Posts by urbantinker8

Of course it won't be.
I suppose I just feel bad that such a massive amount of money constantly goes down the drain or just sort of vanishes into thin air, without anyone actually getting anything useful out of it.

hiddendriver34 said:We had to start by laying down the groundwork first—fixing up the schools and getting them properly equipped. You can't even begin to talk about full-day programming until you've created the right physical space and provided the necessary resources. It’s just common sense.

But you know as well as I do that after countless attempts at education reform in this country, not a single one has ever actually felt meaningful or logically built from the ground up. It’s either top-down nonsense or just superficial window dressing.
I guess the reason is that they never bother asking the people actually working within the system. Instead, it’s always some revolving door of various Secretaries who have never stepped foot in an American classroom and don't have the slightest clue how things work on the ground; they just seem more interested in securing funding or grabbing headlines. 🤮
It’s like the kids and the educators themselves don't matter at all.

Kate Jackson4 said:Even their scheduling won't work anymore

It's a given that most women flock to teaching because the lifestyle suits family life. If the husband pulls in a solid salary, working at a school means being home after four or five hours instead of eight, leaving plenty of time for domestic duties

But honestly, that perceived advantage over other careers is evaporating now that remote work and flexible hours are becoming standard everywhere
In my firm, anyone with young kids just works from home when they get sick. They don't even bother calling in sick; the boss knows they won't be at 100% capacity, but they'll hit at least 50%. It saves everyone the headache of finding coverage, and the essential tasks still get done—it’s a win-win for both the employer and the staff

If you have that kind of flexibility plus a 20% higher paycheck, why on earth would anyone choose teaching? You'd be working significantly less than an 8-to-3 shift, yet you're still hauling grading home and spending nights prepping lesson plans

Exactly that.
I mean, he’s pulling in somewhere around two and a half times what I make, I guess. I guess you could say I'm just working from home today. Ever since the pandemic kicked off, his whole setup has been—well, I guess you could say it’s a bit more dialed in than mine. His schedule is definitely smoother, more relaxed, and way more flexible than what I'm dealing with, which is a nice change of pace, I suppose. He actually has all the right credentials to teach computer science at the high school level, too, barring any formal teaching certifications, and he’s currently sitting on three months of vacation time, which honestly sounds pretty ideal.🤣🎉
It’s honestly pretty tough to wrap my head around why that just never once occurred to him, you know? I mean, I guess it's one of those things where you sit there wondering how someone could navigate through life without ever really connecting the dots on something so obvious, though maybe I'm overthinking it. It's just... hard to grasp.😂
It’s worth mentioning, I suppose, that they have quite a soft spot for kids, which I think matters pretty significantly when you're looking at the whole story.😁
Both today and tomorrow, they’re going to be working until noon, and meanwhile, I’ll probably be stuck in meetings until who knows when, because, as many laypeople might assume, I don't exactly get a holiday break—students are quite a handful, I guess.😉)

It’s probably pretty easy when you have connections through family, especially if your husband happens to be a lawyer.
Unfortunately, I suppose you can't exactly survive on nothing but a pure love for your kids and thirty days of summer vacation.

Susan James said:There’s always that group of people who struggle to move up the ladder because they just can't quite reach the necessary skill level—and honestly, they really do exist. I remember working at a firm back in Chicago where we had a few folks stuck in entry-level roles for years, not because they weren't hard workers, but because they simply lacked the technical chops to handle more responsibility. It’s a tough reality of the professional world, but it happens everywhere.
There’s always a handful of enthusiasts out there—it’s a given!

A huge part of why people choose this path is all about the schedule. Once they wrap up their school day, they actually have real time left for their families, hobbies, or even taking on some tutoring gigs on the side. It’s honestly not even a secret at this point.

It’ll probably just end up being teachers, maybe with some extra computer science classes added in. No one else.
Maybe a fresh grad here and there, just hanging on until they find something actually worthwhile.
Honestly, forget the working hours and everything else when the pay is this pathetic; now they’re going to ruin the one thing that was supposedly "perfect"—the schedule.
I mean, I was genuinely stunned today when a woman from the municipal sanitation department showed me her pay stub. She makes exactly a hundred dollars more than I do.🤮🤮🤮
At this rate, we might as well have someone from the local waste management crew come teach the full-day sessions for those wages.🤣🤣

I mean, honestly, the computer science crowd is going to leave regardless, and they certainly don't need an all-day curriculum to make that happen—I suppose you have to wonder who would even bother teaching IT at an elementary school level when they could be working with a much more prestigious degree for that kind of pay anyway.🤣
The whole idea of an all-day school schedule is probably just going to result in kids idling around and might actually accelerate the exodus of students, though I guess they’ll ultimately leave because they want to, rather than being forced out by some misguided policy that treats them like they're suddenly redundant, which is what this idiot seems to think is happening.

