Any math teachers here?

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guitarplayer
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Any math teachers here?

Post by guitarplayer »

Any math teachers here?

Particularly in the UK there is lots of noise about teachers in general being overworked, I am not sure to what extent I would want to believe it.

I have heard on multiple occasions by now that I would make a good teacher. I have lots of experience with verbal / physical challenging behaviour coming from children and adults alike; I now study Maths, so probing the subject.

daylen
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Re: Any math teachers here?

Post by daylen »

I was for about six months until I figured that it wasn't for me. Whether or not teachers are overworked is quite subjective, though on the whole it would seem that most people are these days across all careers. I tutor now part-time which is a whole different beast to classroom management.

7Wannabe5
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Re: Any math teachers here?

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Have you seen the movie “Blackboard Jungle?” JK :lol:

Seriously, the main problem with teaching at K-12 level is that school attendance is compulsory, so you have to be part cop and part parent in addition to the actual teaching bit. So, for instance, teaching remedial math to community college students or home-schooled kids who choose to show up is a much more relaxing and rewarding job, unless you are somebody who derives personal validation for being good at the cop and/or parent bits.

WFJ
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Re: Any math teachers here?

Post by WFJ »

From US perspective: Talented and conscientious teachers are overworked and overpaid. The majority of teachers are neither of these and are coasting along for the pensions and health insurance. If you are in a school with solid teachers, supportive parents and some level of resources, Math is a great subject to teach. But it only takes a few bad apples to ruin the teaching experience of those in higher level classes. It's called "passing the trash" where it's easier to pass students along for showing up and copying homework and earning 0% on exams than failing these students year after year after year. Depending on admin, a teacher may also be reprimanded or fired for not passing the trash if this is the expectation of the school.

Imagine working for or holding any standards with "educators" like below.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/02/us/v ... ts%20learn.

https://www.ridgedevilsadvocate.com/dom ... em-become/

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Seppia
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Re: Any math teachers here?

Post by Seppia »

In Italy it’s borderline impossible to be overworked as a teacher, as they have under 20 class hours per week.
The problem is they make shit money, but it would not be a problem for an ERE person.

guitarplayer
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Re: Any math teachers here?

Post by guitarplayer »

daylen wrote:
Sun Aug 22, 2021 5:11 pm
it would seem that most people are these days across all careers.
agree.
daylen wrote:
Sun Aug 22, 2021 5:11 pm
I tutor now part-time which is a whole different beast to classroom management.
yep for sure! but one has to know how to sell their brand somehow.
7Wannabe5 wrote:
Sun Aug 22, 2021 5:52 pm
you have to be part cop and part parent
Thanks, this was sobering. Also what @WFJ writes, I am now stoically imagining all the worst things that happened in the classroom when I was a pupil, but putting myself in teacher's shoes.

@Seppia, in the UK there are also about 20 class hours, but apparently there is lots of admin work. Read an article also that UK teachers are fleeing to international schools abroad, not least to Italy, enjoying higher working standards and well better weather.

ducknald_don
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Re: Any math teachers here?

Post by ducknald_don »

guitarplayer wrote:
Sun Aug 22, 2021 4:55 pm
Particularly in the UK there is lots of noise about teachers in general being overworked, I am not sure to what extent I would want to believe it.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2 ... week-study

There were a few teachers at my kids school who seemed willing to flog themselves to death (for no appreciable benefit) but they were a minority. I'm guessing if you are capable of setting boundaries then it probably isn't a problem. You might not get promoted but you wouldn't get fired either.

I suspect the situation in the US is quite different to the UK.

7Wannabe5
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Re: Any math teachers here?

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

“WFJ” wrote: Talented and conscientious teachers are overworked and overpaid. The majority of teachers are neither of these and are coasting along for the pensions and health insurance.
I feel like this perspective is either a couple of decades out of date or maybe only relevant to well-funded suburban schools. My first note would be that in order for any teacher to be able to “coast” at their job, they would first absolutely have to have the “cop” bit mastered. I once sat in on a 6th grade math class in a challenging setting led by a teacher who was very good at “cop” and “parent”, but clearly didn’t have a great grasp on the topic she was teaching. However, since there are almost always going to be a few kids in any group who are ahead of the curve, she used her superior tough but kind coaching style of classroom management in a manner that allowed the brighter kids to explain their solutions/ strategies to the rest of the class.

My preferred teaching job(s) would be either being the person who takes the three brightest kids out of that classroom to facilitate their advanced path OR being the second adult playing the “grand-parental” role with very young students. In some settings where the administration recognized the likelihood of behavioral disorder, I have been provided with a disciplinary officer to sit in on the class, and that also works well. Laura Ingalls Wilder had to have Almanzo come to her one room schoolhouse to get control of the big boys, so I don’t feel too bad about not being particularly gifted at playing “cop.” :lol:

At higher adult to student ratios even the most behaviorally disordered, remedial students are teachable. So, the cop/management bit is mostly about cost efficiency. This is also why I sometimes hear teachers complain that parents just want them to be babysitters when they observe their lack of participation in the child’s learning process. There is very little a human charged with the care of 28 kids can do to make up for the lack of a parent reading to a child at night or providing structure to their study time or modeling appropriate social manners.

