Without wishing to come across as an a**hole here…aren’t long hours sort of inherent to teaching? Obviously there are going to be ways we as society can make teaching a more enjoyable profession, but how do you go about shortening the work day when you’ve got the school day followed by marking and lesson planning on top?
By giving time DURING the school day to get the job done, and minimizing red tape. One major problem is that the larger and more heterogenous classes get, the more grading and planning work piles up, and the harder it is to help individuals during class with one-on-one attention. So the teacher ends up using their grading, planning, and lunch time to meet with those students later, and takes all that paperwork home. Administration piles even more kids into the class, saying, “You’re not overworked: it was your CHOICE to teach through your break,” because they know full well that anyone who chose this profession is going to have a hard time drawing that line when they know there are struggling kids who need the help.
One simple way is to schedule enough teachers so they have time for documentation, planning, follow-ups and grading during school hours.
That might mean every teacher gets only 2 teaching hours/day to have time to do the rest, could also mean they get support with documentation, follow-ups and similar, through other functions.
Of course they did. Without a skilled principal, teaching during the pandemic was chaos. No real attendance rules, no fair way to calculate grades, tons of extra work. Maybe veterans could manage, but early to mid career workers were just there on the edge of bailing.
I’m not really understanding this comment. Teaching during the pandemic was chaotic, yes. I don’t think a skilled or unskilled principal made the difference for a lot of people (besides some mental support and I’m assuming you’re referring to the position of principal). There were attendance rules for the districts around my area, grades were calculated regularly like before (not sure what you mean by “fair”), and the curriculum was maintained the same so I’m not sure where the ton of extra work was coming from.
This is all anecdotal from my perspective so if you had a school district that failed to properly follow protocol I apologize and sympathize with the situation you were in. I think most of the problem was how we transitioned with such a drastic change. Resources weren’t properly reinvested, proper training support for educators wasn’t given, and the students weren’t prepared in a meaningful way for the shift.
In this day and age of online training though, for future employment, it could’ve been something that better situated students to handle obstacles they may encounter in the future (what school is suppose to prepare us for). Just looking at the stats for online education show more than 1/4 of all students are engaged in a form of distant learning. This is going to be something that only increases over time so we should be better prepared as a society to be flexible with transitions like WFH, etc. (sourcesource)
I’ve spoken with hundreds of students and dozens of teachers from many schools. So this is anecdotal based on interviews…
School district policies were reactionary in large part. Some schools were all paper based. Some were all digital. Some students didn’t have reliable internet. And it took months to get anything figured out, because in many situations the bosses had no idea what to do. However, schools with leadership who could take assertive steps to say “this is our path for the next six months” tended to be less stressful working environments.
Now, what about attendance. Again it depended on the district. Still does. Most schools classify infectious disease absences as uncounted absences, which don’t show up on the transcript. But what about edge cases? If a parent is worried about infection, then what? If a sibling has a fever but doesn’t get tested, then what? If a student is absent but only on quiz or test days, do you fail them for those quizzes and tests, even though the reason given would ordinarily let them retake the quiz or test, or not have it included in the grade? … And absence count might matter for university, or maybe not, but we didn’t know back then so we had to assume it did. And what if a student misses all the term tests? Can you give them a grade at all? … These questions could be answered by the department, school administration, or district. And yet at many places they were often left up to individual teachers. In any case, there is no clear notion of “fair” if you consider all the edge cases.
Overwork is even easier to see. Teachers had to get students to fill out health forms, and collect them, and maybe call parents who didn’t. Teachers were running thermal image cameras, and disinfecting things. In many districts, lessons were hybrid, and teachers were running all the tech for that. I could go on, but this should be enough to explain the general situation that thousands of teachers faced.
In other words, please talk to other teachers in other school districts in Japan. :-)
I’ll have to take your word on the interviews, I’m open to other perspectives which is why I initiated this dialogue with stating my confusion. I’m still not seeing the connections that I initially confronted. As you stated, the questions are usually answered and administered from top-down (department, district, then principal). I’m not sure on what effectiveness a “skilled” principal could have when the district is not prepared, though I could see a case for an unskilled principal not instituting/following change as instructed.
All of the questions you’ve brought up are valid whether there is a pandemic or not (which is why I specified your pandemic remark). When considering any fairness, edge cases will always be problems that need to be addressed. I agree the situation of overworking was exacerbated during the pandemic but existed long before that as funding and support systems have been slowly dwindled away.
I’m not sure on what the crux of this debate is but I feel like the light has been shifted from “education responsibility” to “pandemic bad/we need X”. I believe education has been getting the short straw for decades and the pandemic was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. A decent principal or administration assessing the health scenarios you presented would not fix the broken system. Schools being all paper based, the overworking of staff, students lack of reliable internet, not having a pre-pandemic plan ready (it’s been known for a long time that it was a problem to arise soon), all of these are problems that needed to be addressed a long time ago. Most early education schools only have one I.T. person and usually doubles their role in another form (teaching classes as well).
