# Any teachers here?



## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

Whenever my husband & I join a new cultural group or evening class, we always find that a large proportion of the members are or have been teachers of various sorts. Natural enough, I suppose, since teachers probably enjoy learning & showing that they have the brains or the stickability to make good progress. 

I was just wondering whether the same is true of Talk Classical - whether quite a large proportion are involved in education, whether as teachers or students. 

This is also a thread where, if you're a retired teacher like me, you can bore for your homeland at the World Boredom Olympics by telling what you consider to be amusing or revealing anecdotes. 

Thank you for any replies, and if not, hey, it will still have been a learning activity.


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## Art Rock (Nov 28, 2009)

When I was doing my PhD (Chemistry, 1980-1984), it came with running experimenting courses for the students, defining and supervising their laboratory work. The last few years before retiring from my industrial R&D management position in 2012 I have been giving safety courses inside the company in addition to my regular job. In recent years I have been giving courses on composition in photography and fine arts for highschool students. 

I have always enjoyed this type of interaction, but I've never been tempted to take up a full-time job in this direction.


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## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

I used to be a teacher. Because my husband had to move to change his teaching subject and gain promotion, I have fitted in where I can - taking short-term posts, covering maternity leaves, or settling in only to find that we were moving on again.

My sometimes short teaching experiences include:

Teaching English in a sixth-form college (age 16-18) - my last job before retirement
Teaching English in high school (one grammar school; one comprehensive)
Teaching English in private school (two all-girls and one all-boys)
Teaching various subjects (English, Latin, Maths) in a boys' choir (preparatory) school
Teaching as a form teacher in a junior or middle school. (three times)

Leading seminars in Anglo-Saxon at a university. 


I liked my job when it didn't involve crowd control. I can't say that I'm a disciplinarian, though I would never give up on a class. But where the children were younger, or it was an academic environment, I did enjoy it, and I think that I taught effectively. 

Do I miss it? Not really, except when I'd like to share a book or a poem with enthusiastic people. But I enjoy having extra thinking time and not having to stress about staff meetings and new educational initiatives.


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## Bulldog (Nov 21, 2013)

While a graduate student in Economics at Washington State University, I taught Econ. 101. I enjoyed it, but the money was very tight after we had our first child. So I ditched the education thing and was offered a job with the Army Corps of Engineers Real Estate Division. It was a good move for me as it eventually led to my becoming the Chief of Real Estate, a position that also involved teaching of employees new to the field. Even better, it also allowed me to do private real estate appraisal work on the side that was quite lucrative.


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## Kjetil Heggelund (Jan 4, 2016)

I've been teaching at the local high-school since 1998, mostly classical guitar and now music history that now is going through a reform. That means I have to prepare the next year differently. More Norwegian folk music and Sami-music. I finished my MM at SFCM in 1996 and got a job at a high-school right away and then was relocated when it was closed down. At the end of this school year I've been in the same job for 25 years! They even celebrate that


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## Jacck (Dec 24, 2017)

I teach medical students, though I cant say I would enjoy it. I have one 2 hour lecture every weak, always the same topic and to a different group of students. So I am both bored by the lecture, and I cannot really form any kind of contant with the students, because they are always a different group, and I just dont really enjoy talking for 2 hours straight. I think I would much prefer teaching for example high school students for a whole semester, where you can both form contacts with the students and teach every week something different.


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## Taggart (Feb 14, 2013)

I used to be a teacher. I started teaching Economics in a high school and enjoyed it. I also enjoyed teaching other subjects to younger students mainly history. As a result of government initiatives, the school got a computer and I got hooked. I taught computing for about 18 years moving from job to job ending up in a Sixth Form College. I enjoyed teaching computing and working with computers immensely. I had also been a network manager and done some part time admin - helping set up the hardware and software to provide all the government returns. As education became more data led, the demand for good computer systems grew and I moved into admin full time.


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## GucciManeIsTheNewWebern (Jul 29, 2020)

I taught high school German as a practicant for a year when I was in college and it was a very rewarding experience. That was originally the career I wanted to get into, but teachers are pretty underpaid in the US and I decided I wanted to use my more advanced German skills to pursue something more lucrative. To be fair, that's only taking a starting teachers salary into account and it also depends from state to state. Some states have really good unions so the starting pay for teachers is actually quite comfortable. Another thing that factored into that is that I would've been really bored teaching basic - intermediate German to high school kids and thought it would be a waste of my skills. Gotta say though, I loved working with those kids and they never failed to put a smile on my face. Enriching young minds and watching them grow is really priceless and I respect teachers a ton for what they do for kids (especially ones who need stability and guidance where they lack it at home or elsewhere) and for society. It's the most noble profession out there IMO.

