RE: Marking a Physics paper (aka: Pay your teachers more... aaka: the system is borked!)

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Ah man I totally agree with everything you say! I'm just a TA involved with some course exercises of several Master courses. But I do have the same issue. There's never enough time to give the student what he/she needs to grasp concepts fully!

I appreciate a lot the kind of work that you do. Especially high school teachers, which I see as the people who shape society of the future. The place where I'm at right now, I attribute for a large part to the teacher who taught me.

Many topics I am interested in now, were taught by some of the best teachers in school. Some topics I'm interested in only now, were taught by some of the worst. Which resulted in grades that weren't, lets say, great...

Who knows where I might have ended up if I would have great teachers for all my high school courses.

So, to say it again: for me teachers are a very important piece of the puzzle called society. They are under payed, and more importantly, underappreciated!

And regarding you comment:

Not everything can be made into a metric that is easily measurable, and if it is... then perhaps it isn't a totally representative metric. Thus, you are prioritising many things that are trivial but easily quantifiable. Makes for good reading on a annual manager's report! But is crap for the system...

I coincidentally read an interesting article (in Dutch) regarding exactly this topic! The article is from 2016, but still very relevant.

Here's a link to the article from de correspondent. I think you might enjoy reading it :)

And finally, I was curious: are you doing this tutoring as a full time job?


Thanks for sharing your story. Have a, hopefully, great day :D



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(Edited)

Yep, the problem exists all through the education structure... TAs also have it pretty bad! My father was a Mathematician at University... he always complained that at some point, they were de-incentivised to fail students... because that would mean that the completion metric would go down, and that would result in less funding! So... pass students at ALL COSTS! If they didn't understand the course material... make the examinations easier! Just make it easy to pass... who cares if they actually learn anything...

I do the private teaching/tutoring as a side job normally... I also teach violin, but my principal "day job" is as a performing musician (as a zzp in the Oude Muziek field). However, this year... Math/Physics teaching has become the major earner! Everything else has pretty much crashed to zero!

I have toyed with the idea of doing high school teaching... but the idea of teaching 30 people at once is a vastly different concept to teaching and inspiring one person at a time!

Thanks for the article, it will make for a good test of my Dutch! Happy that people in more influential positions are also thinking similar things.

PS: Thanks for the article gift!

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You're welcome! I sort of assumed you were dutch sorry! 🤦‍♂ The Correspondent is also available in English now. If I see a nice article in English there, I'll share it with you 👍

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No worries, I can read Dutch well enough to understand, but my speaking can be a touch variable!

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