I feel like teaching is chaotic as a whole regardless of the situation society faces. Hearing about how the pandemic was the root cause of the problem just sounds disingenuous and completely glosses over the need for distant education to be an effective tool for future students. Teachers should be available to help explain and instruct how to fill out health forms, just like tax forms and other important documentation that should be covered at some point in a students career. Classes should be hybrid, teachers should be familiar and take supplemental training for the new tech they are using. All of this should be countered with support so nothing is “added on” to the workload. Again, these aren’t problems that were cleared up when the pandemic restrictions were lifted. Plenty of teachers are still on the edge of bailing as the system continues to decline.
Call me edgy McEdgelord. Admire my 2048 layer katana that’s been hand-made by some machine in a Chinese factory with japanese steel and no information about the type of steel used.
You know what's crazy? If you hadn't posted this, I would've had no idea at all that you were such a piece of shit. But now that's literally the only thing I know about you.
Unfortunately, meme communities are where ironically terrible people and actual terrible people mingle and pretend that everyone else is in the same group they are.
Here's a hint: ironically terrible people are just regular terrible people (perhaps with an added unjustifiably inflated sense of superiority) once they publicly spew their terribleness.
There are several countries where I've heard of this being a problem, but I've never heard this about Australia. Care to share some resources about what you're referring to?
It’s been a major, major issue reported on by news organizations all over the world, and acknowledged as a huge problem by the Australian government as well…
Just because I'm not aware of it also doesn't make the original post from False any less unexpected, I acknowledge my own ignorance but the point still stands. If it becomes known enough world-wide that Australia does indeed have a rampant SA problem that it become associated with the country as part of it's "culture", then it won't be any weirder to so a "Sigh, Australia..." when an article comes up talking about it.
Literally no one is doing that. There was no excuses or apologies made for sexual assault taking place in other places. There was no "minimizing" the fact that it happens elsewhere. You are perceiving a slight from nothing, or at best a short post of exasperation that it happened again.
As I mentioned somewhere up the thread, I’m not talking about you personally. I’m talking about the lack of societal acknowledgement and awareness regarding the issue. When 63% of women working in the Australian parliament report being sexually harassed as I linked above, and there are years of newspaper articles from all over the world regarding it yet there’s no societal awareness of the problem something has to change.
I’m not talking about you personally of course. I’m sure that you are against rape culture that is prevalent in Australia, Japan, and much of the world over.
This is exactly why everyone thinks you hexbears Lenin apologists are obnoxious. You made a specious argument which seems intended to pull a third nation into a completely unrelated story for no reason and then aggressively argue about it when people call you out. Take the L and try to contribute something other than rage for a bit.
I think the point he was making is it’s never good to assume the whole country is like this when it’s individuals doing it, and I have to say I agree. That’s the kind of reasoning that led to people attacking Russian-American businesses and homes when the Ukraine invasion started
Ahhh, that sucks to hear. It seemed like such a nice place while there, but I guess that's benefits of tourism. All of the cool parts, not around long enough for the bad :(
I mean, the vast majority of people here are not committing sexual assault. There is certainly work to be done with the justice system regarding reporting and prosecuting crimes, but it's not like Japan or Osaka or Tokyo just condone SA.
Societies today are extremely large, which means it doesn’t matter if a majority does something or not, if a per mille does it’s a massive, society-defining problem.
Lack of effort to stop sexual assault in Japan is well documented. Victim blaming is common. This is a systemic problem, and if you didn’t know, then now you do.
Yes, it’s like that in much of the world. Australian laws until recently silenced SA survivors for example as I linked down below. It’s good that you’re learning about it and engaging with it. Rape culture must be stopped world over.
This is specifically for train groping, for one, and literally has a whole section on what they are doing about it. I specifically wanted to know what was being cited here:
Lack of effort to stop sexual assault in Japan is well documented.
I specifically was asking for documentation about "Lack of effort to stop sexual assault in Japan is well documented". The article provided mentions the efforts they are making.
I suppose you could do a basic web search. Meh.
You make the claim, you provide the evidence.
The actual reason I ask is that, if this specific sort of thing exists, it would be good to specifically target and fight it.
They have women only passenger trains on the subway because they need to not because they want to. Those don’t exist in most western countries that I know of.
Lmfao, as if rape and sexual assault don't happen literally everywhere on earth there are men.
But hey, if you single out Japan, that means you can avoid acknowledging the misogyny in your own country/culture right? What a neat and not at all obvious trick that is...
Coffee is going to become increasingly rare in the coming years. It won't go away completely, but the places that can actually grow it will shift, and a coffee tree takes years of cultivation before it becomes productive. 3-5 years to get your first beans, and then another couple years for full production from that tree.
And as the climate shifts and environments collapse, you'll have to either grow in a greenhouse, which greatly limits supply, or you'll need to be planting new trees in colder areas in the hopes that you'll have a productive run as the Earth warms.
Eh; I can trigger 429 errors that log me out of the service by just keeping the page open. I’m not sure of anyone is supposed to keep using the service for free in any official capacity.
Makes sense, a bunch of stuff on twitter is broken. We’ve had embedded twitter feeds (most recent 2 or 3 posts) on our work websites for years and they broke that functionality in June. I guess they didn’t want the extra traffic from website embeds?
japantimes.co.jp
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