EDIT: Btw, OP forgot to add the option: "I hate ArtMusic's polls".


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## Bulldog (Nov 21, 2013)

GucciManeIsTheNewWebern said:


> EDIT: Btw, OP forgot to add the option: "I hate ArtMusic's polls".


That would have funny if Ingélou had done it.


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## SixFootScowl (Oct 17, 2011)

I am not a teacher, but my wife, mother and grandmother are/were. Ironic. With all those teachers and I am a dunce. :lol:


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## Joe B (Aug 10, 2017)

I became a teacher at the age of 50 in 2004. The events of 911 quickly changed the aerospace industry and I changed careers. My background as a manufacturing engineer (writing process sheets, CAD drawings used for inspections during manufacture, writing programs and designing tooling used for computer numerical controlled machining centers/lathes/etc.) made me the perfect 6th grade math teacher.
I've been teaching for 17 years (5th and 6th graders). I am truly looking forward to retiring in another 3 years. Kids are not the students they used to be, and I'm getting tired. Teaching 10-12 year old children requires about as much energy as I can muster. This has been an incredibly stressful year. I think half our staff could be labeled clinically as 'burned out'. I know I am.


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## senza sordino (Oct 20, 2013)

I qualified as a teacher in September 1993. And I've been teaching ever since. I was first hired as a substitute teacher, which is typical here. The following May I got a three month contract to teach kids in jail. Following that I taught for one year in a kind of halfway house for kids: kids fresh out of jail, kids who've been kicked out of every public school, and kids who just don't fit in. 

In September 1995 I got hired to teach in a regular school, and I've been in that same school ever since. I'm a science teacher, grades eight through twelve, students as young as twelve and as old as eighteen. For the younger students, I teach chemistry, physics, biology, astronomy, geology, and ecology - a general science course. For older students, I teach my specialty, which is Physics, and I've taught it every year. I've also been teaching Geology for twenty-two years. 

This might be my last year teaching Geology because not enough students signed up for the course next year. Our school is losing students, and we will have to lay off some teachers. We don't have as many international students, some students now take all of their courses online and they're not returning, and more students are graduating than entering due to changing demographics. It's a shame I won't be teaching Geology, as I turned this into my own course emphasizing what I liked and what the students wanted to learn. Next September, there will be a job for me, because there are enough junior students, plenty of senior physics students, and I have decades of seniority. 

I will retire four or five years from now. This depends on my energy level and my mortgage. 

Our school will be piloting a new grading scheme for the younger students. I don't like this new scheme and I have no interest in implementing it. This might accelerate my retirement.


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## arpeggio (Oct 4, 2012)

I have mentioned this before.

I lasted one semester as a high school band director. Left the profession and became an auditor.


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## Guest (May 3, 2021)

I teach harmony and counterpoint to 2nd and 3rd-year undergraduates, and ear-training (aural skills) to 1st year undergraduates.


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## BrahmsWasAGreatMelodist (Jan 13, 2019)

I'm probably the most intelligent person I know, so I often end up teaching my peers or higher-ups.

But ultimately I know nothing, so I can't imagine anyone else really knows anything either... C'est la Vie!


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## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

It was a trendy place to get my post-graduate teaching qualification, the London Institute of Education in the early 1970s, and there were a lot of ideas that just didn't work at the chalk-face, but one which I used a lot was the strategy of 'improvised drama', which provided some of my most joyous moments with classes ranging from seven-year-olds to seventeen-year-olds and always paid off in pupils' writing or their understanding of a topic. 

At A-level, we staged a mock-trial of Moll Flanders, using 'evidence' from the book; for the seven-year-olds, we made the tables into tents for Captain Scott's expedition, and used them again to have Bruce's outsize spider leaping across the void. 

Happy memories - but I was always too involved and couldn't switch off my mind when I got home, not to mention all the marking.


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## Merl (Jul 28, 2016)

As many of you know I'm a primary teacher up here in Chillyjockoland. This is my 20th year in education (I came to teaching in my 30s after a plethora of unsatisfactory jobs) and I have spent half of that time in my native Manchester and now in Fife. I've seen it all (all the fads in education and children with every condition you can think of) and taught everything. This year has been a different one as I've been the 'floating' teacher at school so I've taught the lot from 5-11. Who knows what the next school year will bring (apart from more educational fads)?


