It's worth pointing out that wages in the US are vast compared to other developed countries, though, too. We outspend OECD by 35-40%, but our average national wage is also higher than OECD by 35-40%.
Labor compensation in the U.S. is also extremely unequal, which pulls the average up in a way that isn't very informative as to this particular issue. The average starving PhD would be a much better and more knowledgeable teacher to high school students in the subject she took her PhD in, than the typical high school teacher with nothing more than an Education credential. Are you sure that you need to pay such high wages to existing teachers?
>The average starving PhD would be a much better and more knowledgeable teacher to high school students in the subject she took her PhD in
i dont think this is true.
there is an art to educating (especially the ~10-15 year old range) that does not just manifest itself because you are smart: how to engage students, how to keep them engaged, how to adjust the message to the audience's level and communicate it effectively (which changes kid to kid), how to earn a kids respect without becoming over-bearing (or too friendly), and dozens of other things that your PhD in compsci or whatever does not teach you.
some of the smartest PhD holders i know would be very shitty elementary/high school teachers.
(context: i teach at the college level. its a lot easier than teaching at the high school level.)
Yeah there's some truth to this - I find that my Ed students don't always have sophisticated understandings of their content area (though honestly I find that ENGR and BIOL students don't, either). But they do get more content area teaching than in ED.
ED as a field is 100% all-in on AI, too, so there's a lot of discussion amongst them about what skills in the field need to be automated and what has to stay artisanal. But I'm sympathetic to zozbot's claims too - I do think the reading scores would be higher if there were more comp/rhet specialists in sec. ed.
~10-13 mostly comprises the junior high range. By the time the kids are 14, they're plenty old enough to benefit from a "college-prep" educational approach. Sure, some PhDs will be better, others will be worse. But you solve that by throwing out terrible teachers and rewarding the best ones. There's no guarantee that an Education-credentialed teacher with negligible education in the actual subject they're supposed to teach would be any better.
I'm retired from engineering. I did startups / exited / joined difficult technical domains for the funsies / etc.
I have taught 5 years at a private school. I do not have a teaching credential.
Knowing the stuff you're teaching is the easiest part. And I say that despite teaching in an environment with far better behavior, student buy-in, family support, and academic accomplishment than most places.
I thought that when I launched a student team doing spacecraft design (selected for orbital flight on the basis of the quality of their mission, btw, not their age) that the hard part would be teaching kids about power budgets, radiation aging, and the thermal environment.
Turns out the hard part is helping them figure out how to navigate the social dynamics of talking to each other, organizing their work, realizing what other people know, and coping emotionally with setbacks. Kids will teach themselves the stuff if you have buy-in and the culture in the room is right.
Yes to this! What makes a great teacher is the willingness to hold kids accountable for their behavior and their work. Sure, it helps to be a subject expert, but that won't matter if you can't manage your classroom.
And parents play an equally important role. One of the best things you can do for your child's education/life is support the teacher when they call you up and say, "Your child is making poor decisions..."
> Sure, it helps to be a subject expert, but that won't matter if you can't manage your classroom.
I've known plenty of highly credentialed teachers that were very poor communicators and/or could not manage their classroom. I think the idea that this can be, or is, effectively taught as part of the "education major" is very suspect.
Indeed, the worst-performing school districts are precisely those where "classroom management" is a serious problem, versus better districts where the children come to school ready to be managed. It seems older styles of classroom management now out of vogue and untaught by universities were more effective.
Here in my state teachers in good districts start at $60,000 per year and see minimal increases due to length of service; after 20 years they might be making $75,000 per year. You ever done the math on living on $60k per year? Hard to do a lot besides support youself on that income. I note that surrounding states (even higher cost states) have lower salaries.
It depends a lot on the state. Some actually do pay alright. Some pay terribly (and may have serious issues finding enough staff, as a result).
Unions are similar. People cry about them being a huge problem, but they have effectively no power (as in: don't even collectively bargain for contracts) in lots of states, including many of the ones with poor school performance. In other states, they really do have quite a bit of power.
In states with lower teacher pay, most teachers without a much-higher-paid spouse take summer jobs or teach summer school. Also, none of them get as much time off in the summer as the kids do. Plus, you can't pay your mortgage with vacation days.
