7 Reasons You Might Not Want to Teach Anymore

[whereisjustice]

Make no mistake ... what's happened to the education system is a crime against humanity. MBA and Graduate School efficiency experts decided that classrooms needed to be run more like corporations... with all the micromanagement, controls, interlocks, burdensome processes and so on. Brought to us by the 1%.

This is the result... a commodity culture of teacher as fast food worker where everyone is sure teaching is just a minimum wage drone job of spewing pre-digested pieces of information carefully vetted by Texas School Board and packaged in nice neat gel caps.

Of course it's not just teaching, it's other formerly professional occupations like nursing, engineering, legal, accounting.

The MBA is probably the most destructive credential developed in modern civilization. The MBA is just a know nothing middleman groomed with inflated ego, trained to not think twice about saving a dime in the short run even if it costs a dollar in the long run. Of course they don't know (nor care) about the social costs of their wealth grabbing, they are strictly data driven, saving pennies no matter how much it costs. And hell, it costs a fortune to pay MBA administrator salaries so that comes out of teacher salaries.

Most of the complaints here can be applied to those other white collar professions I've mentioned. We are becoming a society that looks down their nose at anyone who isn't in the 1%. Wealth and power are all we value.

I don’t want to teach anymore.

In the twelve years I was a high school English teacher, I watched people leave the profession in droves. The climate is different. The culture is different. The system is breaking, and educators are scattering to avoid the inevitable crushing debris when it all comes crumbling down.

I won’t go into detail about the budget cuts or the massive class sizes or the average salary, as that’s all been discussed ad nauseam. I’m not going to talk about the bone-deep exhaustion that comes from being onstage all day, or the drowning sensation that follows you home on nights and weekends when you have hundreds of papers to grade.

These are the other things — the stuff you might only understand if you have a key to the teachers’ lounge.

1. You are an “authority figure” with no real authority.

2. Your day does not resemble that of a typical white-collar professional.

3. Everyone thinks they know how to do your job. EVERYONE.

4. You wanted to foster imagination, not slaughter it.

5. The technology obsession is making you CRAZY.

6. All the entitlement and the trophies and the apathy and whatever.

7. There is no reliable way to assess who is ACTUALLY good at this.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/melissa-bowers/7-reasons-you-might-not-want_b_9832490.html

[Hoyt]

1. Not to diminish the point, but that's true nowadays for nurses, doctors, attorneys, and just about

everyone else. Doesn't matter what you do, there are fools who think it can be measured on a "dashboard."

[niyad]

18. that was stated in the article.

[msongs]

2. 1 problem is one cannot "fire" the students in the teacher as office manager situation. fire the

students for work failures, behavior issues, etc like one can in an office

[madinmaryland]

4. That's why government at ANY level cannot be run like a business, unless of course you want

a dictatorship and a move back to the Middle Ages.

[OceanPete]

16. Corporate slavery

All professions are now benefiting from the fact that the ideal "corporate" employee is one who works for free and without benefits. Wake up America!

[Coventina]

3. 3. Everyone thinks they know how to do your job. EVERYONE!

And, they all think they can do BETTER!!!

[scscholar]

5. To be fair,...

everyone has been a student in a school so they have experience with it unlike nearly every job where the public doesn't have any direct experience with it much less 180 days every year for twelve years.

[Coventina]

7. I get that, BUT students only see, at best, 25% of what goes into being a teacher.

The other 75%? Not so much.

And I think I'm being pretty generous at saying it's 25%.

[LiberalArkie]

6. Lord knows I am about as dumb or stupid as they come, but for some reason everyone thinks

they are so much smarter than the person they are looking at or reading an article from. I am smart in a very small area but as I get older even that does not mean much any more. And it shouldn't.

Note: Here I go expressing something I have now knowledge of at all.

I really think society is really asking way to much out of most people on the planet. People used to be able to just do the job they were trained to do, punch the clock out and go home. Very few can do that any more. I remember my teachers could grade papers and such at the school on school time most of the time.

No worker in this world deserves the pressure they are put under, not the nurses, teachers, the iPhone workers in China, no one does.

[malaise]

8. It' in th universities and colleges as well

Now the Business School know it alls get tenure and the people with real knowledge are on contracts.

[NightWatcher]

9. 8. & 9. Kids today carry guns and cell phones

If you smack the occasional deserving kid, now there's video proof. Plus you never know if you give a kid detention that the kid might come back with a gun

[1939]

10. Not limited to MBA

Colleges crank out legions of teachers who have gone back to get a degree in Educational Admin and Supervision. Parkinson's law has created huge numbers of former classroom teachers who are "curriculum specialists". At one time , the "principal" was the "principal teacher". I have gone into a school in the last few years and the numbers of "clerks and jerks" in the front office is amazing compared to how many non-teachers there were when I went to school in the 40s and 50s. Every single individual in the front office just means more and more work for the teacher as each tries to justify his/her job by "adding value" in the form of reports, data collection, and added training. Take the admin burden off the teacher. Hell, turn the school over to a MBA who is responsible for all of the house keeping (facilities, cafeteria, janitors, security) and who reports his functions to some guy upstairs, but can't say squat to the principal and teachers who only focus on academics and report to a different guy upstairs.

[treestar]

11. #3 is pretty much true for all of us

[GreenPartyVoter]

12. And we are only glorified babysitters, unworthy of much pay, who get too much vacation time.

[femmocrat]

13. More from the above article (SO TRUE!):

Here are the things your friends can do at work:

1. Pee
2. Get coffee
3. Spend fifteen minutes chatting leisurely with a colleague
4. Go out to lunch
5. Complete paperwork and other job-related tasks during the actual work day
6. Sit down occasionally

I’m pretty sure the real reason summer break exists is because the School Gods counted up all the seconds you don’t get to use the bathroom and handed them back to you in one big chunk. Twenty-five-minute lunches are not conducive to nice, relaxing meals beyond the building’s walls, and you can only relieve yourself during passing time — which, unfortunately, is the only opportunity all the OTHER teachers have to take care of business.

Because you know what else is the boss of you? The bell schedule.

[mainstreetonce]

15. #5

Is so true.

[lindysalsagal]

14. Forgot to mention the special ed laws. Don't attack unless you're a teacher:

The special ed laws create endless streams of laws and documents. It's a labrynthian maze of b.s. It still doesn't get kids what they really need, but it hand-cuffs the entire school. The laws are mis-used for power struggles and often allow normal kids to sit around.

Yes, we need special ed and there are truly needy children, but the taxpayers aren't willing to pay what it would cost to do them justice.

[niyad]

17. it is a wonder to me that anybody actually wants to be a teacher these days.

[a la izquierda]

19. I had a first year graduate student try...

to explain to me about how to teach my graduate seminar.
Um. No. I don't care if you're 20 years older than I am. I have worked my ass off to be a good university professor. And i have excellent evaluations to prove it.

I spend far more time on my classes than I do my research, yet my assignment is 40% research, 40% teaching, 20% service. It's more like 75% teaching, 15% service, 10% research.