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Comment by nemo44x | Hacker News Reader

Most school teachers are full of it, but they don’t mean to. They are simply low level clerics in the church of truth. They recite a very lossy account of what they were ordained with at a likely low level institution. It’s not really their fault - people need jobs, the ministry needs repeaters, and the pay is bad.

Your teachers weren’t the disease - they were just a symptom.

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If only teachers were as intelligent and wise as HN’s anonymous commenters.

No disagreement with your jab. It's easy to be right once, when you get to choose whether you participate. If you had to speak for hours a day, days a week, you'd certainly be wrong some good amount of the time.

If only all people were as intelligent and wise as HN’s anonymous commenters (I wish I would too). When you think about this, it's almost like instagram but for knowledge.

I love this veiled (but true) insult. That is the core of my love-hate relationship with this site.

This is a great analogy. The teachers in school are not there to teach you the most detailed model of the world, they are mostly there to make you exercise your model critiquing ability on some toy models that are simple to deal with. Your math teacher might draw a blank when you tell him he taught you an inconsistent notion of limits in calculus, and your physics teacher will certainly admit that there are holes in the high school version of gravity.

But the point wasn't to tell you the exact version of what we know, it was to make you think about how models work.

This idea of a shadowy unified people that control everything is a poor way to try to make sense of the world.

I mean, the HS teacher that told me this had a masters in Mech E. Or so he claimed, hmm...

He must not have been the top of his class if he had ended up a HS teacher.

Which is actually kinda sad. Pay and working conditions for teachers shouldn't be so that being a teacher is regarded as a failure.

You are the one regarding them as failures. I had a variety of teachers in school, some were very educated (PhDs), and simply found a calling in teaching. Not everything is about money, you shouldn’t look down on teachers.

I think the public perception of teachers varies a lot between societies. In breaking bad it was clear that Americans don't think much of a guy who ends up teaching chemistry. If you go to other countries it's very different, eg in Switzerland it seemed totally legit to aspire to teaching. Salary was 120k according to the kid who told me.

> according to the kid who told me

Come on, you can do better than this and actually invest the minute to type this into your search engine of choice and verify:

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/society/swiss-salaries-teachers...

So according to this, Swiss teachers make between CHF 95,590 and CHF 110,590 annually. Cost of living is also higher in Switzerland, so it's a bit less than "120k" would suggest, but still a solid salary. Refer to the link for details.

It's in the ballpark, and will certainly get to 120K once you have some seniority.

The point was more that a person thinking about what to do could admit to saying he wanted to be a teacher in Switzerland, whereas in the US it seems like making Walter White a teacher was the perfect way to say he'd somehow failed.

Admittedly, if the choice is being a "successful" chemist, and bringing into existence VX gas, TNT, Phosgene, Thalidomide, Teflon, various industrial chemical wastes that tend to end up creating Superfund sites, and being a chemistry teacher... I may be getting pretty lame as I get older, but I think the Teacher strictly speaking has the quantifiably lesser destructive footprint of the two outcomes. Then again, the argument there is likely one against mixing business majors, industrial chemists, and more lawyers than you can shake a stick at. So... Yeah. Take it with a grain of salt and call me in the morning.

My high school was in the US. I think good teachers anywhere are teachers because it is their calling. Breaking Bad is hardly the normative reference of how people should view teachers.

I can agree with that, but the fact that it's believable is the giveaway.

Could you make a movie where being a doctor makes the main character a failure in life? Such a movie would almost certainly have to be a comedy where the character is a failure in spite of being a doctor, not because.

Probably related to the old joke: Those who cannot do, teach and those that cannot teach, manage.

And honestly, it is a bad joke as it propagates bad stereotypes.

for sure, a bad joke all the way around.

Is it regarded as a failure? Teachers in public schools work part time for 25 years and get a scaling pension they “negotiated” with the politicians their union dues elected. I’d call them fantastic winners. Grifters? Sure. But certainly not losers.

My parents, both with master’s degrees, worked at least eight hours every day teaching, grading assignments, and then preparing for the following day. I would guess about ten hours on average, seeing as I was mostly left alone as a child while my parents worked over the kitchen table. Yes, they don’t teach during the summer. Their pay reflects that. I won’t even touch on personal expenditures for supplies. Grifters?! My lord. Teachers are criminally underpaid, highly educated adults who shape society’s future while fighting its current failures. All while being inexplicably hated and ridiculed by students, parents, and I guess HN.

