@jemostrom my partner is a teacher and I really have no idea how she can put up with all the crap in the system. Teaching isn’t of any priority anymore... it’s just chaos prevention without any plan from the government. Teachers are blamed for everything, but they are the ones that are really suffering.

@hutaffe @jemostrom One thing that has been striking about so many of the recent teachers strikes is that their demands include basic services for their students. That regular old political pressure from parents isn’t enough anymore—the schools have to be shut down.

Union 💪.

@hutaffe @bruce This is similar to what I see, the teachers are doing their best but they are actively prevented to do their work ! Unfortunately, I see the same thing happening in the university world ... if I get the chance I'm out of academia, working here isn't sustainable anymore.

@jemostrom I’ve worked as a developer for close to 20 years now. It’s always been expected that I learn new stuff in my spare time. Since it’s also my hobby.

And with the exception of my first job, I’ve always told them it’s not going to happen. They need to give me time at work/compensate me.

I expect that is much harder as a teacher than in my line of work.

@furstenberg yeah, what they described to me is that they are teaching back to back, they don’t even have time to talk/plan with another colleague what to do if they share a course/class and they might be required to spend time in the evenings talking to parents. Then add a course in programming... and in some cases an extra compulsory course. And these are people who are talking care of kids with all that includes. This what I hear from they them, but I hear the same kind of story from almost everyone I meet so I’m going to believe what they say until I hear something else.

As for myself, I’m in a similar situation to you. I like learning new stuff, I like software ... but unfortunately we are given less and less time for each course we teach, which means that we need to teach more courses/teacher. This mean for me, who teach “courses that no one else want to teach”, that I should keep up to date in various subjects like operating systems, programming language theory, databases, concurrent systems, software engineering, fintech, and programming language like C, Python, Java, Haskell with related technologies ... plus new languages like Rust, Julia, etc. Add to that web related stuff, cloud computing, etc.

Note, I wouldn’t mind learning all the new stuff, I’m very interested in all this but I don’t have the time to keep the things I know up to date. So I’ve basically given up (I become even more negative just writing this) and spend my free time with photography instead - lots of thing to learn and experiment with, and actually feel enjoyment/satisfaction instead of frustration of not having the time to do (= learn) things properly.