Teachers work "really hard'.

[chemgear]

Originally Posted by Rathji

How would you go about setting up processes to stop bad employees from staying employed?

Are you saying that we cannot stop bad employees from staying in the school board system? Hands tied, nothing that you can do? (Because I agree).

I don't know, how about like any other company or organization where:

- Hey, you suck at your job and you're not improving. Thank you, goodbye.
- You are abusing your sick days/benefits. Thank you, goodbye.
- You clearly don't care anymore and are just barely even showing up every day. Goodbye.

[Locke]

Originally Posted by MarchHare

This matches my experience exactly. Occasional overtime has sometimes been required either to meet a project deadline or to perform work that can only be done after hours so as not to disrupt the rest of the organization (I work in IT), but a typical week for me has always been ~40 hours. When I do have to work overtime, I can either come in late or leave early the next day to make up the hours.

Yeah but Teachers cant really do that. I do that in my industry to some extent, its on a longer scale, I work 70-80 hours a week for 3 months and then later on I only work short days.

But a teacher cant be like: "well, I put in a few extra hours marking last night so I'm going to skip my first couple of classes tomorrow."

[OMG!WTF!]

People are perfectly willing to start teaching kids for 36k in the states. What are we at in AB? 50k-60k to start? Do we have better teachers or worse kids?

[wretched34]

Teachers have 195 operational days in 2015-16, and 179 instructional days. Compared to 260 business days for the average employee. Let's also bare in mind that the average school day is what 8:45 to 3:50, and shorter most Friday, compared to the standard 8-5? Do they really need the ability to say "I put in extra hours Tuesday, so I'm leaving early Friday"?

[MarchHare]

Originally Posted by Locke

Yeah but Teachers cant really do that. I do that in my industry to some extent, its on a longer scale, I work 70-80 hours a week for 3 months and then later on I only work short days.

But a teacher cant be like: "well, I put in a few extra hours marking last night so I'm going to skip my first couple of classes tomorrow."

I wasn't talking about teachers. Rathji and I were both responding to Jiri who made the following claim:

Originally Posted by JiriHrdina

I think it is difficult to find a full time job where you don't put in more than 40 hours per week.

That, in our experience, has simply not been the case.

[wooohooo]

I feel if they make it much harder to get into the profession that would weed down a lot of the 'not fit to be a teachers'. Right now if I remember right (my wife's a teacher) to get into Education at the U of A was something like a 2.5 GPA. That's something a long the lines of a B-/C+. Doesn't that indicate a lack of mastery in the material and how would they be fit to teach such a subject?

Not only that they have like 300-400 teachers that graduate every year. Multiply that with how many schools we have and wow, there's an over abundance of teachers. With too many graduates and not enough spots, well... what's the point?

If they start restricting the amount of seats as say pharmacy or raise the standard entrance to those of engineering, the end product of quality teachers would rise significantly.

[Locke]

Originally Posted by MarchHare

I wasn't talking about teachers. Rathji and I were both responding to Jiri who made the following claim:



That, in our experience, has simply not been the case.

Okay, fair enough.

[wretched34]

Originally Posted by OMG!WTF!

People are perfectly willing to start teaching kids for 36k in the states. What are we at in AB? 50k-60k to start? Do we have better teachers or worse kids?

ATA CBA says starting wages are $59,487-$66,710 based on years of education (4-6 year degree).

[GGG]

Originally Posted by OMG!WTF!

People are perfectly willing to start teaching kids for 36k in the states. What are we at in AB? 50k-60k to start? Do we have better teachers or worse kids?

Significantly better teachers.

I think teachers are fairly compensated for the work they do as a whole. I'm glad we have some data to show work weeks and those numbers are comparable with other professions. Really the union needs to go or the union needs to actively develop a performance based system for evaluating teachers and have at least a 20% difference in pay between the best teachers and worst.

We also should lay off the worst 5% of teachers every five years or so to allow younger teachers into the system.

For evaluation you use average student improvement as compared to peers accounting for demographic and economic factors.

[Rathji]

Originally Posted by chemgear

Are you saying that we cannot stop bad employees from staying in the school board system? Hands tied, nothing that you can do? (Because I agree).

I don't know, how about like any other company or organization where:

- Hey, you suck at your job and you're not improving. Thank you, goodbye.
- You are abusing your sick days/benefits. Thank you, goodbye.
- You clearly don't care anymore and are just barely even showing up every day. Goodbye.

I do admit that there are problems with getting rid of bad teachers, because they have protection, but I am just thinking about this from a practical perspective.

How do people who are bad employees still have jobs? Shouldn't every one of them be unemployed? Do these people wander the world moving from one job to another every 3 months when they get canned?

The reality of the situation is not everyone can be an above average employee, or even just average, some of them are going to flat out suck and they can be kept in a job because it is harder/more expensive for management to fire and replace them than it is to keep them on the job.

My point is, you can't expect much deviation from this pattern from any field, so accepting that some teachers are bad at their jobs is really just a fact of life. This is just personal experience, but in the 12 combined years that all my kids have been in school, ranging from K to Grade 12, there has only been one teacher who I would have considered as bad enough that he should lose his job. Maybe that's an acceptable ratio?

[Harry Lime]

Keep in mind that this is an impression of teachers from K-12, and the experiences in different grades will vary greatly. A Kindergarten teacher would be putting in somewhere around 2 hours of extra work a week, whereas a grade 12 teacher could be putting in 16-20 hours. There are also differences in teachers receiving the same pay whether they are teaching 3 classes or 6 classes, all within the same school. The experience of the teacher with 60 more kids to teach and mark (than a colleague considered doing 'equal' work) is going to include a boatload more 'overtime'. (and this may not have been reflected in the study)

It amazes me sometimes that grown men and women have this ongoing gripe to pick with teachers.

