South Dakota teachers scramble for dollar bills in ‘demeaning’ game | Hacker News Reader

South Dakota teachers scramble for dollar bills in ‘demeaning’ game

theguardian.com

54 pointsgreencore20 comments

> “I think it’s really cool when the community offers an opportunity like this for things that educators a lot of times pay out of pocket for,” Alexandria Kuyper, a fifth-grade teacher at Discovery elementary school said.

The most poignant part of Squid Game was that they had the chance to leave, and many chose to participate anyway because of how badly they needed the money.

This should have been a simple donation instead of a “game”, but the real evil is the broken system that put the teachers in this position to begin with.

Idiocracy was a prophecy all along. Next years plan is to throw in a little bit of Running Man by equipping teachers with hockey sticks to beat the competition.

I thought of Idiocracy as well today, for another reason. I saw on instagram a video of a groom holding a bride in his arms over a mud puddle for a photoshoot. At some point the groom tripped and dropped the bride in the mud: she started screaming and crying. The video was clearly staged. It made me thing of "Ow! My balls". Somehow, ragebait is even worse than sophomoric humour.

That’s one of the best dystopian movies out there with the Terminator. Shows how the elite critics are often wrong in long term prognosis.

I'm pretty sure people were posting "Climbing for Dollars" on Twitter in response to this

"“I think it’s really cool when the community offers an opportunity like this for things that educators a lot of times pay out of pocket for,” Alexandria Kuyper, a fifth-grade teacher at Discovery elementary school said."

Article kind of burys the lede, this is the issue at hand and what makes this tasteless. If this was just extra money for a field trip or something that's one thing, but this isn't a donation to the class, it's replacing things that the teachers personally buy because the schools don't purchase basic supplies.

Why do teachers buy supplies out of pocket? Is their pocket also the class's expense account?

Sounds like the game is the result of several levels of wrong stacked on top of each other.

Because teachers love their students. The school says the budget is coming up short and there won't be enough crayons to go around, so the teacher has the choice of telling the students that there is no more crayons or just buying a bunch of crayons themself. But applied to all supplies.

This heartbreaking. I can't imagine how it must feel like as a teacher, especially one that is short on cash.

Teaching has to be the worst job in America right now.

Where does all of the money go?

New York City is spending nearly $30,000 per student this year.

Bloated administration, expensive tech that doesn't work or is less good at educating than pencil and paper...

Oh boy when you find out about all the "edu-tech" companies that have sprouted up, creating "solutions" to non existent "problems". A lot of them also have family/friend relations to local governments :)

Want to do some good with your coding skills? Build open source edu-tech.

Imagine questioning the district on why they're spending so much when an open source options is both cheaper and better.

I imagine good edu-tech requires some expertise that not every open source developer has, though.

On the other hand, look at the massive amounts of high-quality data in something like Open Streetmap. It should be possible to do this.

> Build open source edu-tech.

They existed, they just didn't get adopted really. E.g. https://moodle.org/

There's so many ways of justifying not open source. Heck it's so easy to create FUD around open source projects.

Is it too much to ask to first spend money on teachers and basic supplies, and only if money is left over after that, spend it on extras, new tech, experiments, and administration?

The supplies budget doesn't provide enough by itself so they have to either pay out of pocket or ask for donations.

We have plenty of money to perpetually increase the police budgets, though...

our teachers are some of the most poorly paid in the country but I guarantee that this was not intended nor taken as "demeaning" by anyone involved. this is the social media thing where something gets taken out of context and posted online, someone sees it and makes a viral hot take, and then said hot take is the lens everyone views the thing through & prejudges accordingly.

(disclaimer: presently employed by a SD school system, but not this one.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com