Maybe you should stop. Let the system fail enough such that the pain that you're preventing will start to affect the people who can actually fix things. If you can't fix it, let the wheel squeak. You're not the parent or savior of those children, so don't allow your high levels of empathy and life choices to be exploited by bureacrats. They know exactly which buttons to push and how to manipulate the type of people teachers are.
Stop playing the game where you spend money to cover up incompetence or corruption. Don't be a reliable patsy. Some problems only get better if you force the ones responsible to fix it.
Use a classroom to audit their own supplies and needs, and see where money intended for education actually goes. The information should ask be public.
American teachers spend a lot of time, as my Asian mom would always complain, on “arts and crafts.” The volume of construction paper and pipe cleaners and other junk my kids bring home is truly astonishing.
These expenses are symptomatic of curricular problems—and the solution isn’t to allocate more money for craft supplies. It doesn’t cost that much to have kids drill their times tables.
Many teachers spend their money essentially replacing the role of 1) parents and 2) administrators.
I know a lot of teachers spending money on hygiene products:tampons, deodorant ect, because it is distracting if students are bleeding at their desks and smell like garbage.
2) they also spend money on basic supplies, pens pencils, as well as heaters and coolers for the room because the administration blew the funds on some bs like a marble facade for the school
Although I sympathize with the student's issues, it is not taxpayer's fault that these issues occur.
For (1) the government already gives housing assistance, food stamps and a bunch of other welfare programs, so the parents can easily afford basic hygiene products and they should be paying for it, not the school.
For (2) it is the administration's malice or incompetence that is burning away the money. We shouldn't increase the budget even more, we should hold the administration and the parents accountable.
I don't disagree, but this is the situation teachers are in. The parents should be buying the hygiene products, but aren't so teachers are trying to fill the gaps. It is a inefficient solution to a problem that should be addressed by someone else, but they are the ones that have to deal with it in order to do their regular job.
The comment you are replying to didn't even touch on "what are the appropriate ages to learn multiplication".
That level of discussion is really astonishingly low. You respond to something the parent comment didn't even touch on, and half of your comment is offenses to the parent commenter.
I think people may be traumatised by what happened to Perl or Cobol. They don't want to become obsolete. In reality what happened to Perl isn't the norm imo.
PHP is the more recent one. Folks who worked in PHP but got out at the right time look at all the low-paying PHP jobs (and there are lots of them!) and see mostly-PHP-experience job candidates dismissed out of hand for higher-paying jobs that would offer work experience outside PHP and think "there but for the grace of God, go I".
PHP has declined but its by no means a dead or dying tech. Pay should be good in the good companies (Slack? MessageBird? I am sure there are some big names I dont follow the PHP world that much).
What I am saying is that even declining tech can provide stable income for decades.
Perl is a different story though. I dont know if the Perl people can still get jobs writing Perl.
Oh no, it's not dying—there's a ton of PHP work out there—it's just that most of the PHP dev market is very stagnant, wage-wise, outside a handful of companies, in a way that most languages in wide use are not. There's also a real stigma that goes along with still being mostly a PHP person these days, I've noticed. (I was one, like... 9 or 10 years ago)
reply