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## Chilham (Jun 18, 2020)

Not a teacher but a trainer. I train business people in the soft-skills needed to be more successful in their roles. Mostly sales training, but also presentation skills, negotiation skills, leadership and team development.


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## Totenfeier (Mar 11, 2016)

I've taught high school English literature, grammar, and composition, and all that that entails, since 1986. And yet, I have sat and sat and sat here trying to think of a way to talk about my career and how I feel about it, and I just cannot find the words. So sup, fam. lol. aight imma head out. It do be like that.


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## Guest (May 3, 2021)

Ingélou said:


> [...] there were a lot of *ideas that just didn't work at the chalk-face* [...]


I like that expression, "at the chalk face". It may surprise you but in this day and age I still use chalk on a blackboard (a greenboard in fact, a big, nearly 2-metre wide one with 8 staves, the only one in a dedicated room in our music department, the younger teachers prefer to use the overhead projectors in the other teaching rooms that display staves onto a whiteboard and "virtual" pens to write the notes). So yes, I'm old-school with my chalk, blackboard and a piano. But we always sing through our work. Until very recently, when teaching string quartet writing, if I had enough string-players in my class we would also play through their exercises on their intsruments, much better than chalk!!!


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## Tikoo Tuba (Oct 15, 2018)

I like to teach this and that now and then . Sometimes it happens , usually for free .


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## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

TalkingHead said:


> I like that expression, "at the chalk face". It may surprise you but in this day and age I still use chalk on a blackboard (a greenboard in fact, a big, nearly 2-metre wide one with 8 staves, the only one in a dedicated room in our music department, the younger teachers prefer to use the overhead projectors in the other teaching rooms that display staves onto a whiteboard and "virtual" pens to write the notes). So yes, I'm old-school with my chalk, blackboard and a piano. But we always sing through our work. Until very recently, when teaching string quartet writing, if I had enough string-players in my class we would also play through their exercises on their intsruments, much better than chalk!!!


Don't you find the chalk gets on to your clothes? I think I'd prefer the option of 'direct' writing on to a board than the virtual pen palaver, however. :tiphat:


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## Barbebleu (May 17, 2015)

I taught primary for six months and quickly discovered that the teaching profession was not for me. I actually dreaded going in to meet the little horrors.  I have endless admiration for those who do it.


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## Guest (May 4, 2021)

Ingélou said:


> Don't you find the chalk gets on to your clothes? I think I'd prefer the option of 'direct' writing on to a board than the virtual pen palaver, however. :tiphat:


The chalk dust gets everywhere and not helped by the fact that I often wear black when teaching!


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## SixFootScowl (Oct 17, 2011)

TalkingHead said:


> The chalk dust gets everywhere and not helped by the fact that I often wear black when teaching!


Is there a disease that teachers get called White Lung, analogous to the coal miner's Black Lung?


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## Guest (May 4, 2021)

At one point I was a Professor of Physics and Biophysics at a large U.S. research university. I conducted large lectures on elementary physics, but most real teaching was in the form of advising PhD students. Dramatic deterioration of support for academic science in the U.S. meant it was no longer viable for me and I now work as a scientist in the private sector.


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## Tikoo Tuba (Oct 15, 2018)

Tikoo Tuba said:


> I like to teach this and that now and then . Sometimes it happens , usually for free .


It's enjoyable to introduce little kids to the 12-tone row and the simplicity of composition . Tickles .


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## SixFootScowl (Oct 17, 2011)

We all teach someone somewhere sometimes. Hopefully we are not teaching bad habits.


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## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

SixFootScowl said:


> Is there a disease that teachers get called White Lung, analogous to the coal miner's Black Lung?


Nothing like as widespread or as serious - but yes, inhaling chalk dust isn't good for you. 
https://www.infobloom.com/is-chalk-dust-harmful.htm


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## Tikoo Tuba (Oct 15, 2018)

SixFootScowl said:


> We all teach someone somewhere sometimes. Hopefully we are not teaching bad habits.


There are strange and useless habits which are classical that one may teach or not . Hmm , like middle C. My farmer neighbor was discussing this C the other day woefully remembering his childhood piano lessons. Hogwash ? Yes , he washes the pigs .


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## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

Barbebleu said:


> I taught primary for six months and quickly discovered that the teaching profession was not for me. I actually dreaded going in to meet the little horrors.  I have endless admiration for those who do it.