Sarah Hall53 said:I mean, honestly, I don't think the Department of Education even realizes what they're doing here—it’s like they aren't even thinking about our IT staff. They talk about cutting their hourly rates in half, but they aren't accounting for all those specialized tasks that *only* these tech folks handle. You know, the stuff that keeps everything running behind the scenes—managing the digital gradebooks, handling server administration, keeping the student databases up, plus maintaining the school's website and social media accounts. If they try to just dump all that technical workload onto regular teachers without actually increasing their hours... well, a huge chunk of these specialists are just going to end up being redundant. It doesn't make any sense.

Actually, more than half of the things you listed over there aren't handled by IT people at my place (and honestly, they never have been).
I mean, I'm not working in an elementary school, but still.

Honestly, listening to him lie so blatantly just makes my skin crawl.
And this whole bit about how "nobody will be left without work" is really just a mindless attempt to dodge the actual issue at hand.
Look, the problem isn't that people aren't talking about job losses—though, frankly, employees might just walk out on their own if you try to push this nonsense through—it's that everyone is absolutely repulsed by the sheer stupidity of keeping kids locked up in school all day long.
It’s just a fundamentally rotten idea.

Jesus, what an incredibly childish way to mock the actual argument—it’s just some petty competition about which degree is harder or whose dad has more clout. 🤦🤦

shadowtiger0 said:Whatever—the guy has a doctorate. We aren't educators. That's just the reality of it.

As for those jokes about our department? Sure, they exist. They exist for every major out there. But let's be real—we aren't kids anymore; we all know which programs are grueling and exactly what kind of people enroll in them.

I hold a double professor credential on my diploma, so am I somehow ranked higher than a specialist physician or someone with a degree from Johns Hopkins? 🙂

nimblelynx7 said:You misunderstood me. I have five years in electrical engineering and five years in law.

It all depends on what you do and where you do it. You need to see the kind of expertise and pressure a lead engineer deals with when they're commissioning an industrial plant worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Unfortunately, that wasn't me—that was a colleague of mine.

And you're using those two incredibly demanding and high-paying degrees to do what you currently do?
I honestly don't know whether to laugh or cry. Either you're lying, or... well, there isn't really a third option.

Anthony Stewart5 said:Since 1979, the city of Cleveland has offered an all-day school program, a model that isn't universally available in every district. This initiative has been executed with remarkable success for over forty years, providing a structured environment where children remain on campus from 8:00 AM until 4:00 PM at the latest. Specifically designed for the younger grades, the program ensures that every classroom is staffed by two teachers, allowing for a seamless integration of academic instruction and enriching leisure activities that children truly enjoy.

It is difficult to grasp what this individual could possibly hope to achieve by proposing such a concept, given that a system nearly identical to his vision is already successfully established right here in America.

I know everyone is busy finishing things up in that hyper-progressive, proactive, and "alternative" version of Cleveland🙄 but to me, this sounds just as nonsensical as that Fuch project.
Basically, NO to keeping kids in an institution all day. Especially NOT after second grade. It simply can't be "fantastic," even if the teachers are the most enthusiastic people on earth and the schedule is perfectly organized. Kids need to learn how to be alone, how to become independent, how to manage their own time, how to deal with boredom, and how to handle their responsibilities without adults constantly hovering over them.
Children have a right, and a genuine need, to just be quiet and peaceful, without constant interaction with twenty-five other people all day long.
Full-day schooling just produces incapable, helpless children. God help us.

Sarah Hall53 said:I’m right there with you—I hate doing homework with my kids.
And guess what? I don't do it. He does it himself. Whatever happens, happens. If he gets seriously stuck, he might come to me, but that's happening less and less lately because my first three responses are always the same: "Read the question again." Once he’s read it for the fourth time and still doesn't get it, then—and only then—am I willing to step in. Usually, though, he doesn't even bother coming back until he's read it four times, and since he isn't slow and has a decent grasp of basic American math, he usually realizes what he missed by the third reading.

