What job do people take way too seriously?

const_void@lemmy.ml to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 176 points –
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Teaching. Everyone seems to think teachers are full of themselves until they become a teacher and become full of themselves themselves.

it's one of the most important professions but okay tell me more about how mrs dunn was mean to you and you suck at fractions

Read the OP title, it asks what job do people take too seriously. I answered. Anyone who ignores we did just fine without our current system of teachers for centuries is already doing exactly that, taking it too seriously. It has nothing to do with your strawman of me thinking a teacher was mean to me.

Go back to being an illiterate, muck raking peasant or die young in a workhouse then, I guess. Fucking hell.

People in all the past golden ages did just fine without having the teaching system we have currently.

You know who the "Golden Age" was golden for? The relatively few educated people.

And for general relative prosperity and trade.

And you somehow genuinely feel that the average person's prosperity was, relatively, better in that period?

Working 7 days a week, morning to night, producing that prosperity and trade for the educated class in exchange for a pittance. Whilst eating your table scraps in the dark, you can hope you don't die of a disease you have no idea how to prevent contracting.

You can measure the prosperity of an era by contemporary descriptions of their health, including how tall people were. So we definitely have proof people fared better then.

Would you want to factor in life expectancy at all?

Did I not?

It feels like it might impact your view a bit if you did.

As good as it is to be marginally taller for 30-40 years, or be a super tall person who died an infant. Not that the article you linked has any description of heights related to whichever "golden age" you might refer to, but whatever.

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I love teaching, but the job of being a schoolteacher scares the heck out of me. Trying to earn the respect of 30 kids, while working from some standardized lesson plan, it sounds awful. I wouldn’t last a month.

Plus there's the problem of having to relearn subjects to such a level of mastery that you can teach them effectively. Like 2nd grade math isn't hard at all obviously but it's really hard to synthesize and break down all material in a way that a developing mind can grasp it.

I took classes which would qualify me to be a teacher. The biggest thing that scared me out of it were the unions and the fact they're not even legally questionable sometimes. I didn't want to become that. In the United States, the occupation has so much control that the head of the teachers' union is considered the most dangerous individual in the nation according to a poll/ranking. Not sure if anyone would be willing to accept that as context for my answer though.

Everyone should be in a union. I'm happy to hear teachers are successfully unionised in the US.

If you grew up here you probably wouldn't be saying this. Unions at their conception were supposed to be collectives of people who made sure they weren't mistreated, but today they're groups who use their membership numbers to make sure they get their way as often as possible. You may have heard about police here being notorious for overstepping in certain matters. In cases where this is true, that's with the unfortunate help of the police union, which practices a needlessly strong honor-based system of nepotism. Teachers here are the same way. If anyone in power even remotely brings up any proposed bill that works in favor of teachers, such as one that gives them less required work time or more pay, they will pressure it into materialization, and they will exploit anything and everything for their giant wolf pack, allegorically-speaking. With Lemmy having a strong anti-capitalist sentiment, it strikes me as counterintuitively argumentative that the same demographic would be so supportive of unions.

Giving support to a bill that benefits workers through collective organisation is precisely what unions are for. Why are you against people wanting a better work/life balance? Unionise and you can have one too.

Because that's not what they end up being used for most of the time, people here most often see them be used to impose one's group's interests on others, and these interests often dictate the fate of one's future in the job. The issue is so bad the occupation is stigmatized in less populated areas.

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