Do you support the U.S. teacher strikes?

[Darashiva]

gergroy said:

Aeolus451 said:

 Teachers in the US don't have to do all that. Curriculum and all that is decided for them. If they want to do elaborate lesson plans or do stuff that's not in the text books, that's completely their choice. They get the summer off unless they're doing extra things like summer school. They're getting paid alot considering the time they get off and it's office work. I have a friend who works in IT for the school system and I asked him about this topic. They're just wanting to get paid alot for their job and they're using an appeal to emotions "getting grossly" to get it. Alot of them work an extra job during the summer for extra money or something to do. They don't have to buy a new car every year or have a huge house or brand name everything. Alot of people like to live beyond their means and they feel like the they're not making enough. 

Haha, what!?  Glad your friend told you all about it.  As an actual teacher, I can tell you that my curriculum is certainly not decided for me.  There are obviously core standards I have to cover, but that doesn’t mean they give me a lesson plan to teach it.  The standard is like one sentence that I have to make into a two week long unit.  Honestly I can’t remember the last time I worked less than 60 hours in a week.  So much more than just lesson plans, you got various school committees you have to take part of, after school tutoring, extra curricular organizations, conferences, iep meetings and all the paperwork involved in that, and then grading all that homework.

 

personally, I’m not taking part in any protests.  You don’t become a teacher because of the money.  However, if you are trying to say teachers aren’t underpaid it is just an ignorant comment.  No offense.  Most people don’t actually have any idea what goes into being a teacher.  It is way more work than you would think.  

 

The more important issue is with teacher rentention.  They require teachers to get these nice college degrees in order to get their license, and then pay them almost half of what they could get in the private sector with that degree.  This is why we can’t keep any math teachers around for example.  The fact of the matter is that teachers have all the qualifications to go out and get much better paying jobs, which is why teaching has become a revolving door profession and why we have one of the worst teacher shortages we have ever had right now in this country...

Pretty much yeah. Like I said earlier, I'm a teacher as well but not in the US so I can't really speak from first-hand experience there, but there seems to be so many misconceptions and just plain ignorance regarding what teachers actually do in their jobs that I no longer wonder why there's so much misguided opposition to this.