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Common Dreams reports
Colorado's teachers' union expects more than 400 teachers at a rally that's planned for Monday at the state's Capitol in Denver.
[...] Englewood School District, outside the capital city, announced on Sunday that schools would be closed the following day as 70 percent of its teachers had indicated they wouldn't be working Monday. It was unclear on Sunday whether more school districts would be closing.
"We are calling Monday, April 16th a day of action", Kerrie Dallman, president of the Colorado Education Association (CEA), told KDVR in Denver.
[...] According to[1] KMGH in Denver, "The CEA estimates that teachers spend on average $656 of their own money for school supplies for students." The state's teacher salaries rank 46th out of 50, with educators making an average of $46,000 per year.
Public schools are underfunded by $828 million this year, Dallman told the Post, and lawmakers have said they could inject at least $100 million more into schools--but they have yet to do so.
[...] The planned protest follows a trend that was seen in West Virginia and Kentucky before moving west this month to Oklahoma and Arizona as well as Colorado. In all the states where teachers have walked out and rallied at their Capitols, teachers have reported paying for school supplies out of pocket, working second and third jobs to make ends meet, and coping with funding shortages while their legislators hand out tax cuts to corporations.
[1] For a laugh (or perhaps a deep sigh), check out all the whitespace in the source code of the page.
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 16 2018, @02:52PM (21 children)
Don't forget, that is a SCHOOL year, not a calendar year.
9 months, not 12.
If they choose to do nothing for pay the other 3 months, then that is on them.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by looorg on Monday April 16 2018, @03:16PM (3 children)
What kind of shit contract are they on if they don't get paid during the summer/xmas holiday? If that is the actual case no wonder they are leaving or being pissed.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 16 2018, @04:29PM (2 children)
The same kind of shit contract my parents were on when they were teaching in the 1970s. Shit pay, piss benefits, and summers off. Mom did telemarketing to bring in extra money, because what kind of job can you really get for just a couple of months?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday April 16 2018, @09:49PM (1 child)
Wow, does the US seriously not pay their teachers during their school holidays?
My mother was a teacher from about 1978 until the early 1990's and I don't remember her ever having more than about 3 weeks holiday per year. When the children were having their holiday, she was doing her lesson plans for the next term among other things.
She worked a damn sight harder than I did, but at least she was paid every month.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 16 2018, @10:05PM
I forget the specific arrangements (I was in grade school at the time), it could be that the paychecks were distributed across all 12 months, but effectively the pay was reduced as if those vacation months were not being worked. Either way, all I heard in the car on the way to and from school is how I shouldn't become a teacher, bad pay, lousy benefits, etc. etc.
There was definitely extra money paid if they (were allowed to, not everybody could) work summer school, but those were mostly the "bad" kids, so it wasn't a very appealing option.
Mom was a teacher from ~1968 to ~2013, by the time she retired the second time she was making respectable bank.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 16 2018, @03:27PM (2 children)
Don't forget that most school districts expect teachers to complete continuing education during the summer, or the fact that they work 8 hours at the school every school day and grade homework at night.
The whole 9 month argument is ridiculous. Its comparing apples to oranges and totally ignores all context.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 16 2018, @08:09PM
Article [commondreams.org]
Contains a useful bar graph, broken down by state
In no state are teachers paid more than other college graduates [epi.org]
In 1 state (Arizona), it's 63 percent.
In the "best" state (Massachusetts) it's 83 percent.
over the summer
When I was a kid, some schoolteachers taught summer school or driver's ed for a few weeks.
The ones that go into the general job market for those months are at a disadvantage because the boss knows they will be gone in a few weeks.
...and several of the articles I have seen on this topic say that DURING THE SCHOOL YEAR it's not uncommon for a teacher to have a 2nd or 3rd job e.g. delivering pizza.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday April 17 2018, @04:45PM
Yeah about that oft repeated meme, I donno.
Some is nostalgia. I vaguely remember we all had to read "Blubber" about bullying a fat chick, back in the old days when all chicks were not fat, in about 5th grade and write book reports individually as she would be cross checking to see if we cheated as a group, and I sweated that single page report for at least one entire night or so, but I'd think the average college educated elementary school teacher could read, correct, and grade a class worth of 20 or so pages of hand written scrawl in not much more than an hour of watching TV, so yeah it might have been agonizing for me as a kid to write, but I suspect she didn't put more than a minute or two into grading my literary masterpiece. I have to think about that for a minute... at my 2018 typing speed of 100+ WPM I could type that essay almost as fast as my 5th grade teacher likely read it... Who here is old enough to remember red pen to correct errors? My kids do everything on google docs, so they've never had the experience of getting a graded essay covered in red pen.
I think the worst term paper I ever had to write from K-12 was about 8 pages typed a position paper about nuclear power for "advanced smart kids or whatever term they used" senior economics class. But that was like one midterm paper one time ever, and the teacher was a bro of an easy grader.
Also I really enjoyed group grading, I can't remember any K-12 math class where my assignments were not group graded by some fellow student looking at the overhead projector for three minutes at the start of class. Yeah I don't think my high school trig instructor missed too many episodes of The Love Boat or Fantasy Island or Threes Company by grading my homework instead.
Now the people really deserving of pity are those poor bastards teaching University Freshman Composition who have 350 students turn in a minimum 20 page midterm on some bullshit (I vaguely recall it was my thoughts on the Athenians idiotic idea of invading Sicily which lost them the Peloponnesian War, and believe it or not this was assigned to me not chosen, Democracy, what a shitty way to run a country). Oh and the students think they'll get graded midterms the next day. All for Adjunct Professor pay, thats a couple cents per graded page?