Given the (often ongoing) educational requirements, if you pro-rate it you still come out much below most positions with similar requirements. We absolutely under-pay teachers in virtually every public school.
My mother retired after working her entire career as a teacher, and I earned close to double her final salary my first year working in tech. She has her masters degree and I did not graduate college. And if you count the stocks I got at the end of that first year, it was over triple.
She was a special ed. teacher teaching emotionally disabled grade schoolers (including a first grader that tried to kill his grandmother with a tv power cord). There is no way that I worked harder than she did.
You sure they're not on 20 pay contracts? Everybody tells me "it must be so nice, getting summers off" and I'm like "actually I look for summer courses because I don't get paid."
Here average teacher salary is over $100k. Projected to be $120k by 2027 due to their new union contract.
Newbie teachers start around $70k last I checked, and hit six figures in 5-6 years.
This is roughly double median salaries.
That said, I think they earn every bit of it even with "summers off" and their relatively lucrative benefit packages. The work environment is utter shit. Basically zero ability to manage a classroom and get rid of any shitheads - with very little supportive parenting or administration having your back. Even if salaries were $500k/yr I wouldn't remotely consider taking such a job.
Pay itself though? Not an issue for one of the worst performing major urban school districts in the nation.
I'm planning on transitioning into teaching due to not being employable (apparently) in tech anymore. It's about the only career I can transition into. I wish I could make six-figures!
Move to Chicago and get a job in CPS - you'll be at ~$100k in 5-6 years!
The idea of it actually sounds initially fun to me, until I talk to friends who actually work those jobs. For my temperament I know better. At best I'd rage quit, at worst I'd end up in prison.
PhD holders are, on average, not starving. Some of them could make good primary/secondary school teachers, but knowing how to teach children effectively is a skill by itself. It's quite different from working as a college instructor. That's why earning an teaching credential is important (although the quality of some teacher training programs is terrible).
LaLiga isn't Cloudflare's customer. They have no relationship. So why would Cloudflare rework their infrastructure just to instrument rapid blocking at their own expense as a favor to LaLiga? And if they don't, ISPs just break the Internet for each soccer match? This is a kind of coercion that makes no sense. Cloudflare has no obligation like this to LaLiga (and neither would a Spanish domestic CDN!).
Cloudflare has not in fact refused to comply with any court orders! The very thing at issue is that LaLiga wants Cloudflare to do censorship on their behalf that Cloudflare, who has no contractual relationship with LaLiga, is not required to do by any legal framework in Spain or the US.
Cloudflare literally wasn't even a party to the ruling by which LaLiga has been compelling Spanish ISPs to do the IP-level blocking. They're just an affected third-party because the blocking scheme the courts have allowed LaLiga to impose on ISPs is on a per-IP basis.
Spain hasn't asked Cloudflare to do anything. Only LaLiga has acted like Cloudflare owes them a huge, expensive rework of their CDN's architecture for the purpose of censoring things for LaLiga purely as a favor to LaLiga. What LaLiga has over Cloudflare isn't a court order. It's a protection racket, or maybe a hostage situation, where court orders involving other parties are the gun held to the hostage's head.
> Cloudflare has not in fact refused to comply with any court orders!
Nor did I say they did.
The question was asked, "why would they [without an explicit order]" The answer is they probably shouldn't, but there's still an obvious incentive here.
I'm not sure why it shouldn't be cloudflare job to make sure they don't host illegal content. If my super market keeps distributing illegal goods, even if they remove it after a court order, they will end up having to close the whole market.
Either they should police the content they serve themselves or they accept the right holders to do it (which sucks for everyone).
Also they certainly willing take all their customers as hostage, as they could certainly split their network into legitimate customers and shaddy ones so the blocking is not so impactful, but I guess they prefer to make it as impactful as possible to be able to complain.
Anyone can report illegal content on Cloudflare and Cloudflare will remove it. The pirate streaming sites pop up only in or just before the first few moments of the game, and LaLiga insists they must be removed instantly in order to prevent their losses. So what they actually want is preemptive removal without meaningful human review or anything else that could take 10 minutes.
That involves more than being responsive when someone reports abusive content or dropping bad customers. That requires becoming a censorship machine that preemptively treats all new customers as criminals, and probably having some unaccountable AI drive the censorship process. (That latter seems to be what LaLiga is pushing Fastly to do.)