No need to take my word for it: https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/15/us/teacher-pay-myth-misconcep...

The article cites the BLS for other professions so why not take the BLS's word for teachers, too?

https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf

> ...shape society’s future while fighting its current failures. All while being inexplicably hated and ridiculed by students, parents, and I guess HN.

I’m not sure how to interpret this. Are you saying they indoctrinate kids? Do they exist to teach kids __how__ to think or __what__ to think?

Which current failures are they fighting?

As to my previous comment about “grifters”, I’ll admit that was too cynical and over the top. I don’t think individual teachers are. However, their unions are pretty close.

> Which current failures are they fighting?

Depending on the teacher and school, everything from kids coming to school hungry or without supplies to obesity to discipline problems to cheating to bullying/cyberbullying to child abuse to uninvolved parents to mental health problems to anxiety to drugs to deficiencies in the curriculum to achievement gaps between genders, classes and races to lack of good role models to gang culture.

That's not to say every teacher works to address all those things at once - at some schools they might not contend with any at all! But I've seen people call on the education system to do almost everything you'd otherwise expect parents to do.

So it's the system that is failing, not the teachers...

Public schools are a part of the system and the system has only continued to grow larger and larger over the last 75+ years. So what is the solution, to make the system even larger? More of the same failed therapeutic?

More and more "solutions" have been added to an outdated school system and has continued to show worse and worse results. This is quantitatively proven. Yet, we continue to tinker and politicize public schooling. To your point, we've decided to inject more and more social issues into schools, expanding scope of all things except effective learning.

And the teachers unions are a huge part of this. They support unaccountable teachers, pay for time and not for merit, and combined with the progressive wing of the country they are allied with countless special interests which are all too eager to continue to have their interests blended into the curriculum. Because no time to make a customer for life then when they're young.

So yes, the system is failing and the solution has continued to be "Add more system". We spend more and more every year and get worse and worse results. We should dissolve the public school system (government should not be in this business at all) and grant each student a sum of money that parents can use to place kids in private schools of their choice that suit their child's abilities and the parents aspirations.

This is a good breakdown on how some teachers are in fact a big part of the problem with educating kids:

https://fee.org/articles/the-failure-of-american-public-educ...

"part-time" is not something I would ever describe teaching as. All the teachers I've seen take huge amounts of work home with them, even on vacation. There may be a slight lull in the summer but it's filled with training, learning changes in the curriculum, etc. It's not uncommon for teachers to pay for classroom materials out of pocket because the schools are unable or unwilling to pay for them (this would be utterly ridiculous in many other industries). Teaching is something you go into because you enjoy it or it satisfies you on some level and you can put up with ridiculous workloads, not because it pays well.

> Teachers in public schools work part time

Typically full-time and usually year round, though some work seasonally for about 3/4 year (but still full-time), with commensurately reduced annual pay.

It’s amazing a man would work for a masters degree and end up teaching mainly below average people at a public institution. What’s a masters degree worth?

Good lord this comment is condescending.

Some people are teachers because they want to be teachers, period. They find fulfillment in it.

That’s not even touching the unnecessary dig at public institutions.

Did you go to public schools? I did. The student body is mainly uninterested, incapable, or irredeemable. Some great diamonds in the ruff to be sure. But certainly these people would excel regardless of a 1-off actual good teacher seeing as most of them are just mailing it in, like their student body.

Why go to the trouble of getting a masters to waste it like this?

FWIW I don’t believe teachers should need a bachelors. A 2-year trade school should suffice.

I went to public schools. The majority of teachers worked hard and did well with what they had. And many of them had masters.

It's "diamonds in the rough" not "ruff". Sorry to assume you spoke English as a first language ;-)

Touché.

I sure am glad my fantastic public high school teachers didn't have your attitude. They sacrificed so much for so little, and I'll tell you what, they made a word of difference in at least one life: mine. From what I've learned of teachers, that's more than enough for them.

Shame.

My (public) high school physics/chemistry teacher had two PHDs and is responsible for me getting interested in science in general.

He probably had more impact on the world than some CERN researchers spending their entire lives working on theoretical physics with 0 application in the real world whatsoever

Who should teach below average people ? Below average teachers with no education ?

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