THIS Stopped Me From Being a TEACHER in HAWAII

so i want to talk about why i decided not to become a teacher in hawaii some of the things that kind of held me back when i graduated from high school i wanted to become a teacher i didn't know exactly what i wanted to teach but i just knew that i wanted to be in the classroom i loved the idea of passing along knowledge from from me to some students in just fun and creative ways and i really respect teachers and there are times that i wish that i could join them i think about it sometimes like maybe i should apply and become a teacher in hawaii and i bet you if you think back you must have had some really great teachers that inspired you and didn't talk down to you unfortunately every time i think about stepping in front of a classroom there's enough reasons to keep me from doing it and by the way this is my old high school mckinley high school go tigers and in a lot of ways i hope this video doesn't discourage people from wanting to become teachers in hawaii because we really need teachers here i mean they talk about that every single year we need teachers but it's hard and in a lot of ways i feel like i quit teaching before i even got started and i'm not here just to complain i actually want to offer some solutions that i think can make teaching a little brighter for people and if you're a teacher in hawaii please let me know in the comments below and maybe you can leave some encouraging words for some people who are interested in becoming future teachers also in full transparency i've never been employed as a teacher in hawaii and i hope that doesn't lose any credibility that i may have on this topic i did student teach when i was in high school if you can believe that i also was a summer fun instructor here which i know is not quite the same as teachers but i had the wonderful opportunity to teach at the university of northern colorado for several years even teaching esl so i do have some classroom experience although granted not quite the same as k through 12. so i think it's universally known that teachers are traditionally paid relatively low which is too bad because they have one of the most important jobs which is teaching archaic and this is the starting pay for teachers in hawaii which i guess if you think about it it's not too bad considering they get summer and winter off as well as the fact that they're state employees and i hear people say that they get into teaching because they love to teach kids and they're in it for the kids and that's really great but the truth is that you also have to pay the bills and because hawaii has one of the highest costs of living it's really tough and the teacher pay while maybe pretty okay it gets really stretched out when you consider how much things cost especially housing and food i wish the starting teacher salary in hawaii was 80 to 100 000 i wish that if it was that sign me up i'd be right there to apply it's not all about the money but that would definitely attract some high-level candidates but as i've looked into education in hawaii and teaching i found that actually the highest salaries are in school administration and that's where the money's at it's not really in the teaching of the kids it's actually in the management and administration of that thank goodness for these bus stops huh now i've heard the argument that hawaii schools underperformed so why should we pay them more money and if you look at the past year the test scores pretty much across the board in public school have plummeted i mean math proficiency is down 11 to 32 science is down 9 and language is down four percent and so i hear that how do you improve the quality of education by strategically allocating limited resources and the thing is i think it starts by getting the most local born teachers to stay in the profession i mean we have initiatives like grow your own where they're going to pay individuals to go and get certified to become teachers at the university of hawaii but the thing is is that going to be enough because frankly hawaii is importing a lot of its teachers from other parts of the country and i just don't understand why we can't recruit and keep enough of the teachers that are locally born here and because of that we typically have this high turnover rate of teachers in hawaii and we've been able to get by because of course who doesn't want to teach in hawaii right you can always get young new teachers to come and teach here but it doesn't really help in the long term if a lot of them are leaving after three to five years it's like trying to plug a hole in a boat by just peeling out the water with a cup and the thing is it would be nice to see teachers who were part of the community or at least try to be invested in hawaii and i think the way that you can do that is make it easier for people to stay in hawaii but oh god it's really wet outside i guess i should wait the thing is it'd be nice to see teachers who are part of that local community or at least invested in hawaii and part of that is making it more affordable for these teachers to live here because i think that when you're invested in your place as a teacher and you're not thinking about moving away to the mainland quality of education gets better all right well we just got to go out there and do it in the rain right real hawaii here the second thing is the admin work and that's one of those things where just hearing from my teacher friends they weren't necessarily prepared for the amount of admin work that you have to deal with as a teacher because i think a lot of teachers get into teaching because they want to create those wonderful lesson plans and they want to inspire kids and have wonderful classroom discussions they don't want to fill out binders or attend department meetings and those types of things i think are just very draining for some people and then there's the admin work with the kids like dealing with fights or bullying or cheating and there's liability and safety concerns and these are all things that as an educator