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.

    • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      35·
      3 months ago

      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.

        • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          7·
          3 months ago

          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.

            • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
              3·
              3 months ago

              Right here, from the start.

              Why would be teaching propaganda to kids for poverty wages make you feel better? This is not the way.

              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.

            • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
              8·
              3 months ago

              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.

              • Runcible [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
                9·
                3 months ago

                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?”

                • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
                  6·
                  3 months ago

                  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.

                  • Runcible [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
                    5·
                    3 months ago

                    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.

        • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          6·
          3 months ago

          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.

            • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
              5·
              3 months ago

              are you trying to argue they should become a teacher

              No. I already said they shouldn’t.

              a significant portion of the job is teaching propaganda and / or abusing neurodivergent kids

              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.

      • Belly_Beanis [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        4·
        3 months ago

        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.

          • Belly_Beanis [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
            2·
            3 months ago

            Below is a blog post from a teacher about “What if we taught art the way we taught math?”

            What if we taught art the way we teach math? We start by showing students all the colors, not to play with, but to memorize. Then, after a few years of that, we give them two or three colors and permit them to only paint straight lines over and over until they’ve mastered them. Then we work on arcs and then other curved lines for a few years. Finally, after many years of this sort of drilling, we move on to shapes where we drill some more. Then comes more repetitive drilling on colors, color mixing, composition, until finally, after many tedious years, the art student, now at a university, is finally permitted to actually create something of his own. Oh, and never, ever take a peek at someone else’s paper. It’s a ridiculous, backwards idea, but in a very real sense, this is exactly how we attempt to teach 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:

            By removing the creative process and leaving only the results of that process, you virtually guarantee that no one will have any real engagement with the subject. It is like saying that Michelangelo created a beautiful sculpture, without letting me see it. How am I supposed to be inspired by that? (And of course it’s actually much worse than this— at least it’s understood that there is an art of sculpture that I am being prevented from appreciating).

            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.

    • bubbalu [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      5·
      3 months 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.