That's beyond the legal obligations of infrastructure platforms, bad for the reliability of their service, and just a slice of what they'd have to do to rework their architecture to support this kind of preemptive censorship.
> ” what they actually want is preemptive removal without meaningful human review or anything else that could take 10 minutes.”
Yet this would actually be a better solution for everyone (except the pirates).
10 minutes seems like a reasonable response time that would allow a chance for human review. No football fan wants to have their viewing interrupted because they used a dodgy pirate site to watch it. Currently, pirates can simply use a VPN to get around the IP-level block while the huge collateral damage affects legitimate Cloudflare users.
The runway is going to be your time and attention span, not $10/mo.
I don't know what you value your time or opportunity cost as... but the $10/mo doesn't need to save very many minutes of your time deferring dealing with a resource constraint or add too much reliability to pay off.
If resource limitations end up upsetting one end user, that costs more than $10.
This is a legally tricky minefield. Depending on what is in summary, it -may- be subject to copyright but be protected as fair use... but a work being unpublished weighs against (but does not preclude) free use.
I could see an argument that it is a trade secret, too-- which could be used to oppose downstream dissemination.
I think it'd pretty much have to be a script, a screenshot, audio, or video to qualify as copyright infringement. I can tell you what a song is about without risk of violating copyright, but the moment I start quoting lyrics things get riskier.
I think it depends on the depth of the summary, and the purpose. You can do quite an indepth analysis as part of educational material for example, which is one of the tests of fair use.
I think a key thing to remember when assessing your own liability is fair use is a defense, not an automatic guaranteed right for blanket uses.
Leaking spoilers of unpublished works can definitely cause market harm, and serves no wider good for the market the same way educational material would.
I wouldn't like to be on the receiving side of this lawsuit. At the very least it's going to be expensive to defend against.
That's the rub. When it comes to copyright, money makes right. The one with more money and willingness to go to court will win. Not who is actually legally right.
That's not just copyright, it's our entire legal system. A corporation can intentionally murder hundreds of thousands of people and get nothing but a slap on the wrist fine.
I think you're missing the point of the person you're replying to.
It's really easy to end up with procedural machinery that makes it unpleasant for other entities that you don't like.
It seems to get the things that you do like and value less often. Why? Because you think about the consequences to what you consider important and you're inclined to ignore potential consequences to those you oppose or are competing with.
The Vogons weren't necessarily overtly malicious when they obliterated Earth.
We already mine landfills -- mostly for land reclamation but sometimes to recover resources.
In the longer run, when there's been more compaction, settling, and densification (and changes in what things are valuable), and more need to reclaim land that was previously landfilled, we will do this more.
Example: Shoreline Amphitheater, near Google HQ in Mountain View. Built on top of a landfill. For a while in the 80s, there were occasionally small fires during shows when people lit cigarettes. Google also harvested the methane and used it to power some stuff, although I can't find an authoritative article with details.
Several schools I know of have part of their playing fields on reclaimed land that's former landfill. You can't build on it because you have no idea what sort of gases and possibly toxins will work their way up from below, but wide open fields with free air movement that aren't round-the-clock occupied are fine. The only downside is that for an initial period you need to re-cap places with soil every few years as the fill underneath settles. There was one place where they'd paved over it rather than leaving it as soil to create tennis courts and after a few years it was a sort of dune landscape since they couldn't backfill the dips with soil. It was quite picturesque actually, a sort of post-apocalyptic look with miniature ponds with reeds growing in them and occasional visits from ducks. Sure, they'd lose a kid in one from time to time, but being a large school they didn't have a shortage of those.
when I first saw it in the 1990s it was kinda on the outs, like K-Mart was already failing (as a business) and the parking lot was visibly wavy because of subsidence. Funny the New York Pizzeria mentioned in that article is run by my relatives.
Indeed, sometimes big things. The landfill we used when I was growing up is now beneath a Home Depot, which was built over the top of it almost 25 years ago. The landfill in this case was unlined, too.
Yup. It is a little undesirable for various reasons, and not every landfill is suitable for construction on top (seismics, sealing/capping technique, materials, etc).
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