i hate my cushy bullshit job where i make obscene amounts of money. should i quit my job and become a teacher? here’s what i’m thinking so far:
pros:
- i won’t hate my job anymore
- my job is a real job where i actually contribute to society
- summer vacation sounds dope
cons:
- maybe i still hate my job
- my job would be a real job where i do work
- i won’t make obscene amounts of money
- wtf grad school is expensive
alternatively, are there other jobs i should try to do instead? mind you i have no skills and would probably need to go back to school.
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.
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
Right here, from the start.
The implication is right there that there’s nothing to public schools, damaged and ransacked as they admittedly are now, except propaganda. It’s not a good career choice overall as it is right now. but it’s still essential work that is necessary for a society.
i interpreted them as meaning that that’s what OP would most likely do if they entered the public school system? not that that’s what all of public school does?
Are you going anywhere else with this? I already answered your questions as far as I know regarding my position on the topic.
are you trying to argue for everyone to become a teacher even if it makes their life shittier? idk i would prefer to just… actually pay the teachers that are currently employed a living wage rather than flood the job with people who don’t particularly care about teaching but want to do it for moral reasons
like i’ve gotten the impression that teaching is essential but the whole “teaching propaganda to kids” thing is a thing they’re forced to do and would rather like, not, so acknowledging it is something i want to do… in support of current teachers and not as a thing against them
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?
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.
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.
… teaching good propaganda? idk they weren’t implying that ALL public school is doing that, just US or western public school. i see no reason why we have to remove public schools if their purpose is to disseminate information, just that the information being disseminated in the US sucks currently
As a kid I was raised believing teaching was a respected job (along with being a nurse, doctor etc) but I now perceive it to be somewhere along the spectrum of frustrating, demeaning and unsatisfying. Not because of the purpose but the compensation, institutional disregard and public scorn.
One of my best friends from school is a teacher & he commented to me that he is the only person he knows from when he majored who still teaches.
I am curious how much of this is consistent with your experience?
edit: I guess I only read the first half, my bad. The propaganda part is off putting to me as well. I struggle with this in general because often I feel there are assumptions that are more pervasive and more damaging than explicit propaganda (ex US won WWII) but people aren’t typically consciously teaching that it just gets communicated somehow.
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???
No. I already said they shouldn’t.
That does happen and it is terrible and it has contributed significantly to my own decision to leave the profession. Again, once again, my point is that doesn’t mean that teaching itself or the public school system should as a whole be abandoned or abolished. It is in dire need of improvement and restoration, even if that currently seems out of reach.
Saying “it’s all propaganda” sounded to me like a defeatist condemnation of public schools in general.
ok i think we just agree altogether but read it differently. i just read it as complaining about a part of the job but i can understand why you’d read it that way. sorry for being confrontational
Yeah, I think it’s a difference of interpretation.
It’s all good, comrade.
This is why you are in my top 5 posters
I swear some leftists think every teacher teaches senior history
Well depends on what they’d be teaching I guess. Math is hardly propaganda.
PEDMAS is literally fascism.
BOMDAS more like bomb this
Unironically it is though. We teach math wrong in the United States (it has gotten better since I graduated high school, but its still pretty shit). You get taught the wrong way to use math because it’s what capitalism demands from a teenage workforce, you spend undergrad unlearning everything, then finally get to what you should have been doing the whole time in graduate school, which will leave you “”“over qualified”“” and in debt with zero job prospects outside academia.
It’s the entire reason the US is behind every other developed country when it comes to math.
Could you explain how you use math the wrong way in high school?
Below is a blog post from a teacher about “What if we taught art the way we taught math?”
This is a summary of the book “A Mathematician’s Lament” by Paul Lockhart (I have not read the whole thing, so if these people are full of brainworms I wouldn’t know). An excerpt from his book:
If you graduated high school before 2010, you were taught math completely wrong. Only in 2022 were the first students graduating high school that were taught using common core, a half-cocked remedy that fixes a lot of problems, but still leaves a bunch in place. Basically, you were taught things like multiplication tables, told to memorize formulas, etc. etc. Never were you taught the proofs mathematicians used to come up with this stuff. For example, multiplication and division are shorthand methods for addition and subtraction. So when kids are taught only to memorize, when they encounter numbers they have not memorized, they don’t know what to do.
That’s not how mathematicians do things. Instead, they’re focus is on finding proofs for unsolved problems. Knowledge of formulas and how numbers interact are simply tools to go in your toolbox. It’s like arguing a court case where you cite precedents. We already have the proof for the Pythagorean Theorem so there’s no reason for you to prove it. Yet that’s what we have kids do. They practice problems using the Pythagorean Theorem while groaning about “When are we ever going to use this?” This method of teaching is great for creating a workforce that can count change or take measurements. It’s not great at creating the people that will discover a unified theory of gravity. In order to make new discoveries, it would help if children were introduced to algebra and calculus a lot sooner than 8th. and 12th. grade (respectively). More importantly, it would help if they were taught how algebra and calculus solved problems that weren’t understood (like the exact volume of a water bottle shaped like a bear).
Probably the worst culprit is homework, which is used to get children to accept being available to their employers at all times. When you’re off the clock, they want you to perform unpaid labor. Even when that unpaid labor is bullshit other people figured out 2,000 years ago.
This is a tough one. On the one hand, the structure of most public schools and esp. public schools for proletarian children are very dictatorial and designed to develop children into workers. On the other hand, most schools are running on shoe string administration and the amount of oversight in practice is very low beyond a pro forma checklist. In these environments, individual teachers have a lot of room to practice radical care politics. However, they have very little support to do so and many barriers in the way.