Good morning fellow antiwork comrades. Obviously, we'd rather not have to work at all, but here's something that's been hanging on my mind recently. Backstory, I went to school in the US to become a teacher but I am not a teacher currently because of money, not wanting to deal with parents, etc.
As a student teacher, you are expected to write lesson plans, conduct parent teacher conferences, grade, testing, basically take over the entire classroom with a mentor teacher there as support. Additionally, they usually have some sort of class they're doing or some form of semester long project. During this time, student teachers are not only not paid, they are paying the university for the experience and living expenses are covered by themselves or student loans. The mentor teacher gets a small financial incentive for providing the mentoring, but the student teacher does not.
Student teaching is not only an unpaid internship, it's an internship where you pay the employer to work there. This starts a cycle of working in the school districts. You're a broke college student and need to be able to eat during student teaching, you have two options, get a paying job to do outside your full time student teaching or get student loans. The universities tell you not to have a job outside of student teaching because they expect student teaching to take up all of your time. So you are highly encouraged to take loans. When you get out of college, you're in even more debt and are going to be willing to take any teaching job because you need the money, even when the starting pay for an elementary school teacher is between $35-$45k/year. Take living expenses and student loans into consideration, and that most teachers spend hundreds of dollars of their own money in the classrooms, you now have a person who is too desperate for work to have any energy to try to change the systems.
There is some good news that teacher unions are growing more powerful, etc. I would suggest we not start with the unions, but start with the students at universities. We could take away the barrier the current student teaching system creates and recruit more teachers while also giving them a stipend and/or salary.
Thanks for reading and if you know someone doing their student teaching right now, let them know you appreciate them and/or gift them something. But not mugs. Most teachers I know have too many mugs.