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Seppia
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Re: Any math teachers here?

Post by Seppia »

guitarplayer wrote:
Mon Aug 23, 2021 1:45 am
@Seppia, in the UK there are also about 20 class hours, but apparently there is lots of admin work. Read an article also that UK teachers are fleeing to international schools abroad, not least to Italy, enjoying higher working standards and well better weather.
For what I’ve seen, the UK is one of the worst places on earth to have a public sector non-white collar job.
You get similarly shitty salaries to Italy/Spain/France, only with higher demands and less benefits.

Italian teachers are underpaid but they at least are completely unfirable, enjoy THREE months off during the summer and a very reasonable workload.

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Re: Any math teachers here?

Post by jacob »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Sun Aug 22, 2021 5:52 pm
Seriously, the main problem with teaching at K-12 level is that school attendance is compulsory, so you have to be part cop and part parent in addition to the actual teaching bit.
Undergraduate too. When I first interviewed for my grad student position I told the committee that I wanted to be a professor because I wanted to teach students who unlike HS were all really interested in the field. They laughed at me. Later (as a TA) I saw what they meant. Quickly developed the attitude that I was really only teaching about the 10% of the class that was there to learn. The convention was that the rest would pass with minimum effort as long as they showed up and didn't bother anyone---excellent corporate training.

chenda
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Re: Any math teachers here?

Post by chenda »

I come from a family of UK maths teachers (and teacher trainers) and the general consensus is the only good thing about the job is 12 weeks of paid leave per year.

I expect it can be rewarding for some at a personal level but don't expect any thanks for it, teachers enjoy very little professional autonomy and are often scapegoated by everyone from parents to government. Except to be accused of sexual misconduct and physically threatened by parents at least once in your career as a male teacher (even nice middle class areas have their fair share of rough families) And a crap teacher earns the same as a great teacher in the same pay band, there is no performance related pay or bonus for doing a good job.

That said if you are skilled at dealing with behavioural problems of both children and parents and then you might find yourself in good demand, especially at primary schools which tend to be very female teacher heavy.

A Public School (which means plush-private-charge £10 000-a-term fees) is of course going to be a very different kettle of fish than a state comprehensive, for better and worse.

You might make better money (and have a better lifestyle) in private tutoring; I hear £20 an hour for GCSE level is normal and possibly much higher for A-Level.

basuragomi
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Re: Any math teachers here?

Post by basuragomi »

I know some UK math teachers for the under-12 set of children. They moved to Canada - twice the pay, half the living cost, and a twentieth the stabbings (location dependent on this one of course).

chenda
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Re: Any math teachers here?

Post by chenda »

basuragomi wrote:
Mon Aug 23, 2021 8:20 am
I know some UK math teachers for the under-12 set of children. They moved to Canada - twice the pay, half the living cost, and a twentieth the stabbings (location dependent on this one of course).
The stabbings might be but I'd be surprised if the difference in salary and col were that large.

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Re: Any math teachers here?

Post by Sclass »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Sun Aug 22, 2021 5:52 pm
So, for instance, teaching remedial math to community college students or home-schooled kids who choose to show up is a much more relaxing and rewarding job,
Some of the easiest money I ever made in college was tutoring a bunch of stressed out premeds in math and physics. They were highly motivated. After taxes is was the highest pay I could get - and that was compared to Bay Area tech summer internships. That was fun. Classmates told me to get a real job. It was one of those times when you think you’re doing the wrong thing but it works so well it must be right. In retrospect I realize I was on to something far more lucrative and temporally stable than tech employment.
jacob wrote:
Mon Aug 23, 2021 7:19 am
Undergraduate too. When I first interviewed for my grad student position I told the committee that I wanted to be a professor because I wanted to teach students who unlike HS were all really interested in the field. They laughed at me. Later (as a TA) I saw what they meant.
:lol: Yeah. My conscription TA ship at Stanford really opened my eyes. I got cheaters. Bribers. Flirts. I couldn’t believe these kids made the admissions gauntlet. There was one really sharp one. She gave me a serious dress down at finals. I’ll never forget it. She had aced everything so she was fearless. She walked into my lab before the final and said, “sclass you suck as a TA. You don’t care. You hate us. You don’t know the material and I catch you making mistakes all the time because you don’t even attend the lectures(tech for arts and humanities). You hold your office hours at all kinds of weird hours to keep us away from your creepy ass subterranean laboratory with machines so goddamn loud that we cannot even hear what you’re saying. You should have never volunteered to be a TA. Somebody needed to say this and it’s me!” When I heard the word “volunteered” I exhaled. Yup. I was conscripted on the eve of my doctoral defense.

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Re: Any math teachers here?

