(December 12, 2010 at 6:52 pm)Dotard Wrote: I disagree based upon the interactions I've had with those in the profession.
Sure, I'd support merit based pay increases. But they would have to do something meritorious to receive it. Just showing up for work 205 days out of 365 wouldn't qualify.
I'm sure there are plenty of teachers that shouldn't be be teaching.
I've seen and I still hear about teachers like that all time time.
But it'd help to get good, quality teachers by making sure that the people who are capable and qualified actually want to teach and not choose a job that pays better for the equivelent amount of education. It should be competative and not something people only do because it makes them feel good inside to teach people things.
It's easy for teachers to burn out years later in their life given the enormous responsibility, far more enormous stress, and a pay rate that most people with a 4-year degree would laugh at.
Only working 205 days out of the year doesn't help in terms of overall pay either - many teachers have to struggle to figure out what they're going to do for all that time they're not at work.
This is not a healthy paradigm for one of the most necessary and important professions in a healthy industrialized socieity.
Money, of course, isn't the only part of this problem, but it is a very important aspect of it.
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers...
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
