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Comment by gizmo686 | Hacker News Reader

>They had no weight to your grades and there was zero incentive to do well.

This doesn't seem like that bad of an idea. One of the bigger problems with tests is that they tend to become a terrible metric once people start preparing for them specifically (and test-prep can suck the oxegyn out of real education). If the students and teachers don't care about the test, it is much easier (but still difficult) to make a test that gives useful feedback to the school system. Of course, you want students to take it seriously enough while there taking it.

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> This doesn't seem like that bad of an idea. One of the bigger problems with tests is that they tend to become a terrible metric once people start preparing for them specifically (and test-prep can suck the oxegyn out of real education). If the students and teachers don't care about the test, it is much easier (but still difficult) to make a test that gives useful feedback to the school system. Of course, you want students to take it seriously enough while there taking it.

I remember when I was a senior in college, my professor asked me to take a test one day. She said it had nothing to do with my grades and it was to compare the outcome of our college's program with other colleges (BS Math). I still gave it my best shot even though I don't remember if I got to see the result.

I don't like how you need so many licenses to be a teacher. Most college lecturers do not have a background in education and definitely don't have a license and we do just fine. The licenses just feel like a way to limit supply.

>I don't like how you need so many licenses to be a teacher. Most college lecturers do not have a background in education and definitely don't have a license and we do just fine. The licenses just feel like a way to limit supply.

Teaching adults who pay for the privilege of being in your class is VERY VERY different from teaching children who are forced to be in your class.

The latter requires a very special skill set that can only be described as 'managing psychopaths'.

The former just requires you to show up and tell them they're on "responsible for the material" (i.e. they're on their own).

> The latter requires a very special skill set

I'm going to argue against that idea.

1. The bar to become a teacher is quite low.

2. Most of the teachers I've met certainly didn't not have the necessary skills, but they, and the students endured.

Being an outstanding teacher required a very special skill set.

That 'managing psychopaths' portion of the teacher skill set sure seems similar to that required of babysitters.

Babysitters generally don't need to manage more 15 children all at once (none of which are related or have known each other for a very long time), in a setting that is not their home, for longer periods of time than they are with their families, for the purpose of education and not play.

There are transferrable skills, but they're transferrable in the way that making buildings out of LEGO is transferrable to building actual buildings. There are large differences and a whole host of other challenges.

[I'm not a teacher, but I have a few friends that are teachers or training to be teachers.]

> Babysitters generally don't need to manage more 15 children all at once

Sorry for going off-topic but I come from a small school and I don't understand how it is acceptable for class size to be huge (40+ students in a class is considered acceptable). I mean I get it if the class is led by someone extraordinary like Richard Feynman and everyone wants to be in his lectures but as others have said most teachers are not celebrities.

Plus, I don't think just because someone went through the motions of getting a license thirty years ago and all the certification conferences means that they are decent teachers today.

It boils down to lack of funding and lack of teachers. Lack of new teachers -- as well as absolutely insanely strong unions -- are also some of the reasons why teachers effectively have tenure at schools. In Australia, teachers can be moved around schools (in a given state) as well, which is even more flexible than just tenure at a university.

> It boils down to lack of funding and lack of teachers. Lack of new teachers -- as well as absolutely insanely strong unions -- are also some of the reasons why teachers effectively have tenure at schools. In Australia, teachers can be moved around schools (in a given state) as well, which is even more flexible than just tenure at a university.

So basically we have no friends. The unions are not our friends obviously but the people who want to break teacher unions are also not our friends because they want to profit at our expense.

There's nothing insidious about unions protecting workers that are members -- that's explicitly their whole purpose. More fields should adopt strong unions.

The problem is that education reform is an common empty promise in politics. Education is underfunded in most countries, and better funding (and then more education for teachers) would be very helpful.

This dismissive attitude really pisses me off.

Babysitters don't have to get the kids to DO anything.

Saying these are the same is like saying a manager in a business is only supposed to check if employees showed up and clocked in.

Sure, some managers are that bad at their job, but it is also very clear that their job is supposed to be much more than that.

Same with teachers. Getting 30 children who did not choose to be there to actually DO something is a very different skillset than babysitting.

/rant

That's the ideal. Except that in the status quo, only the good teachers need to get the kids that don't want to DO anything to DO anything, and the practical consequences for failing to motivate the slackers are nil.

Otherwise, there are two basic possibilities depending on the kid's parents. Either the kid is expected to try and DO something (and does), or the parent only expects child care. In the latter case, avoiding willful destruction and interruption is all that is required … tada, babysitting!

The manager analogy doesn't make sense because managers are much more directly accountable for whether the employees achieve anything for the company while clocking in. If managers' mostly subjective assessments were the only tangible output of employee time and other impacts were felt years later and weren't directly ascribable to an individual manager, then maybe the analogy would work.

> The latter requires a very special skill set that can only be described as 'managing psychopaths'.

And without exception, every teacher I've ever spoken with (including several in my family) has told me that this skill is something you have to learn on the job. All of them, regardless of what route they took to become a teacher, were unprepared for managing classroom discipline.

And it took all of them a year or two to learn how to manage classrooms (some teachers never learn this skill).

I strongly agree that the licensing is just a way to limit supply. I'm not against unions per se, but in this matter, the teacher's union is a serious impediment to educational achievement in this country. It should be much easier to hire and fire teachers in this country. And teachers should be much better paid.

Are you certain that most college lecturers do just fine? I have heard multiple complaints from students at California public colleges about lecturers who could barely speak English.

That complaint has been around as long as there have been lazy students. When lazy students find themselves in a class taught by a foreigner with a thick accent, they almost invariably blame the accent (barely speaks English) for their own failures, which, as often as not, probably have more to do with students' own laziness.

> they tend to become a terrible metric

Not exactly. When a test becomes study-able, it becomes a good metric for how hard people try and how much time/effort people put into their studies/career. And that is arguably what people making tests were trying to or would want to measure.

Not for a standardized test gauging the understanding of student's knowledge of Math or English.

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