I just helped a woman get her high school diploma in her eighties, who was a grandmother that believed dropping out of school to work and raise her kids had meant that she would never have that opportunity.
Not trying to proselytize, but education is truly such a powerful part of growing communities, and so if you have a feeling that it might be for you, it's at least worth looking into.
IDK. It's not really reasonable to expect that everyone has a job that makes the world a better place. It's just your job. If being a techbro permits you the time and material comfort to have a dignified existence and you're not doing anything uniquely harmful (like working for the NSA etc) then like, w/e get that money and tithe 10% to a local org or something and use some of the extra time you get to help organize.
If you want to change because you really hate your job and you genuinely want to teach, then yeah cool but don't forget yeah you get summer vacation but you'll also like you say really have to work.
Just don't become a teacher because you think it's A Noble Job and you think it's very important for you individually to feel like you have A Noble Job so you can consider yourself A Good Individual.
I'd further add that you wouldn't necessarily be making the world a better place by becoming a teacher anyways unless you have some reason to believe you'd be a better than average teacher in comparison to other teachers in your area. There will still be the same number of teaching jobs but your inclusion in the labour pool will make other teachers getting a job (who maybe don't have an option to become a techbro) incrementally harder.
I suggest you volunteer/substitute/teach part time before committing fully to it.
Do online tutoring to see if you're cut out for teaching. You can do it for free or you can squirrel away the money and use it while you get your teaching certificate.
Sure I guess so.
Or just learn to code
if i never learned to code, i wouldn't be in this predicament to begin with
You aren’t coding hard enough, I think.
Is learning to code even valid anymore after generative AI?
I'd expect there to be a lot less space for jr programmers because of this.
Also, the interest in increasing the reserve army of labour on the tech industry. All around the world, especially the south hemisphere, there is neolib push for "learn to program". The 90'-00' classic "learn graphic design".
Not saying people should't follow jobs in tech (especially if the like it) but, with the busting bubble, is viable being a jr in the current year?
Speaking from my own experience. Absolutely yes it is valid, but perhaps not just "learning to code" for the sake of it with no specific direction or specialty in mind. Gone are the days where you can get a $100k/yr entry level job at "FAANG" by going through a 3 month Javascript boot camp (if those days ever existed, I wouldn't know because that was not my personal path).
Generative AI can certainly do some tasks more easily, but it makes a lot of mistakes/hallucinations, so it still requires a solid programmer to first be able to break down and articulate smaller pieces of a whole via prompts, and also to identify issues with the output and deal with them. Used as a tool (and nothing more), to write smaller pieces of code for a larger project it is quite powerful and speeds up development.
It however is not going to write your company's "secret sauce" proprietary business logic for you, or finish the whole project in one go. There are also still many specialties within comp sci generally that AI can't help with because they require a human touch.
The productivity bump of generative AI for programming is massively overblown. Whether or not the hype has hiring managers expecting junior devs to output twice the code in the same time as they would have been expected to 5 years ago is another issue.
There’s less space for juniors right now because the market blew up after all the free money dried up and now people graduating college are competing with people who worked at Facebook for a decade. Layoffs were no joke.
Use your money to fund communism
i was a high school teacher for seven years. it was hard, rewarding work. and i do not want to go back because my current job also contributes to society and is a tenth the effort
This would depend highly on what it is you’re doing now, and what grade(s) you want to teach
for all intents and purposes, nothing (techbro)
ideally high school
I'm in the same situation and the unhelpful answer is that it really just depends on whether the trade offs are worth it to you. I left academia because the pay is unsurvivable. I'm now in private industry (yuck) but I don't have to skip meals and hand wash my laundry any more. I don't have any employees (I am the employee) so I'm not exploiting people and don't feel guilty really but obviously I wish I was working for state-owned industry or employee-owned industry. I dislike my job but I think I dislike being impoverished even more. I'm not 'rich' but I never want to be on the verge of homelessness. I've found that cutting back on work hours to do hobbies I enjoy helps a lot. I'm thinking of saving up enough to take a few weeks to a year off at some point to do other shit. Sort of like living two lives.
You should make yourself financially bulletproof first, and have some investments. You'll have to do real work, which might not be something you're used to doing. Don't delude yourself that it'll be easy, your current job is undoubtedly easier than teaching.
But that said, yes you should, if it's not stupid for you to do it. You can't help change the system by helping capitalists, the best thing a leftist can do is either join a union or become a teacher. Pick a job to make money, or to help society. The middle ground exists purely to make losers feel better about existing inside capitalism.
Talk to me in six months! I went from STEM work to substitute teaching to now completing an alternative certification program. Definitely DO NOT go to graduate school. If you do not have an education background, you will have to slog through 2-4 semester of prerequisites.
I strongly encourage you to try substitute teaching or para-educator work to see if that environment actually works for you. For me, I do best in heavily structured environments with little screen time, in care work, and in public facing roles. Teaching hits all of my buttons.
Why not do private tutoring as an interim step before trying to drill the state mandated curriculum to 30 kids at once?
I go over this all the time. Notice comments saying use free time to do something good but cushy corporate jobs are so draining any free time in the week is used to recover and the weekend is too short and the work looms in the back of the mind.
I was checking up on public sector jobs that could pay comparably recently, just to get an idea of what else is out there, and there's a lot actually. I reccomend checking those postings or just random job boards filtered for comparable salary. I half thought about being a plumber just because I knew some plumbing stuff(but didn't want to deal with sexism). But there are options.
I also wanted to go to teaching by with the pandemics and shootings, I changed my mind.
I've been teaching for a long time, and honestly the answer is... maybe
It can vary a lot from state to state, municipality and school to school. There's no guarantee it's going to be better or more fulfilling than your current job, but it might be. Anyway, feel free to DM me with questions if you like.
No? If you really feel like you need something "real", just take a sabbatical (if you can) and do important volunteer work.
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