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Comment by thot_experiment | Hacker News Reader

lmao, you're completely out to lunch, my friend is a teacher in one of the most well funded districts in the entire country and it's a decent job but it's an incredible amount of work and he's not making an amazing wage considering how much he needs to work outside of school hours

i can only imagine the horrors faced by teachers even on the other side of the bay, much less in a red state that isn't the fourth largest economy in the world

tenure protections can be problematic, but so are activist parents, the system isn't great but it is necessary to some extent, your exposure to bad actors as a teacher is massive and requires commensurate protection, just stochastically you'll get parents trying to get you fired every once in a while

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Do you have a more specific reply to factual points 1 .. 4?

There are about 3.5 million public school teachers in the US. The idea that they are incredible is not credible. As an Air Force brat, I attended many diverse public schools. Some teachers were good, some were not, most were ordinary folks. I don't recall any being incredible, though this teacher was definitely incredible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Escalante

Any thoughts on this documentary: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1566648/ ?

The Department of Education has spent somewhere between $5 and $6 trillion since its inception, with no measurable improvement in results.

> he's not making an amazing wage

The point of what I posted is the premium value of the benefits package.

In one of my classes in high school, the teacher always tested us with multiple choice tests (I presume because it makes the tests quick and easy to grade).

After a few tests, I noticed a pattern. Whenever one of the four answers was "all of the above" or "none of the above", that was the correct answer. So I went to the teacher and asked him about that. He leaned over conspiratorially and said "you're right. They're like that because the kids need a break." Then he laughed. I liked him, he was a good egg.

When I was little, my dad taught Air Force ROTC at the local university. He'd sprinkle the test with questions like "what is the insignia on a Soviet fighter jet?" On the classroom wall was a picture of a Soviet fighter jet. The students would still get it wrong. (The answer is "red star".) It was a favorite story of his.

You can say all you want but the fact is there's no lack of people wanting to be teachers.

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