Some of my temporary jobs were very stressful and I don't think I'd have stuck it out in a really tough school.


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## Barbebleu (May 17, 2015)

Every class has its super clever one and its super horrible one. The class I had combined those two attributes into one child I taught in a small village school where everyone knew everyone else. Continual truculence combined with threats of being done over by his older siblings, with whom I was well acquainted, were a regular feature of my days and needless to say six months of looking over my shoulder of an evening convinced me my career lay elsewhere. :lol:


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## CnC Bartok (Jun 5, 2017)

I teach Chemistry, up to A-Level, I hope that counts?


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## Tikoo Tuba (Oct 15, 2018)

My favorite book is a textbook : Philosophy of American Education . The professor recommends every teacher have a philosophy whether it is adopted or creative . Beyond the most recent and popular Existentialism and Experimentalism I've thought to focus on the the essential idea of Relation .


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## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

CnC Bartok said:


> I teach Chemistry, up to A-Level, I hope that counts?


Certainly - respect. :tiphat:
I was always useless at experiments - too timid and impractical. I hope your school/college has got on well during the lockdowns.


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## CnC Bartok (Jun 5, 2017)

Ingélou said:


> Certainly - respect. :tiphat:
> I was always useless at experiments - too timid and impractical. I hope your school/college has got on well during the lockdowns.


Shall we say it's better now we are not teaching via Zoom......!


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## david johnson (Jun 25, 2007)

I taught music in schools for 40 years, K-12 and a little college work.


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## senza sordino (Oct 20, 2013)

Two years (May 2021 and May 2020) in a row we've laid off dozens upon dozens of teachers in our school district. There has also been a fair amount of movement of teachers between schools in the district. I have a lot of seniority, so I'm able to stay put. This pandemic has really changed things here. We've lost hundreds of international students and some students have not returned to schools, they have chosen to remain at home doing online classes with designated online teachers. 

Retirement looks ever more enticing. I have four or five years to go. 

In one of my Physics classes, I've been using the same textbook since I started, that's twenty-eight years. The textbook is twenty-nine years old. It's embarrassing giving it to the students at the start of each new year. I don't use it a lot, but it is nice for the students to have another resource. They will not buy us new textbooks.


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## Becca (Feb 5, 2015)

My teaching experience started when I was a chemistry undergraduate and I found myself in front of a class containing 3 of the world's top researchers in astrophysics & chemistry. I managed to survive that experience and have since done some teaching at the college undergraduate and graduate level and then only early in my career - organic and clinical chemistry and various computer and programming courses. As must be obvious, I changed fields early on! From all I hear from the high school teachers in the family, I think college level was appropriate for me, it was fun but life moved on in other directions.


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## Guest (May 8, 2021)

senza sordino said:


> In one of my Physics classes, I've been using the same textbook since I started, that's twenty-eight years. The textbook is twenty-nine years old. It's embarrassing giving it to the students at the start of each new year. I don't use it a lot, but it is nice for the students to have another resource. They will not buy us new textbooks.


The science textbook industry is essentially an organized crime organization. Haliday and Resnick has been a lynchpin of intro college physics for generations but every couple of years the publishers come out with a new edition, essentially identical with the previous editions, except that they have re-ordered or slightly revised the end of chapter problems so you can't use the old textbook when the class is using the new one. It is a game to force students to buy a new book even though there are zillions of essentially identical used books that would be perfectly suitable.


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## senza sordino (Oct 20, 2013)

Baron Scarpia said:


> The science textbook industry is essentially an organized crime organization. Haliday and Resnick has been a lynchpin of intro college physics for generations but every couple of years the publishers come out with a new edition, essentially identical with the previous editions, except that they have re-ordered or slightly revised the end of chapter problems so you can't use the old textbook when the class is using the new one. It is a game to force students to buy a new book even though there are zillions of essentially identical used books that would be perfectly suitable.


Agree. I can't argue against this. But I'm not asking for a new textbook every year, a new textbook once every twenty years will suffice. The price of science textbooks is exorbitant. Each new book costs a minimum of $200, and there are approximately one thousand introductory physics students in the district. So to buy a new physics book would cost the district about $200 000. And biology needs a new book, and so does history, etc. The price tag would quickly climb to $1 million.

And for what? Students don't read like they used to. The very nature of literacy has changed over the past generation. Our library has half the number of books it used to. The empty space now occupied by more computers, desks with whiteboard tops for collaboration, and a maker space. I know I'm making an argument on both sides of the issue here. We educators (classroom teachers and administration) lament the decreasing amount of reading while we facilitate this shift in literacy.