[Rathji]

Originally Posted by wretched34

Teachers have 195 operational days in 2015-16, and 179 instructional days. Compared to 260 business days for the average employee. Let's also bare in mind that the average school day is what 8:45 to 3:50, and shorter most Friday, compared to the standard 8-5? Do they really need the ability to say "I put in extra hours Tuesday, so I'm leaving early Friday"?

260 working days? You can't compare apples to oranges. Those operational days are accounting for all time off already.

52 weeks a year, 5 days a week is 260.

10-12 stat days, 10-15 days vacation, often some number of personal (not sick) days puts that number at 230-240 for the average office worker.

[Rathji]

Originally Posted by wooohooo

I feel if they make it much harder to get into the profession that would weed down a lot of the 'not fit to be a teachers'. Right now if I remember right (my wife's a teacher) to get into Education at the U of A was something like a 2.5 GPA. That's something a long the lines of a B-/C+. Doesn't that indicate a lack of mastery in the material and how would they be fit to teach such a subject?

Maybe they should make it harder to be a teacher, but I think reducing the number of people who want to be teachers might have a negative overall effect. I think making it harder for teachers to get 'ultimate protection from termination' by vetting them more aggressively in their early years would be more productive

On the bold section, I recall hearing that the average A student in a university course only actually learns 50% of the material that was taught. At that level, would they still be qualified to teach it?

[llwhiteoutll]

Should be a comparison of hours worked, not days worked. I worked about 215 days last year, but close to 2700 hours.

[Major Major]

Originally Posted by GGG

For evaluation you use average student improvement as compared to peers accounting for demographic and economic factors.

Based on the assessment of the teacher whose job depends on giving good marks? Teachers, students, and parents are soft enough as it is to criticism. We certainly shouldn't be giving any reasons to gift even better marks.

Give standardized tests to every grade at the end of the year, you say? Ed systems around the world are trying to dump these rather than increase their presence. Why? They don't really work in terms of formative learning. Sure, they can let us know approximately the amount of knowledge and problem solving skills have been obtained in a given field, but they also guage how well students write tests, which is inauthentic. The result, teachers teach for the end goal of learning to write this test. This would be especially true if you said their jobs depended on it.

Really, any evaluation system would need to start in the classroom. Big bloated school boards, such as the CBE, that are riddled with inefficiency and entitlement do not emphasize teachers be evaluated after receiving permanent certification. I don't even think schools have the autonomy to do so even if they wanted to. It's just not a priority in a system that is focused on protecting beaurocratic process rather than show real improvement. How can you blame teachers for losing any sense of passion and altruism they may have had when they are typically burdened by their administrators rather than aided.

[afc wimbledon]

Having been a teacher's aid in a probationary/difficult to handle alternate program I can say without doubt that teaching is a difficult job, but not as difficult as most teachers think.

Unfortunately most teachers go straight from high school to college and then into teaching, very few have any experience of anything else than education therefore have no idea how ####ty other jobs are. They also have an almost religious belief in how difficult teaching is, I'm a youth worker and had a somewhat burnt out teacher who would leave me to 'supervise' for whole lessons while he played guitar in the office, the fact I could, without years of college, keep a class quiet and working was seen as almost miraculous by the other teachers but in fact was just basic childcare, I'd call it 'whack a mole', as soon as you saw the little #######s head pop up you had to be over and asking them what's up.

[Harry Lime]

Also keep in mind that about 10% of children are horrible devil spawn, to whom their parents are genetically predisposed to overlook their horribleness. And that 10% of that 10% have parents who might actually be Satan. So every teacher, over the course of each semester, has to deal directly with child of Beelzebub and the nine little disciples.

[shermanator]

Since I know most of the vitriol is being flung towards those teachers in the public sector, I'm curious what the mob in this thread think about schools like the following?

http://providencechildren.com/

[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by GGG

Significantly better teachers.

I think teachers are fairly compensated for the work they do as a whole. I'm glad we have some data to show work weeks and those numbers are comparable with other professions. Really the union needs to go or the union needs to actively develop a performance based system for evaluating teachers and have at least a 20% difference in pay between the best teachers and worst.

If the unions ever accepted pay differential (which they won't), it should include what sort of degree they have. For students in social sciences, humanities, and fine arts, teaching is about the best job they can hope for. By a long shot. Which is why teachers are overwhelming drawn from those fields, and few have backgrounds in science, engineering, math, and other technical studies. We'd see more, and better, teachers from those under-represented fields if there was a pay differential.

[pylon]

Originally Posted by wretched34

If someone offered me a job, and said "if you stick it out for a few years, it's a 6 figure salary, with 12+ weeks annual vacation" I'd work "alot" in those 40ish weeks too.

This.

I don't doubt teachers are very important. But I work a 50 minimum, sometimes 60 hour work week, with your standard, legally mandated vacation time. I feel I'm fairly compensated, but if they feel "48 hours a week." is going above and beyond.... Well they need a reality check. Especially in consideration of the incredible compensation, benefits, and holiday time they receive. Plus they are impossible to fire. The ineptitude you would have to display once your in the union to get dismissed would be nothing short of something catastrophic or criminal.

I see a lot of 90-100 k credit apps for teachers which isn't gold plated Bentley money. But the benefits they have are insanely good, and would easily amount to a 10-20% raise for 90% of us.

There's a reason you rarely ever hearing teachers in this province complaining about wages anymore. They are more than fairly compensated. And they realize it.