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Comment by OkayPhysicist | Hacker News Reader

They can compete the exact same way that those tech companies compete with each other: compensation.

Pay more, or offer enough other perks to entice employees. Teachers already have a massive perk in the fact that they work ~1/3rd fewer days than other jobs. That's a great draw, if you can offer good enough compensation to get over the "not making enough money to live a comfortable life" threshold.

If people will risk their lives as cold-water crab fisherman for the right price, there's certainly a price to put up with highschoolers.

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For the people I've known who've left teaching, it's never been about the money, or at least they've always said it wasn't about the money. It's always about the working conditions, partly the kids and parents but mostly ever-increasing bullshit from admin.

They work longer days than most people and also have the privilege of working with increasingly shitty kids and their awful parents, in large class sizes. The long vacation is frankly not worth it.

For most it's not a vacation, because it's not paid. You can't exactly get a second job during the time, who has work that is 1) not awful and 2) only needs extra labor for 2.5 months during the summer?

Teachers probably don't want to run ice cream trucks

Why not, though? Dignity of labor. I've done manual work plenty, in the past as well as now, though I am a techie. Nothing wrong with that.

Difference is funding. Good luck convincing the population you need to tripple teacher salaries.

I mean we should. But good luck convincing.

If they tripled teaching salaries I would 100% become a teacher because its fulfilling. But the pay is rather shit for the role and responsibilities

I know many who have the same sentiment. And I wish we lived in a society where that was the case.

So did, and do, many others, past and present (both wish and lived).

We can create our own such society.

Wanna sign up?

Refs:

Robinson Crusoe (book).

The Swiss Family Robinson (book).

I read both of them as a kid.

The USA (country).

Why not become a private teacher, aka trainer / instructor. 3x may not be even close to the top of the potential upside (if using modern elearning tech, and having good subject knowledge and some decent marketing).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39697025 is the ref for my "3x".

Ah yes, just what teachers love doing, being monetarily beholden to the parents of the little brat causing all the problems because they pay $50k a year

Sez who?

You don't have to beholden unless you want to.

Figure it out.

And who said anything about little brats as clients?

Go for big brats.

>You don't have to beholden

You don't have to be (or feel?) beholden, I meant. Typo.

That's funny because I know a lot of people on the other side of the fence that leave teaching for even lower paid work because it is miserable and unfulfilling.

Given this knowledge, it's hard to you comments like this any differently than comments from googlers talking about how fulfilling it would be to work a construction job or romanticize pre-industrial Society from a downtown penthouse

That's partly because due to the fulfilling nature of the work (a compensating differential), and partly because we can't price it (how much is it worth?)

My crazy and political idea what will fix all problems is to give proxy votes to parents for each of their children.

A lot of teacher salary problems come from idle retirees outvoting children on personalised social care vs mass school funding. There is no reason for children to have absolutely no representation in government.

That gives votes to breeders who vote their own interests, not children's interests in general.

Convince the population to tax tech monopolies and billionaires.

We don't need to triple teacher salaries. We need to give teachers better tools so they can teach material they don't know, same as how managers can manage employees.

We also don't need to stop private industry, we just need to open their work to benefit society as a whole.

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