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## Guest (May 8, 2021)

senza sordino said:


> Agree. I can't argue against this. But I'm not asking for a new textbook every year, a new textbook once every twenty years will suffice. The price of science textbooks is exorbitant. Each new book costs a minimum of $200, and there are approximately one thousand introductory physics students in the district. So to buy a new physics book would cost the district about $200 000. And biology needs a new book, and so does history, etc. The price tag would quickly climb to $1 million.
> 
> And for what? Students don't read like they used to. The very nature of literacy has changed over the past generation. Our library has half the number of books it used to. The empty space now occupied by more computers, desks with whiteboard tops for collaboration, and a maker space. I know I'm making an argument on both sides of the issue here. We educators (classroom teachers and administration) lament the decreasing amount of reading while we facilitate this shift in literacy.


I had the idea of creating an "open source" physics textbook series. Didn't last long enough in academia to think of actually doing it. Probably something along those lines exists somewhere. But the textbook syndicates know to protect their territory.


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## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

senza sordino said:


> ...And for what? Students don't read like they used to. The very nature of literacy has changed over the past generation...


So true! 

When, fairly late in my teaching career, I got a job teaching A-level English at a sixth form college, I was surprised and disappointed to find that many of the students opting for English Literature didn't actually enjoy reading very much.


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## senza sordino (Oct 20, 2013)

Baron Scarpia said:


> I had the idea of creating an "open source" physics textbook series. Didn't last long enough in academia to think of actually doing it. Probably something along those lines exists somewhere. But the textbook syndicates know to protect their territory.


Yes, open-source textbooks do exist. But I'm not using them or creating them. Alas, one of my weaknesses as a teacher is technology - I haven't kept up and I don't find it very interesting.

In the future, after I retire, the students will be taught by teachers who themselves didn't use textbooks. Not using textbooks in the future will begin to be the new normal. Because we tend to teach as we were taught I like to use textbooks as a teacher because I used textbooks to learn. Teaching without textbooks will be quite natural for teachers who learned without textbooks.

This reminds me of Max Planck's quote: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."


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## Tikoo Tuba (Oct 15, 2018)

Teachers have a belly-button a child can push .


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## Guest (May 10, 2021)

senza sordino said:


> Yes, open-source textbooks do exist. But I'm not using them or creating them. Alas, one of my weaknesses as a teacher is technology - I haven't kept up and I don't find it very interesting.
> 
> In the future, after I retire, the students will be taught by teachers who themselves didn't use textbooks. Not using textbooks in the future will begin to be the new normal. Because we tend to teach as we were taught I like to use textbooks as a teacher because I used textbooks to learn. Teaching without textbooks will be quite natural for teachers who learned without textbooks.
> 
> This reminds me of Max Planck's quote: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."


I'm not sure how you define "textbook," but I am sure textbooks in some form will survive and be the dominant form of learning in science. What defines a textbook is that it provides a path through the mathematical and empirical structures. "You start with this assumption and use it to solve a class of problems, then you can have the insight to derive this conservation law, and use it to solve another set of problems, then have the insight to derive another conservation law, and solve another set of problems, and recast the equation in a different form and solve another set of problems, and combine it with another physical law and solve yet another set of problems, yada yada yada. Humble Haliday and Resnick led students though the series of insights that Newton had to derive most of what we call Classical Mechanics.

Maybe the opposite is the Caltech physics model, where graduate students have no required classes and no curriculum, except that they have to pass a series of qualifying exams. But even there students figured out that there were a series of textbooks which would lead them through the curriculum that they needed to know.


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## Tikoo Tuba (Oct 15, 2018)

A local public school teacher has said she has quit because of students aggressive behavior . Is authority an issue ?


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## jkl (May 4, 2021)

I'm not a teacher but my father was a teacher at one stage. He taught math at school. I have a lot of respect for good teachers, they set the seeds in children and lead by example in many ways.


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

Tikoo Tuba said:


> A local public school teacher has said she has quit because of students aggressive behavior . Is authority an issue ?


IMO that's a cultural problem, and it starts with the parents. I won't teach at a public school in the States largely because of that, though there are other reasons too.

I mean I guess I would, but I'd need like 300k/year to do it.


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## Flamme (Dec 30, 2012)

> No, but I'd have liked to try teaching.


My mum was an old school teacher and was very passionate about her job...:angel::angel::angel:


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