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Comment by elgenie | Hacker News Reader

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.

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