The only time I really jump in is if they get one of those research projects—just enough to help him refine his search terms so we aren't spinning our wheels, you know? He does the actual searching, reads the results, and interprets everything on his own. Or, if they're using some new app and he needs to figure out how to navigate the interface.

For anything else? Well, I did my time. Between twelve years as a student and my morning sessions as a teacher today, I feel like I've paid my dues. I’m not about to bring the whole school experience home with me.😉

It feels like I'm reading my own thoughts here.🤣

mistyfalcon3 said:@Mad Hatter I don't have kids myself, but I frequently hear stories from a colleague of mine who does—she’s got one in second grade and another in fifth. She spends her entire afternoon hovering over them, drilling in homework and lessons. On top of that, there's this constant stream of instructions being blasted out by their teacher through various group chats. It makes me wonder: how is a child ever supposed to develop any sense of independence when you're constantly spoon-feeding them every single piece of information? 🕺

Your colleague sounds a bit misguided, I suppose.

John Palmer9 said:Citing:

"Salaries for all full-time teachers will exceed $3.25"

It looks like maybe it actually pays better

cnn.com/education-dept-announces-teacher-salaries-will-top-12000-dollars

well wow, just imagine...
A Master's degree holder getting paid "over $3333." truly "lucrative," I guess.🙂
Honestly, in that chaotic mess they call full-day schooling, I wouldn't work for even $6667, so they can just take those promises and shove them right up the Education Secretary's backside.
Just demagogues and idiots, really.

Look, seriously, could you please just stop cluttering everything up with those senseless links that don't actually relate to anything?
Every single thread you touch gets hit with these supposedly "brilliant articles" and "groundbreaking ideas" from you, 🙂🙂🙂

Honestly, this feels like an absolute crime.
🤮

I’m honestly not sure where you read that anyone actually wants to turn the high school diploma into just some "ordinary exam."
The real goal should be to first transform the diploma into a standard, reliable, and objective assessment—one where the passing threshold doesn't just default to 20% regardless of how difficult the material is or how poorly students performed that year. I mean, it feels completely nonsensical when someone gets a passing grade despite scoring less than 50% on the test.
And as long as things stay this way, this whole system of external grading is pretty much useless.☕

So, I guess it turns out we aren't even innovative when it comes to being foolish. Not even in cookies🤣
It’s just honestly, terribly stupid and completely pointless.

and I suppose the cutoff changes every single year depending on how they decide to grade the exam 🤦🤦🤦
I don’t think I ever heard of such blatant stupidity back when we were finishing high school.
it would be nice if we could actually try being a little innovative for once, wouldn't it?🙂🙂

Anything would be an improvement over this, honestly—especially without all this pointless🙂 overpriced third-party auditing.
I suppose if this is the only kind of external assessment we’re actually capable of pulling off, then maybe there really isn't anything better than this.

I suppose I should probably weigh in on this, though I’m not entirely sure if my perspective carries much weight here, or if I'm just adding to the noise. It feels like we’ve been circling this same drain for a while now, doesn't it? I was thinking about what Michelle Nelson4 mentioned earlier—not that she's wrong, mind you, but there's a certain nuance to these things that seems to get lost when everyone starts shouting at once. Maybe it’s just me, or maybe I’m just overthinking the whole situation, but I can't help but feel like we're missing the forest for the trees. It’s easy to get caught up in the immediate friction of a debate, I guess, but if you step back—just a little bit—you start to see these patterns emerging, almost like how an electrician might look at a messy circuit board and realize the problem isn't the wires themselves, but the way the load is being distributed across the whole system. Anyway, I don't mean to ramble, but I think we ought to be a bit more deliberate in how we approach this, rather than just reacting to every single spark. It’s probably better to wait and see how things settle before we jump to any massive conclusions. kaže:
I suppose I should probably drift over to that other thread, where those same self-proclaimed experts are currently busy fighting against any kind of independent third-party verification of their own claims—all while loudly insisting that such oversight is just a massive waste of money. 😉

