https://twitter.com/ZacBissonnette/status/1678423647415828482?t=O7DvbNeIGhD_S2AjNVPQnQ&s=19
DEI can go suck on a monkey toe but anybody who uses unpaid labor is a mega dick. That some desperate idiots agree to be exploited doesn’t make it less of a dick move.
Yes, they “freely choose” to work without pay. Just like we can freely choose always to pay people for working.
A major part of getting a teaching credential is doing four months of unpaid student teaching in a school. (Essentially, you agree to be an intern.) In this case, we are not even talking about something you might do to improve your resume. This is something you have to do if you want to be able to legally teach in the majority of schools. I do wonder about the percentage of underprivileged people who are kept out of the profession simply because they cannot go 4 months without a paycheck.
In my program, students do practice teaching as part of their degree work. But outside of getting a degree, I agree it’s unfair and ridiculous.
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I put in a required number of hours volunteering at the local ARC daycare as part of my dev psych course. Granted, it was 1 day a week and didn’t interfere with my regular paying job. I enjoyed it. I didn’t know enough, or have adequate training to be truly useful– no point in them paying me. The ladies in charge basically assigned me to their most problematic/violent kid (he was four, just had to keep him from shoving other kids and taking their toys), which kept him out of their hair so they could deal with the rest of the kids. Win-win. By the end of the semester, I had got him to actually wait his turn to go down the slide instead of pushing other kids off the stairs! Progress!
Still… student teaching. It’s part of the degree. My mother (retired teacher) maintains that you don’t learn anything useful about teaching in the curricula of the masters’ program, just the most recent education fads that won’t survive contact with actual children– absolutely everything useful you learn during that degree is in the student teaching portion.
Maybe we should simply abolish teacher colleges and award teaching certificates upon passing a comprehensive test (general knowledge plus relevant regulations like mandatory reporting etc) and completing an apprenticeship. Paid? Unpaid? If it takes the place of a $$ masters’ degree program, probably doesn’t matter– people could still work nights and weekends if they need to.
Our teacher education program lost 60% of its students after dramatically increasing the number of pedagogy courses and decreasing the number of discipline courses. So now they realized that they are being stupid (and students are smart) and cutting the 40 credits for education courses by half. I’m really happy. I completely agree with you that you can’t learn to teach in the classroom. You learn to teach by teaching. Our students need to learn Spanish and then just go and teach.
I agree. If I were put in charge of a credentialing system for teachers, it would consist of two years as a paid assistant teacher supplemented with meetings to discuss practical methodology. As a theory person, I do find pedagogy to be interesting but I am skeptical of its actual benefit to teachers. At best, people might come to analyze what they do in terms of theory but they are not going to be able to actualize theory to practices they are not already engaged in.
If I want to learn to do something but have no skill in it at all, why should I be paid to learn it?
My kid is interested in fixing cars. I think it would be cool if the kid hung out with a mechanic and helped him and got a chance to learn. It would be silly to require the mechanic to pay someone for this.
Maybe we are talking about different things?
I do think people have difficulty entering certain fields unless they have independent income due to low or no pay. Publishing is one.
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“If I want to learn to do something but have no skill in it at all, why should I be paid to learn it?”
That’s the same reasoning that companies use to avoid training employees and when they can charge employees to work for them (this was a trend a few years ago to make interns pay for the privilege of not being paid).
“it would be cool if the kid hung out with a mechanic and helped him and got a chance to learn”
If he’s getting value, then your kid (that is… you) should be paying the mechanic.
If every relationship is to be only a dry economic transaction then every relationship has to involve an exchange of money.
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Who says every relationship is an economic transaction? Obviously people join businesses for economic reasons. They can join charities or non profits if they have other priorities.
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“Who says every relationship is an economic transaction? ”
That is, as far as I can tell, one of the core tenants of neoliberalism… that every human relationsip possible should be monetized. I think that’s one of the reasons they’re pushing the idea of ‘trаns kids’ so much… it’s another way to turn parenting into an exercise in spending. Similarly ‘drаg kids’ turn children into sехualized economic agents… neoliberalism doesn’t have any kind of moral core it’s all about monetization, period so a kid gyrating as adults throw money is as legitimate as anything else….
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You should see these creeps discussing marriage. (barf)
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On the other hand, in professions that still use an apprenticeship model, such as plumbing and electrical… I’m pretty sure apprentices do get paid. Just not as much as fully licensed pros. There’s at least some $$ value in those trades, to having a younger set of legs around to do your gruntwork for you.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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