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Today, Mi is 33 and founder of a startup that aims to give Chinese kids the kind of education American children receive in top U.S. schools. Called VIPKid, the company matches Chinese students aged five to 12 with predominantly North American instructors to study English, math, science and other subjects. Classes take place online, typically for two or three 25-minute sessions each week.
Mi is capitalizing on an alluring arbitrage opportunity. In China, there are hundreds of millions of kids whose parents are willing to pay up if they can get high-quality education. In the U.S. and Canada, teachers are often underpaid—and many have quit the profession because they couldn't make a decent living. Growth has been explosive. The three-year-old company started this year with 200 teachers and has grown to 5,000, now working with 50,000 children. Next year, Mi anticipates she'll expand to 25,000 teachers and 200,000 children.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Thursday December 22 2016, @12:29PM
I'd say you're both right. There is more to teaching than knowing how to solve a math problem. Unions do degrade the quality and performance of teaching as a profession.
I taught English in Japan, and the level of commitment by the teacher and his involvement with the totality of his student's life is on a whole other level from America. He spends most of his waking hours with him. If the student gets caught shoplifting or something like that, the cops call the teacher, not the parents. In America, thanks to unions, the teachers knock off at 2:30pm after having started at 8am; and in that 6.5 hour day they've had a 90 minute prep period and an hour lunch. So they work slightly more than a half day each day. They get about 50 flavors of religious holidays off, and they don't have to work for 3 months out of the year, in the summer. And, they are not held accountable at all for how many of their kids pass assessment test or what kind of grades they get or whether they can read or do basic math. For all that, they get paid multiples more than the median national salary, and enjoy very generous health and retirement benefits. And when they do something bad, it is nearly impossible to get them fired. (All this I have seen intimately from serving on the school board) Result: 2/3rds of the kid fail the state-wide tests. Not, "pass with an A, B, C, or D," but "F," for failure.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 5, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday December 22 2016, @04:25PM
In America, thanks to unions, the teachers knock off at 2:30pm after having started at 8am; and in that 6.5 hour day they've had a 90 minute prep period and an hour lunch. So they work slightly more than a half day each day. They get about 50 flavors of religious holidays off, and they don't have to work for 3 months out of the year, in the summer.
As someone who actually taught secondary school in the U.S. for a few years (a little over a decade ago), you're exaggerating quite a bit. Most teachers I know spent several weeks of "summer vacation" doing planning, creation of new materials, etc. (because they knew they wouldn't have time during the regular year) and all the schools I worked for REQUIRED us to attend additional summer training sessions/conferences, which took up another 2-3 weeks. You're right that teachers get more "vacation" than most professions, but it's not the amount you claim. And frankly I was happy whenever I did get a long weekend or whatever, because it often finally allowed me to catch up on backed up grading.
I've never heard of a public school with an "hour lunch." Teachers generally get a lunch period that's the same length as students get, which is typically around 25-30 minutes. That "prep period" is about the only time you have to not only prepare new materials, but to grade assignments, tests, etc., and there is NO WAY that 90 minutes is adequate prep time per day if you actually want to give real attention to your students.
When I was teaching high school (math and physics), I had 140-150 students per year in six class sections. If I used that full 90-minute prep (and not every school has that much time during the school hours), that gives me approximately 36-40 SECONDS per student per day to grade assignments, tests, etc., and that's assuming I use no time at all to do things like, you know, PREP for teaching, make new handouts, test questions, project materials, etc., let alone basic stuff you might need to do like photocopies, administrative paperwork, etc. I don't think I ever had time to do any grading during a prep period, because I was always immersed in a variety of actual prep work and random administrative tasks each day.
And actually at the 2 public schools I taught at, we didn't have a prep period each day: a couple days each week or during certain parts of the year we were assigned "duty" during those periods -- monitoring halls, lunchrooms, etc.
Simply put, there's no way you can be a responsible teacher and get away with your "work slightly more than half a day each day." Have I known some teachers who basically did that? Sure. I knew some delinquents who did nothing, were out the door at 2:45pm each day, and got paid anyway. But most of my colleagues were there for hours either before or after school (or both). It was very rare that I spent less than 9 hours at school each day, and frequently I took additional grading home to do in the evenings or on weekends. And that's after I sacrificed a lot of more pedagogically sound stuff -- I eventually gave up on giving too many tests and quizzes that required detailed grading in my physics classes, for example. I resorted to "ScanTron" multiple choice things just to keep myself sane. And just consider the amount of attention required to grade even one lab report where you expect some "creative" thinking. For 150 students, even looking at each one for 2 minutes each, you're looking at 5 HOURS of grading for just one assignment. If you want to spend a decent amount of time fixing grammar, correcting more subtle mistakes, improving writing, etc. and do 5 minutes each, that's 12.5 hours of your time dealing with one lab report assignment.
That stuff adds up FAST.
The last year I taught high school, I moved to a private school that was one of those elite academies that's a feeder to the Ivy League. There I was lucky enough to have only around 50 students, but I worked harder than ever, because expectations were so much higher. Of the science teachers in the rooms around me whom I got to know well, all of us spent at least 9 hours/day, and those of us who didn't have kids frequently worked well into the evening, planning new labs and other creative activities, trying to get stuff to work, etc. We'd frequently go for a quick dinner together and continue until 7 or 8 or 9pm at night. I still recall the time my fellow physics teacher came into my room at something like 10:30pm one night to get something and found me asleep on a lab table, because I was so exhausted.
Were we required to be there? No. But it was the school culture. And, you know, out of the 10 AP physics kids I had that year, 6 went on to Ivy League schools, so there's that. You have students ready to be challenged, and you need to meet their challenges, so you work harder. All of us did. At that school, if you disappeared right after the bell each afternoon, you probably wouldn't be hired back the next year.
Anyhow -- bottom line: I know there are plenty of "slackers" in the profession, and plenty who take advantage of union rules (not possible in all states or school districts) to slack off more. But in my years actually teaching, those folks were far outweighed by the number of teachers I knew who were working far beyond the school day most days. And those teachers (again, which I say were the majority of teachers I worked with) were definitely not paid well given their effort and qualifications.
Just my experience. Will likely vary significantly from school to school and depending on state law/regulations.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 22 2016, @06:01PM
U.S. teachers who give a shit, and there are a lot of them, will get to school earlier, stay there longer, and bring work home. They prepare for the next school year during the summer and go to mandated workshops. There are far less than "50 flavors of religious holidays off". Benefits and pay vary but are not that great in some states... and this is for someone with a college education.
Stick to talking about Japanese schoolkids. Did any of them touch you inappropriately?