Ask News.YC: Teach for America?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=113901

by trekker7 • 18 years ago

8 16 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Don't know if this is appropriate for Hacker News. But I'm guessing some of you are in college and thinking about what you're going to do 9 to 5 after you graduate, if you don't go IPO before school ends.

Anyone have experience with Teach for America (www.teachforamerica.org)? Any thoughts about the organization?

yummyfajitas2• 18 years ago

If you are a hacker (you are posting to hacker news), I suggest you avoid it.

I don't know anything about Teach For America specifically, but several people in my graduate program did work for a variant of it (local and math focused). None of them were happy with the program, though several stuck with it for financial reasons. One of them was put in charge of statistical analysis, since he was the only person in the room who knew what a standard deviation was (I'm not exaggerating). His conclusions:

1. Except for the grossly incompetent, teacher quality doesn't matter. He could not reject the null hypothesis (teacher quality doesn't affect student outcome).

2. Students do not benefit from being in the program, unless it removes them from a dangerous school. He couldn't reject the null hypothesis here either (accepted students perform the same as rejected ones). (This fact is usually well hidden: students accepted by special teaching programs as well as students who apply but are rejected usually perform better than students who do not apply.)

According to him, other programs usually get similar results (well hidden in the appendix of a report), at least when the results are reported.

Overall, he said it is a waste for a talented individual to go into teaching. You won't make a difference. As a software person, you will.

Leave teaching to people who can't do anything else. They have a comparative advantage (even if they lack an absolute advantage).

pchristensen• 18 years ago

Ouch. This is sort of the conclusion I came to by observation (and my mom is an excellent teacher). But I guess it's better to know and not like the answer than just bury your head in the sand for the sake of ideology.

teach2• 18 years ago

[Disclaimer: I've been teaching computer science at the high school level for nearly eleven years now. My B.S. is in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin, and I set the curve in some of my courses.]

I hesitate to disparage the analysis of an anecdotal person I've never met, but I disagree with the claim that statistically teacher quality doesn't affect student outcome.

The current leading meta-statistical analysis of teachers and teaching methods and their effect on student learning is "Classroom Instruction that Works", by Marzano, et al. They have statistics on good teacher/bad school, good teacher/good school, bad teacher/good school and bad teacher/bad school and the effect on student performance. The average effect size when comparing multiple studies shows that good teachers do make a significant and measurable difference in student achievement.

I think leaving teaching to "people who can't do anything else" is a cop-out. I've taught the basics of programming to over 1000 students in my career thus far. I know of at least a dozen who now do it for a living, including some who say that a career in programming never crossed their mind before taking my class. Do you think I've had a net positive effect on the industry? I can write a lot of code, but teaching others to code eventually produces more. "Teach a man to fish" and all that.

I do agree with Prrometheus below that a lot of public education is "an inflexible, pathological bureaucracy."

I also agree that if you don't enjoy working with young people, don't bother. Further, if you can't set healthy boundaries, you'll eventually get burned out. Also, if you're a hacker at heart, you'll need to keep coding somehow, or you'll go mad.

Of course, I don't know anything about Teach for America either, but I do know that I really enjoy teaching, and I'm glad I went that route rather than industry or starting something of my own.

Just my two cents.

yummyfajitas2• 18 years ago

Well, keep in mind what I'm describing is one special program in math. Also, everything I know I heard over beers, while complaining about our advisors.

Regarding teacher quality, he found the best fit was a failure model. Most teachers perform adequately, and these teachers are statistically indistinguishable. Some teachers fail, with varying degrees of failure.

Basically, think hard drives. Most work, and these are all the same. Some fail, with varying degrees of data loss.

If the sample in the study you mention comes from the partially failing region, they could easily find an increasing relation. Or possibly this program was special, that I don't know.

However, I do stand by my statement to leave teaching to those who aren't great at other things. That's just basic comparative advantage.

You are comparing your students with you as a teacher to your students with no teacher. The proper comparison is "you program, joe blub teaches" vs "you teach, joe blub programs." If joe blub teaches almost as well as you, but you program much better than him, then it's far better if you leave the teaching to him.

Of course, if you enjoy teaching, you certainly are not obligated to do the most economically efficient job. I'm certainly not (postdoc in math here).

aston• 18 years ago

This is devastating stuff, if true. How large were the student and teacher sample sizes?

geebee2• 18 years ago

My brother did this - taught French in a Louisiana middle school for two years after college. However, he was a humanities major who went on to a PhD program afterwards; aside from a bit of stats in R, he doesn't do any hacking.