i kind of don't really want to deal with and i'm sure there's a lot of other things that teachers have to deal with administratively that i didn't mention and again those just add on to the workload of already dealing with 30 or 100 students that you have to see every other day and so i just wish that in the college programs they would prepare you more for a lot of this administrative work and i know that this differs from county to county or for the state of hawaii you have to deal with the state doe but i think just preparing people for that would be huge because then they'd actually know that teaching isn't just about what you see in the classroom i think another thing that could really help teachers especially the new ones is mentoring or some kind of partnership that you have with someone else that they can check in on you when these types of challenges arise i know it's a big commitment for established teachers because they were they have so much already to take care of but it's a good long-term investment especially for that particular school and this could also start at the student teacher level because when i was student teaching as soon as the kids left i pretty much left too i didn't really stick around for much but had i stuck around to when the teacher actually left the campus maybe i would have known that oh teaching doesn't end when the bell rings you've got stuff that you got to take care of and teachers are often leaving pretty late not all of them some are digging out reasonably early but there are teachers that are stuck at school because they're doing so much other work and the third thing and probably the biggest thing that continues to stop me from becoming a teacher is having a deal with parents i can accept the pay i can even accept the administrative work sometimes but i just cannot deal with the parents because when a child is failing in school the blame is often given to the teachers and when they succeed it's often given to the parents which i think is completely unfair i really think education starts at home there's so much that a parent can do and contribute to their own child's education and i know after a long day of work or all the stresses of life the last thing you want to do is be a teacher at home but that's just part of parenting and because of the high percentage of multi-generational homes we have here in hawaii sometimes it's not even mom and dad that you have to talk to it's grandma grandpa and i don't want to talk to grandma and grandpa i want to talk to mom and dad about the kids education or at least i'd want to talk to them about the kids education because the truth is i think i got spoiled by teaching college kids i never had to deal with parents i just dealt with the student and that's it because they're grown-ups right they're adults and on the first day of class i would just spell it out to my students if you miss three classes you fail and we go over the syllabus and all of my expectations and basically i will just tell them if you want to get an a in this class this is what you have to do if you just want to pass this class this is what you have to do so i made it very straightforward and easy if they didn't like it they could switch to another class but oftentimes i found that most of the students were pretty receptive to that and i love teaching college because i could actually just focus on the teaching i'd have to deal with all this parent stuff i mean if the kid failed that was on them but the thing is if the kids succeeded that was also on them and to see them especially when they improve over the course of the semester i mean that's that's what you'd like to see as an educator because i'd like to think maybe rather naively that if you put in the work you can succeed and if you don't put in the work well you know the consequences and for this there's no real solution i can offer but i think what we can do is we can try to expect more from our students like hold them to a higher standard because i think oftentimes we just expect the bare minimum and so that's what we end up getting from them because i think we'd be surprised at what kids could do if we just kind of expected more of them and held them to that standard while also making sure that we support them in the right ways and i also wish that we could teach somewhat character development things like perseverance and hard work and being punctual because those are things that they're gonna need in the actual real world no matter what job that they take and part of that may be educating parents that their kids education is not just about them dropping off their kid at school but it's actual partnership with the teachers at the school to ensure that their kid can succeed at the close i think teaching is a wonderful profession and if you're coming to hawaii to teach or you're a current teacher in hawaii i applaud you i think that's wonderful and i wish i could join you and like i mentioned there's times where i thought about shifting my career like maybe i could actually handle it as a teacher i could make it work but until things actually change i don't see myself stepping in front of the classroom and that's really too bad because i think i'd be pretty good at it so thank you to all the wonderful teachers out there continue doing what you're doing we all really appreciate it even if we don't say it and i know that when my son goes to school i'm gonna make sure to thank all of his teachers as well as you can see it's getting kind of wet i gotta head back not sure if this was a great idea but it's okay so thanks for watching and aloha hello hello hello hello hello [Music]

Channel: Hello From Hawaii

Views: 11,398

Keywords: living in hawaii, Life in hawaii, what is it like in Hawaii, Moving to hawaii, hello from hawaii, hawaii, oahu, honolulu, hawaii life, life on hawaii, hawaiian life, teaching in hawaii, moving to hawaii to teach, teach in hawaii, hawaii teach

Id: PD6A0qC6L3Y

Length: 11min 38sec (698 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 01 2021