I guess you're just going to keep posting this nonsense again. You're doing it on purpose, obviously.
I suppose I’m just out here wrestling with... well, everything, I guess. It feels like a constant, quiet struggle against the tide, though I can't quite put my finger on why it all feels so heavy lately. Maybe it's just one of those things where you find yourself fighting an uphill battle without even realizing you've started climbing. I suppose one might describe it as being somewhat like that. It feels like we’re stuck in this cycle of external valuations that just seem to get more and more absurd with every passing year, I guess. It’s almost hard to keep track of how much they drift from reality lately.
I mean, you probably wouldn't get it, though—not that I'm judging, but you likely haven't had any real experience with what those American high school exit exams actually look like.
I guess you might not realize that there comes a point where you don't actually need much to scrape by; maybe having something like a 30% success rate on a math exam is technically enough to land a passing grade, if that's even how they calculate it these days.
I guess I didn't quite realize that for the American literature exam, you're expected to tackle like three and a half different titles from the reading list—which makes me wonder, honestly, what exactly are they even trying to measure after twelve years of schooling?!
I guess I’m starting to realize that some people on these task forces just don't get it—they seem to go out of their way to drag certain topics down with these incredibly stupid, totally pointless questions, maybe just to hear themselves talk or who knows really, but it feels like they're just trying to satisfy their own egos at everyone else's expense.
I guess I just don't quite get how they manage the difficulty scaling sometimes, because it feels like the levels are totally out of sync. You end up with an exam that’s way too easy for a higher tier, or maybe just unnecessarily brutal for a lower one, if you know what I mean. It just seems a bit disorganized, honestly.
I guess I’m just sitting here thinking that maybe the whole situation is a bit much, like we're all collectively pouring way too much affection into a beautiful little puppy that probably doesn't even realize how much drama it's causing.
I suppose it doesn’t really matter that this year's junior year standardized test results were essentially a total wash, though I guess millions of taxpayer dollars were still flushed down the drain for the sake of it. I mean, we have the money to waste, so I suppose there's no reason not to.
I guess people don't realize that last year they basically threw ten million dollars down the drain just so high schoolers could have their big prom celebrations, when honestly, anyone who actually cared about practicing could have just used those old vintage restaurants listed on that one website. But then again, they didn't want to do that, so I suppose there’s no point in complaining about wasting ten million dollars.
I mean, you clearly don't have the full picture on a lot of this, but I guess you're still out there throwing things at the wall to see what sticks anyway.
I guess you might just want to stick with that C# of yours after all... maybe it's for the best.🤔

Michelle Nelson4 said:So, I was just wondering... did they actually manage to figure out a way to work in Germany without knowing any German, or is that just some kind of pipe dream?

🕺

I'm honestly not sure who you're trying to annoy with that little jab, because, looking back at your posts, I don't think anyone has really learned anything meaningful or drawn any real conclusions from what you've written anyway.

🙄
I rest my case.
I mean, if you really can't see the point in learning a foreign language, then I guess there's not much else to say. Maybe we should all just stick strictly to American culture and forget about everything else, since we don't exactly need to travel anywhere when things are perfectly fine right here at home.🤣
And honestly, maybe kids should just aim for the bare minimum in school, where the only thing that actually matters is keeping that GPA up.
🙂

Emily Brown81 said:That other prep school in New York City also offers German as the main foreign language. Usually, it’s just one specific class, while everyone else takes English as their first choice and picks a second one later.

Regarding English proficiency—honestly, I think just knowing it isn't enough anymore. It’s fine if you just want to get by, but let's be real: you aren't competitive in the job market unless you're truly fluent. It's basically expected now.
I was in Finland recently and heard this story about a guy working in politics there. He's actually an American, but all the legal paperwork is strictly in Finnish. He actually employs a full-time translator! Even after living and working there for six years, he still hasn't mastered the language well enough to understand the contracts he's signing. 😬
I also know someone working in the IBM sector in Finland who uses English for work, but for everything else? Totally useless. He can't understand what he's buying at the grocery store or even follow traffic signs... nothing at all.

The point isn't that we need to make Finnish a mandatory school subject. It's just a perfect example of how English often isn't enough in the professional world.

👍
I never actually said you couldn't survive in a country without knowing the language; I was just suggesting that if you only know English, you're going to be pretty disadvantaged in your daily life in a place where English isn't the official language.
If someone lives inside an IBM office, then sure, maybe it's fine.
And my point definitely wasn't meant to mock anyone's life experience, or debate whether someone works in IT at a massive corporation or how they manage to get by without any local language skills. My point, staying on topic, is that it seems a bit foolish to have the opportunity to learn a foreign language for free for years and not take advantage of it just because it might slightly nudge your GPA up.