It was a good experience for him, and it is an admirable thing to take on. He said that it was largely crowd control, and a little bit of teaching. The schools that serve low income people in Louisiana are in pretty grim shape, evidently.

I don't think it would help a hacker much at all. But there are things other than hacking in life, right?

I dunno, from the sound of it, I don't think it would be in the best interests a 22 year old hacker, who is almost bursting to get out there and work with an innovative startup, to step out of the game at age 22 to teach basic math in an underfunded school. The excitement, creativity, and freedom you have at that age won't be there forever.

I'm sad to say that, though - because I personally do think that talented teachers make a positive difference, and I think that a more public-mindedness among technology workers would be a good thing (there's a strong undercurrent of distain for politics and legalisms - but if we don't participate, lawyers will be more than happy to regulate technology for us...)

mechanical_fish2• 18 years ago

Dear god, if you have the people skills to manage a classroom full of teenagers, and the pedagogical skills to teach stuff, software engineering needs you. Can I interest you in the Drupal project? ;)

I know one person who used his new B.S. in Physics to Teach for America, and was unhappy. I know another person who loved to work with kids, worked for years in a science museum, then got a degree in education and worked as a high school teacher in a rural county, and is now... unhappy.

I think that teaching is like medicine, law, marriage counseling, postdoctoral research, and just about any other career: It's hard to know if you'll like it until you try it for real. You can't really learn what it's like, day-to-day and year-to-year, by watching from the outside. I've certainly met teachers who loved their jobs, but you have to love the reality, not the Platonic ideal in your head.

Honesty, if not my sense of social justice, compels me to observe that the long-term happiness of the teachers I've met has been correlated to the selectiveness of their schools -- they work at Catholic schools with tuition, magnet schools, private schools, or schools in districts where only doctors and lawyers can afford to live. I think the main reason for this is that the students in such schools are relatively well motivated: they either care about the material or care about their grades. (It's not just pay -- the Catholic school teachers I knew were paid considerably less than their public-school colleagues. But then, if you've read Peopleware, you could have predicted that.)

The happiest hacker-turned-high-school-teacher I know started off in industry, burned out after a couple of decades, then switched to teaching. You might consider that path. OTOH, the advantage of Teach for America is that it gets you in front of students (a) quickly, without having to go through as much bureaucratic hazing -- no education degree required; (b) temporarily -- you can quit in a couple years with no dishonor; and (c) when you're young, so that it will have minimal impact on your future career.

Prrometheus• 18 years ago

"I think that teaching is like medicine, law, marriage counseling, postdoctoral research, and just about any other career: It's hard to know if you'll like it until you try it for real. You can't really learn what it's like, day-to-day and year-to-year, by watching from the outside."

A difference with those other fields is that teaching is ensconced in an inflexible, pathological bureaucracy. Although, that could be my ideological bias talking.

mechanical_fish2• 18 years ago

Wait, are you saying that medicine and counseling don't have pathological bureaucracy? Have you asked your doctor to describe exactly how much time and effort it takes to get money from dozens of separate insurance companies, all of which are using every trick in the book to avoid paying? Or are you lucky enough to live in a civilized country?

And, please, don't even ask about postdoctoral research and the attendent interactions with university bureaucracy, departmental politics, and Federal grant review processes. Or I might need counseling. And my insurance doesn't cover that. :)

tphyahoo2• 18 years ago

Teaching is a tough gig -- I tried it, and it was too tough for me.

The downside of tfa is that they are somewhat cultish and will want you to drink cool aid. The upside is that you get some training, and will meet cool people. (Many don't drink the cool aid, and even those that do are well intentioned positive thinkers.)

For those who are born teachers, who love kids, whose calling is to teach... TFA is great. For those who aren't, it could be a catastrophe in a rosy coupon. Most people will fall somewhere in the two extremes.

So, the simple answer is: run away. But, maybe you are a born teacher and this is right for you. No harm in applying, I guess.

tphyahoo2• 18 years ago

Note: I applied, and was negged, by TFA, but know many people who did it and told me of their experiences.

I taught briefly in an urban public school, where basically anyone with a college degree could get a job because there was such a teacher deficit. (They were quitting in droves.)