Post by ducknald_don »

basuragomi wrote:
Mon Aug 23, 2021 8:20 am
I know some UK math teachers for the under-12 set of children. They moved to Canada - twice the pay, half the living cost, and a twentieth the stabbings (location dependent on this one of course).
Plenty of gun crime rather than stabbings though, fifth worst in the OECD.

In fact the medium teacher pay in Canada is $46,500 CAD which is about £26K. This is barely above the starting pay for teachers in the UK.

basuragomi
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Re: Any math teachers here?

Post by basuragomi »

Average teacher's salary here is about C$90k (52k GBP) versus GBP 37k and rent in London (where, apparently, the stabbiest jobs were) is like 4x higher per unit area than in the GTA suburbs.

Now I want to know who's dragging down the average, because Ontario is like 40% of the country's child population. Your stat indicates that everyone else is making literally minimum wage or lower?

If one wants a high-pay depressing teaching job, teaching in rural Indigenous communities is the way to go. Never saw many people last more than a year there. I'm guessing it's about the same in the UK.

guitarplayer
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Re: Any math teachers here?

Post by guitarplayer »

Thanks all for comments, lots of useful info here. Different threads repeated in various posts so I will forgo referring to every poster individually.

Yeah I absolutely don't enjoy the cop bit, I would not make a good auditor at all I think. I can be an okay parent figure, but mostly would be happy to just lay out the material for whoever wants to take from it. I wonder to what extent teachers (particularly in the UK) are officially accountable for the results of the pupils they teach, @chenda do you know? Obviously there would be an expectation from parents and society more broadly, but if there is not an official expectations I think I could shrug it off, what I think @ducknald_don was aiming at and @Sclass described in his experience.

DW doesn't want to live in Canada for some reason, but we have family in Italy and I would not mind moving there for a while! Just looking at their garden compared to ours in Scotland, man. Well, at least berries yield nicely up here.

@Seppia, shitty is relative, I maintain that the UK min wage is pretty much easy mode to Ere in less than a decade for two people both working. But yes the more the better, especially if someone is still collecting like us.
jacob wrote:
Mon Aug 23, 2021 7:19 am
[...] The convention was that the rest would pass with minimum effort as long as they showed up and didn't bother anyone---excellent corporate training.
I think I will write it on my whiteboard to have on display for a while.
chenda wrote:
Mon Aug 23, 2021 7:26 am
[...] I expect it can be rewarding for some at a personal level [...]
I think I could find it rewarding for a few years. I also wouldn't be planning on doing it for more that a few years, so perhaps there would not be a room for any accusations!

@basuragomi, there is some sort of allowance for teaching on the Scottish Isles, those areas are also relatively crime free and I sometimes ponder moving there but they are just so remote.

WFJ
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Re: Any math teachers here?

Post by WFJ »

chenda wrote:
Mon Aug 23, 2021 9:05 am
The stabbings might be but I'd be surprised if the difference in salary and col were that large.
Are the stabbing probabilities disclosed in the job posting or the interview process? Or is it just part of a natural experiment?

WFJ
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Re: Any math teachers here?

Post by WFJ »

Sclass wrote:
Mon Aug 23, 2021 11:27 am
Some of the easiest money I ever made in college was tutoring a bunch of stressed out premeds in math and physics. They were highly motivated. After taxes is was the highest pay I could get - and that was compared to Bay Area tech summer internships. That was fun. Classmates told me to get a real job. It was one of those times when you think you’re doing the wrong thing but it works so well it must be right. In retrospect I realize I was on to something far more lucrative and temporally stable than tech employment.



:lol: Yeah. My conscription TA ship at Stanford really opened my eyes. I got cheaters. Bribers. Flirts. I couldn’t believe these kids made the admissions gauntlet. There was one really sharp one. She gave me a serious dress down at finals. I’ll never forget it. She had aced everything so she was fearless. She walked into my lab before the final and said, “sclass you suck as a TA. You don’t care. You hate us. You don’t know the material and I catch you making mistakes all the time because you don’t even attend the lectures(tech for arts and humanities). You hold your office hours at all kinds of weird hours to keep us away from your creepy ass subterranean laboratory with machines so goddamn loud that we cannot even hear what you’re saying. You should have never volunteered to be a TA. Somebody needed to say this and it’s me!” When I heard the word “volunteered” I exhaled. Yup. I was conscripted on the eve of my doctoral defense.
Higher level schools tend to attract a higher level of schemers, opposite of what one would suspect. The higher the skill of the schemers and higher proportion of these students at "elite" institutions, tend to make teaching difficult, if not impossible. Tutoring to the elites at elite Universities can be incredible, except when their aptitude is below that of an average high school graduate.

WFJ
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Re: Any math teachers here?

Post by WFJ »

I think I could find it rewarding for a few years. I also wouldn't be planning on doing it for more that a few years, so perhaps there would not be a room for any accusations!

Probability of accusations starting on the first day of each year follow a X^2 distribution with cumulative probability of 1 for all students who are not given an A in the course for each sample of 20 students.

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