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keep bullshit job, donate to schools
Do online teaching while on the clock at the bullshit job
I'm gonna say no. Cushy is good, a lot of people wish they had cushy.
From personal experience, I can only advise that you avoid school teaching as much as possible. It’s a horrible, thankless job that puts you in numerous no-win situations. I’ll spare you the full length report, but speak to a number of teachers and you’ll hear plenty of sorry stories. Speak to any ‘good’ teacher and they’ll tell you how much it sucks to care about the job and be powerless to do it well.
My advice, keep your cushy job, and find a hobby or something else that you can enjoy or feel fulfilled doing and use your obscene income to fund it. Teaching is generally a pretty thankless and shitty job. There are always exceptions, but you probably won't be any happier and you'll have far less money.
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summer vacation isn't as long as you think, what with keeping up with your teaching license and your turn at summer school
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Beware, the job has just as many things that make it hateful as any other, being hamstrung by policy, uncaring incompetent superiors, what/how you may teach
Source: grade school teacher friend who vents to me
While teaching is supposed to be about giving kids the best possible start in life and while it's hard to think of more critically important influences on a young mind's development, the testing industrial complex and the lobbying juggernaut that it pays for can and will go out of its way to make you feel as precarious as possible and strip you of as many opportunities to actually inspire students as it can in favor of more testing and more test preparation while paying you less to do more and to pay for more out of pocket.
I don't regret teaching, but at present, I'm in no rush to return to it. 
I can't say whether this would be a good decision for you to make, and I doubt anyone here could.
However, if education is something you're passionate about, I might recommend looking into adult education to see if it's right for you.
I love my job. It's hard. It's emotionally difficult. My students have been failed by society at every level: they are in prisons, they live in tents, they are parents, they are addicts, they have learning disabilities, they are adults who cannot read full sentences or do basic arithmetic. They are people who have had every opportunity taken from them, but they are showing up, not because parents are forcing them to, but because they want to learn and grow.
Also, there is much less oversight about curriculum, so I have been able to build a curriculum that favours abolitionist viewpoints (which resonates, obviously, with many of my students who have been criminalized since childhood), Indigenous perspectives, queer ideas, and even Marxist teachings. Who will stop me? The schoolboards truly do not give a shit about these people and have already given up on them, and the educational authority of the state (not being specific so as not to dox myself) is not willing to invest the time and resources into actually providing and enforcing guidelines on my curriculum.
What I do is heartbreaking, and tiring, and deeply rewarding. I just helped a woman get her high school diploma in her eighties, who was a grandmother that believed dropping out of school to work and raise her kids had meant that she would never have that opportunity.
Not trying to proselytize, but education is truly such a powerful part of growing communities, and so if you have a feeling that it might be for you, it's at least worth looking into.
IDK. It's not really reasonable to expect that everyone has a job that makes the world a better place. It's just your job. If being a techbro permits you the time and material comfort to have a dignified existence and you're not doing anything uniquely harmful (like working for the NSA etc) then like, w/e get that money and tithe 10% to a local org or something and use some of the extra time you get to help organize.
If you want to change because you really hate your job and you genuinely want to teach, then yeah cool but don't forget yeah you get summer vacation but you'll also like you say really have to work.
Just don't become a teacher because you think it's A Noble Job and you think it's very important for you individually to feel like you have A Noble Job so you can consider yourself A Good Individual.
I'd further add that you wouldn't necessarily be making the world a better place by becoming a teacher anyways unless you have some reason to believe you'd be a better than average teacher in comparison to other teachers in your area. There will still be the same number of teaching jobs but your inclusion in the labour pool will make other teachers getting a job (who maybe don't have an option to become a techbro) incrementally harder.
I suggest you volunteer/substitute/teach part time before committing fully to it.
Do online tutoring to see if you're cut out for teaching. You can do it for free or you can squirrel away the money and use it while you get your teaching certificate.
i was a high school teacher for seven years. it was hard, rewarding work. and i do not want to go back because my current job also contributes to society and is a tenth the effort
Use your money to fund communism
Sure I guess so.
Or just learn to code
if i never learned to code, i wouldn't be in this predicament to begin with
You aren’t coding hard enough, I think.
Is learning to code even valid anymore after generative AI?
I'd expect there to be a lot less space for jr programmers because of this.