I probably could have used the training I would have gotten in TFA, as going in there completely green was a bad idea :) Oh well, I probably taught a few kids some stuff they might be able to use later in life. Mostly I just tried to keep them in their seats and not setting the building on fire.

One final note: The hardest thing about teaching is the workload. 100 hour weeks is just words until you've experienced it. (To be honests, I am not sure if it was that many, but it seemed like it. And this isn't 100 hours staring at a spreadsheet, but chasing down kids, grading illegible homework, calling parents, dealing with bureaucracy, dealing with classroom observations and job ratings from the assistant principle who doesn't give a shit about your fancy college degree... yikes.)

Teaching would be a lot more doable if you had fewer students, or if all the classes you had to teach could follow the same lesson plan. I was preparing five different plans a day. A tough schedule even for an experienced educator with years of semi-prepared lesson plans that he has already taught a few times and knows what works and what doesn't.

mainsequence2• 18 years ago

I'm not a programmer, but I did TFA for three years in Compton after graduating with a BS in Physics. I would say that if you are serious about your start-up, it's probably not the best fit for you: you simply won't have the time or energy at the end of the day, especially in your first year. This of course assumes that one would do TFA because one wants to actually tackle the problem of educational inequality, and not just because one thinks it will look good on a resume someday or one has a martyr complex.

A typical day is: get to school at 7, plan, hold before-school tutoring, teach all day (with a lunch break of 30 minutes), kids go home at 3, hold after-school tutoring until 4, plan, go home at 5 or 6, eat, grade papers until you fall asleep. This was my experience at least.

I loved it because for me it was about connecting with people who had a completely different upbringing than I do. The skills I learned in the classroom have colored most of my professional life. I found that students, in aggregate, are excellent judges of character, and I really had to step up my game to gain their trust.

Common Criticisms and responses: "It's crowd control..." -only if you're a lousy teacher (and there are plenty)

"TFA is a cult..." -it is, but after your initial training, which is actually very useful, you can choose to be as involved as you want (I wasn't very)

"Teaching is for those who can't do anything else." -Maybe there's some truth to this. I think it depends on what a person believes is important. Effective teaching in an inner-city school is definitely not easy, and to be honest, I think it's a problem in need of a new solution. I think the world could use a better model of education more than it needs a better way to use RSS to find out what one's friend had for breakfast. So if you have the raw innovative skill, it's a huge opportunity.

geebee2• 18 years ago

I feel a little bad saying it was "crowd control" because those are my words, not my brother's (who was the one doing the program). I think he was a good teacher, and he would probably object to that characterization.

He told me that once he left the room for a few minutes because a kid was sick, and heard a huge crash. When he rushed back in, it turned out that a girl had tried to smash the overhead projector on top of the head of another student. Glass was everywhere This was the result of leaving the classroom for 2 minutes.

But when he was in there, I don't actually think it was all crowd control. He had the respect of the students, and he was able to teach.

You made an interesting observation about the "cultish" quality of TFA. He said that he had no illusions about how much of himself he was giving. He said his attitude from the start was "This school has 30 teachers. Two of us are TFA. The other 28 are just doing their job." That attitude helped him out a lot, I think.

mainsequence2• 18 years ago

There's definitely an element of crowd control in the sense that the students are kids; they naturally like to get into trouble, and don't come pre-installed with self-management skills.

I think that it's important to be cognizant of how to manage crowds, but it's easy to get bogged down in just maintaining the peace. There's gotta be a reason to pay attention, a reason to behave, other than "do what I tell you or else"...this is what I meant by lousy teaching.

Sounds like your brother knows what he's doing and I'd bet his students are lucky to have him. With regards to his story about the overhead projector, it brings back fond memories of pretending to leave the room but really just standing right outside the door to see which students were the first to a) realize I'm gone and b) start trouble. The classroom can be a hilarious laboratory for the study of human nature. (I do certainly hope that the victim was alright and that the perpetrator was held responsible.)

mattchew• 18 years ago

Yes, not sure how it relates to Hacker News. If you're trying to choose between TFA and running a startup, you've got your head twisted around somehow. Very different paths. If you have notions of doing both at the same time, give those up. First year of teaching is very demanding.

But if you're still interested anyway, sure, look into it. I did TFA for a couple years (95 Rio Grande) and it was a good experience. I wouldn't teach in a public school again unless I was starving, but it was the right thing for me at the time. Feel free to email me, mspambox@yahoo.com, if you've got particular questions.

Ask News.YC: Teach for America?

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