God help me my kindergarten teacher SiL will repeat this meme about spending all night grading homework and I can't tell if she's out trolling me or insane or doing an entire backlogged semester of grading all at once. I'm pretty sure she can out shitpost me in terms of writing personalized custom responses to each kid; even I would struggle with that but school teachers probably had a college class on shitposting comments on kids assignments or similar, or maybe they have a cliff notes style book of suggested comments, I donno.
Anecdotally public school teachers can really party; if on the one night per week they're not on tindr/grindr or sitting in a bar drunk, they have to spend an hour of TV time grading an entire weeks homework all at once, eh, I'm not feeling too sorry. Here have my copy of Machine Learning by Flach and stop bitching about "working at home". They gotta walk up hill both ways to get to work in snow every day too. Boo hoo.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Whoever on Monday April 16 2018, @03:35PM (12 children)
What kind of professional job is available for 6 weeks over the summer and in 1 and 2 week blocks at other times of the the year?
Teachers are typically highly trained, would you expect them to take a job flipping burgers during their vacations?
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 16 2018, @03:50PM (6 children)
"Teachers are typically highly trained"
lmfao! if you mean they paid an absurd amount of money to jump through asinine hoops for 4 years while being taught/indoctrinated with bullshit, then sure.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 16 2018, @05:32PM (5 children)
Hmm, while the above is worthy of flamebait I can attest there is some amount of truth in it. Getting a teaching credential requires a looot of bullshit classes with very little value to actual teaching.
The entire school system and the teacher credentialing system need a compete overhaul.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 16 2018, @06:09PM (4 children)
When I was an undergrad, I took a particular geology class just for fun. We visited spots all over the state all day every Saturday looking at rock formations and collecting fossils. It was a blast and we saw lots of interesting things. I had NO pre-requisites since I was not a geology major. Each week, we had to turn in basically a show-and-tell paper describing what we saw the prior week. I finished the class (that I had no preparation for) with a 103% since I got some extra credit.
There a few people struggling. One young lady, struggling poorly, complained about how hard it was. She took the class because it was the "easiest class" that satisfied her laboratory sciences requirements. She was an education major in her final year. I don't think she would have fared well in my electromagnetics or thermodynamics classes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 16 2018, @07:27PM (3 children)
Anecdotal evidence of "teachers can't do"?
What was the point again?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 16 2018, @07:41PM (2 children)
The point is that education majors curricula of the time was (and may still be) ridiculously free of any core skills classwork. The geology class was hardly college level work and yet sufficed for a sciences credit for education majors. I also thought about it while I was required to take four quarters of calculus and differential equations when they took none.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 16 2018, @11:22PM (1 child)
Ah, well like I said comparing science/math classes to liberal arts is apples to oranges and doesn't really add much here. Most teachers get their bachelor's in something other than education though, an education major is probably going to end up in administrative / academic roles and not actually teaching children.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @12:54PM
You're crazy if you think a freshly graduated education major is going to waltz into a nice administrative position. They are going to substitute for a year or so and end up teaching first graders. You are going to need a master's degree in applied bullshit to get into administrative.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Thexalon on Monday April 16 2018, @03:52PM
I will say that back when I was a counselor at overnight summer camps, our most experienced staff tended to be teachers during the rest of the year. But it's not great pay: You're talking something like $2-3K for the summer + room and board. But of course if you're not a college kid or something, you have to maintain your home elsewhere while you're working at the camp.
And yes, you could work retail or fast food or something as well, which would net you something similar. So revise the $46K up to $49K. Wow, huge improvement.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 16 2018, @04:33PM (1 child)
Education has the highest rate of grade inflation of any college major. "Highly trained" is dubious.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday April 16 2018, @05:30PM
It's my impression that teachers *are* highly trained, but that the people who are training them in teaching don't know how to teach. It generally takes them a few years to unlearn their training...but the training is a requirement for being hired for the job.
You can call it silly, perverse, absurd, etc. and I'll agree with you. But it also seems to be true. And the horrible thing is, the idiots who teach teachers how to teach are still better informed than the greater idiots who design the curriculum.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by slinches on Monday April 16 2018, @04:52PM
That's a tough one. If only there was some sort of school that was open during the summer ...
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday April 17 2018, @01:18PM
Consultant / contractor
As a young recent grad, two times at one small employer I ran into a former instructor helping out with some short to medium term project over the summer. Kinda weird. When instructors are out of "instructor mode" they seem more chill at the workplace. I vaguely remember going out drinking with my coworkers with the guy who taught me 68hc11 assembly language as an elective class a couple years previous; kinda weird.
That of course is assuming EE code monkey stuff, teaching future EE code monkeys, teaching kindergarten and teaching high school gym class are all at the same identical level of professionalism.
My SiL is a kindergarten teacher, a long tail survivor near the end of her career, and she did sub work for day cares when she needed cash. Note that some employees "careers" at day care are only a couple weeks, so her working there for two months makes her a lifer. Although again, hard to say if elementary school teacher OR day care worker is a professional job. I'd say "no" to both.
All the tech ed / shop teachers had summer jobs in their fields and saw it as a valuable way to make contacts for their students; I had a CAD teacher in high school trying pretty hard to recruit me into a couple of his favorite employers. Is CAD draftsman a professional job? I donno.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 16 2018, @05:55PM
I'm not sure why this was modded troll. It's a valid point. If I took off my entire summer and didn't work, I would cut my pay by 25%. When I was a kid, it was common to see teachers from my school doing seasonal jobs in the summer. Spreading paychecks over 12 months only helps those that can't budget and reduces their mandated tax withholdings. It doesn't mean they are suddenly "employed" over the summer.