Thomas K-thair wrote:Couple questions for uk.
How much of a raise should the teachers get ?
How big should the classes be ?
Who is going to pay for all of this ?
If you make an average wage.... say $30 an hour, so $2400 every 80 hrs, exactly how much of that should be given back to the govt in taxes ?
Do you think the average people in BC should be paying higher income taxes ?
You have a lot of strong opinions about this matter. Do you have any solutions about where the money will come from?
$2400 every two weeks ? That's an average wage you figure?
After deductions a first year teacher brings home about 2400 dollars a month. Not every two weeks.
How much do you think the person who other than yourself does the most to shape the quality of life for your children deserves?
I think it should be more than a Starbucks manager, and I think it should the most we can afford.
What does it say about the value we place on education if we pay more money To go work in the oil patch as unskilled labourers than we pay university graduates to teach our children?
How much tax should we all pay?
Well that's the multi million dollar question isn't it.
What's the old saying? "The rich won't pay, and the poor can't pay...
We need more middle class to cover all the bills it seems, since Topper's buddies will do anything to scive out of paying their share.
The best way to get middle class earning taxpayers, besides making everyone a welder and sending them up to the patch...?
Give em a decent and fulfilling education.
How big should classes be?
21 would be optimum, but a maximum of 25 with at least one or two TAs depending on particular learning disabilities.
One point I would like to try to explain better is the idea that class size is a fight between the government trying to keep costs down and teachers wanting less work and more dues for the BCTF
Maybe it is those things as well. I'm not claiming teachers are angels.
But thirty kid classes, seriously undermines even the most skilled and dedicated teacher's ability to do their jobs satisfactorily.
consider that a teacher has four classes a day of 30 kids teaching English.
Half of the class are not technically second language speakers, but can't string two sentences together without spelling errors, pronoun/verb disagreements and completely fucking up verb tenses.
The other half consist of 5 kids with actual learning disabilities and three abused kids whose parents should be in jail and who haven't eaten a proper meal in days,
As well as the standard class bully, class clown, class lawyer and in BC, class drug dealer or gang member.
That's 120 kids a day, whom as a part of their studies produce between 120-240 sheets of paper to be read and marked at least once a week. At an average of 15 minutes spent on each student's work (rarely enough time to hack through mistakes and to make corrections so they learn from them) That's 30 - 60 hours a week just by itself.
Add on the 16 hours prep and 16 hours class time, that's 62 hours a week, toss in staff meetings, lunch and break duties, coaching and other sundry time killers and a 40 hour work week becomes a joke very quickly.
All of which sucks to be me.
I know, I know, I chose this career and it's still better than welding pipe all day long in a little shack with faggity oiler fans I admit.
But the bigger issue by far is when does the individual child get time with me to work on his or her personal issues??
If I see a kid suffering and needing a sober adult in his life to make a phone call or spend the time to make a referral or do the paperwork because the girl crying in front of you is pregnant is going to give birth in three months and hasn't got a clue about how to fill out the forms to get help with the enormity of the life changed she is about to face.
Class size is more than just a number to be manipulated by either the government or the union.
It goes right to the heart of whether we are providing a quality level of service to the children... Your children and mine.
Mr "I am alright jack" Topper, doesn't seem to have sympathy for people with challenges he has never faced. So he wants to downplay learning difficulties as whining,
unfortunately there are no such thing as "man up pills" to solve real issues.
When we were kids in highschool in the seventies know one had a clue about terms like ADHD, Autism/ Aspergers...
Nor did anyone even realise that there was a diagnostic scale for autism that all of us are on.
Most of us on one end close to normal brain function and nearly complete brain dysfunction and Aspergers at the other end.
In the seventies know one knew that people cannot learn with traditional teacher methods not because they were stoners and losers because their brains are wired differently.
In the seventies there was this thing called a drop out rate. You don't hear about that in 2014 because we have this miracle called MRI that allows to map brain function so we can prove all of this and take steps to adjust and account for it all...
You ask where is the money coming from?
That's a good question but an unfair one to ask anyone but the Premier that's her job! I don't have access to the books. I don't know where money is being spent that should be spent on education.
Where did the money come from for BC place or the Olympics? Or the sea to sky highway that topper's buddies use ?
Lol I see that dickhead, fassbender is trying to use the same tactic in the media...
I can't answer those questions
But..
I can tell you how they "solved " it in the UK. They track students by learning ability and performance They separate the good kids, the middle ones and the challenged ones into bands A, B and C.
They then spend the money and resources on the good kids and almost nothing on the dummies.
With no collective bargaining, the best teachers get perk filled contracts to teach the top banded classes and the rookie up and coming teachers get the middle bands.
The bottom bands are stuck with whoever they can find. Which is usually no one, and is why London recruiting agencies regularly haunt Canadian universities to find recently graduated teachers to go and fill those vacancies for minimum wages desperate teachers (hi isle nuck
) teaching desperate kids..
As a parent, we all make the assumption that our kids are headed to better things in life. Good jobs, healthy families, learning institutions like colleges and universities...
The institutions most band C kids are headed to are prisons. Hospitals, and welfare lines...