Also, the interest in increasing the reserve army of labour on the tech industry. All around the world, especially the south hemisphere, there is neolib push for "learn to program". The 90'-00' classic "learn graphic design".
Not saying people should't follow jobs in tech (especially if the like it) but, with the busting bubble, is viable being a jr in the current year?
The productivity bump of generative AI for programming is massively overblown. Whether or not the hype has hiring managers expecting junior devs to output twice the code in the same time as they would have been expected to 5 years ago is another issue.
There’s less space for juniors right now because the market blew up after all the free money dried up and now people graduating college are competing with people who worked at Facebook for a decade. Layoffs were no joke.
Speaking from my own experience. Absolutely yes it is valid, but perhaps not just "learning to code" for the sake of it with no specific direction or specialty in mind. Gone are the days where you can get a $100k/yr entry level job at "FAANG" by going through a 3 month Javascript boot camp (if those days ever existed, I wouldn't know because that was not my personal path).
Generative AI can certainly do some tasks more easily, but it makes a lot of mistakes/hallucinations, so it still requires a solid programmer to first be able to break down and articulate smaller pieces of a whole via prompts, and also to identify issues with the output and deal with them. Used as a tool (and nothing more), to write smaller pieces of code for a larger project it is quite powerful and speeds up development.
It however is not going to write your company's "secret sauce" proprietary business logic for you, or finish the whole project in one go. There are also still many specialties within comp sci generally that AI can't help with because they require a human touch.
Why not do private tutoring as an interim step before trying to drill the state mandated curriculum to 30 kids at once?
I'm in the same situation and the unhelpful answer is that it really just depends on whether the trade offs are worth it to you. I left academia because the pay is unsurvivable. I'm now in private industry (yuck) but I don't have to skip meals and hand wash my laundry any more. I don't have any employees (I am the employee) so I'm not exploiting people and don't feel guilty really but obviously I wish I was working for state-owned industry or employee-owned industry. I dislike my job but I think I dislike being impoverished even more. I'm not 'rich' but I never want to be on the verge of homelessness. I've found that cutting back on work hours to do hobbies I enjoy helps a lot. I'm thinking of saving up enough to take a few weeks to a year off at some point to do other shit. Sort of like living two lives.
This would depend highly on what it is you’re doing now, and what grade(s) you want to teach
for all intents and purposes, nothing (techbro)
ideally high school
You should make yourself financially bulletproof first, and have some investments. You'll have to do real work, which might not be something you're used to doing. Don't delude yourself that it'll be easy, your current job is undoubtedly easier than teaching.
But that said, yes you should, if it's not stupid for you to do it. You can't help change the system by helping capitalists, the best thing a leftist can do is either join a union or become a teacher. Pick a job to make money, or to help society. The middle ground exists purely to make losers feel better about existing inside capitalism.
Talk to me in six months! I went from STEM work to substitute teaching to now completing an alternative certification program. Definitely DO NOT go to graduate school. If you do not have an education background, you will have to slog through 2-4 semester of prerequisites.
I strongly encourage you to try substitute teaching or para-educator work to see if that environment actually works for you. For me, I do best in heavily structured environments with little screen time, in care work, and in public facing roles. Teaching hits all of my buttons.
Yeah, you should. You will always feel worse with yourself for not having the balls to quit and try just because of the easy money you have now, unless you are an empty shell of a human being which you don't seem to be. We need other things to actually feel like we have lived and seized the day and all that, which is something we tend to care about a lot as we get older. Speaking from experience (I started a new career at 35, and don't regret it in the slightest).
I go over this all the time. Notice comments saying use free time to do something good but cushy corporate jobs are so draining any free time in the week is used to recover and the weekend is too short and the work looms in the back of the mind.
I was checking up on public sector jobs that could pay comparably recently, just to get an idea of what else is out there, and there's a lot actually. I reccomend checking those postings or just random job boards filtered for comparable salary. I half thought about being a plumber just because I knew some plumbing stuff(but didn't want to deal with sexism). But there are options.
I also wanted to go to teaching by with the pandemics and shootings, I changed my mind.
I've been teaching for a long time, and honestly the answer is... maybe
It can vary a lot from state to state, municipality and school to school. There's no guarantee it's going to be better or more fulfilling than your current job, but it might be. Anyway, feel free to DM me with questions if you like.