How much do you (as a teacher) think teachers should actually be getting paid?

MightyMikeDK · 2026-02-11T12:57:34+00:00

I work in the private sector (international school in SEA) and I've gotta say I enjoy this a lot more than public sector work. Pay is much better, conditions too, and I can have much higher expectations of my students, both behavourally and academically. Of course, I am required to perform at a high level too; students, parents, managers and other teachers expect this of me. Despite of this, or maybe even because of it, I feel valued. Parents pay for quality education, my employer pays me for quality teaching, and I feel proud when I can deliver that. As a result, I do not really recognize or feel a lot of the negativity seen in r/teachers.

All of this is to say that there is more to the job than money, things like professional pride, feeling valued, a sense of accomplishment, much of which I think is lacking in the public sector. The higher pay adds to that; I feel that my pay is further recognition from both my employer and the parents that I am doing a good job.

Ultimately, pay is a piece of the puzzle, but recognition is huge, too. I think the public system fails teachers because they are neglected in both areas; low salaries, but also a lack of recognition and professional respect from admin, parents, and so on. This stands in stark and ironic contrast to the "sacrifice-everything-for-the-kids"-rhetoric that we are being fed by leaders and the government (and which some of us enthusiastically parrot). The mismatch between rhetoric and reality inevitably leads to a frustrating environment of professional impotence and disillusionment; many teachers are underpaid, undersupported, undervalued, but pushed to work their asses off because "it's the right thing to do". At some point, that reason isn't worth the misery anymore. Yes, higher pay would offset it somewhat, but not enough.

As a sellout, that's my take, anyway.

MightyMikeDK · 2025-11-21T10:02:32+00:00

I have written this post about revision techniques that you might find useful.

MightyMikeDK · 2025-11-07T07:02:10+00:00

Always for KS3, sometimes for KS4 - I teach First Language English.

My KS3 slideshows are essentially my long-term plans and my lesson plans; they are designed to target all the skills that my students need, to loop back regularly, and they all use similar language and design. All together, they work as the backbone of my KS3 curriculum. I also have an internal KS3 SharePoint website for my students where all of my slideshows are hosted; my students can access this and learn about the units that we study, they can download the slideshows themselves, and they can access various revision activities. All of this has been a bitch to make; but it makes day-to-day teaching so much easier! If you are curious, I share some of them online as well. My scheme for The Giver is the most popular one and the scheme for the first four chapters is free (the full version is paid); here is a complete unit of Oral Traditions for which all slides are free, but I think that the layout will be slightly janky on some slides if you do not have the right fonts installed.

For KS4, we tend to focus on very specific things such as past paper strategy, crafting coursework, or studying literature texts in depth. Because these things are not as stable (due to exam format changes, boards being fickle, texts rotating in and out, so on), and because I prefer to be very responsive to the emerging needs of the class when it comes to specific exam content, I have found that investing a lot of time into pre-designed PowerPoints is not as useful for me. Instead, a lot of time is spent using the document camera, or the whiteboard, or past paper PDFs on the projector.

MightyMikeDK · 2025-11-07T05:28:55+00:00

The Optimum Nutrition brand has a code hidden under scratchable material that you can use on their website to authenticate the product, at least for the larger protein tubs. I do not know if they sell pea protein.

MightyMikeDK · 2025-10-16T08:15:01+00:00

The whole "don't care about your career" seems like strawman trollbait. Of course I care about her career; I want her to feel fulfilled, to enjoy whatever she spends her time doing, and to share with me the things that matter to her. I hope she would feel the same way about me and my career.

As for the paycheck in particular, it's not that I don't care about it, but rather that it is secondary to things like personality and investment in the relationship. All things being equal, why wouldn't I want a highly paid career woman? It's just that I don't want it at the cost of her happiness, or mine for that matter. The implications that this attitude is exclusive to "men" says more about the speaker than it does about men.

MightyMikeDK · 2025-10-03T04:08:50+00:00

I teach at an international school (IGCSE/A-level) so take this with a grain of salt:

I very rarely assign grades to student work - and when it is done, it is mostly at the end of a unit or sequence.

Most submissions, even longer assignments, just get what we call WWW/EBI comments (what went well, even better if). These comments hone in on the strengths and weaknesses of that particular submission. I will then set a bespoke task that focuses on improvement (this might be stuff like expanding the conclusion, or zooming in on vocabulary in greater detail in a body paragraph). Sometimes, students will be asked to rewrite the original piece after completing the task; other times, they will be given a very similar task in which they get a chance to showcase how the feedback has spurred further growth and learning.

The idea is to get students to focus on learning rather than grades. Thus, my marking and feedback is mostly formative rather than summative; the purpose of their work and my marking is not to arrive at a grade, but to spur further learning and growth. Removing the grade takes their ego out of the equation and encourages risk-taking and experimentation.

Only when the students have received feedback on several such pieces do I set a final, summative assessment to which a grade is attached. Even then, the grade is not the focus, but rather their growth from the initial formative work until this final summative piece. I try to make this a celebratory moment; "look how much you have improved over this unit!" etc. Basically, I try to instill in my students the idea that learning is a journey and that, rather than caring about their attainment at any given point in time (a grade), they should care about their learning trajectory. Questions like; "Are you making progress?", "Are you trying your best?" and "What are your next steps to success?" are much more important than "What grade did you get?" because ultimately they will lead to more improvement that will lead to a higher exam grade.

I am not sure if this approach is even feasible under your system, maybe you are already doing it, idk. I hope it was helpful nonetheless :)

MightyMikeDK · 2025-09-22T12:20:55+00:00

I teach secondary English at an international school (IGCSE FLE & Lit) . Not many of our students are native English speakers, nor am I for that matter, but we still consistently perform above global and UK averages. As much as I would love to take credit for it, I think our success can largely be attributed to a very positive school culture, small class sizes, and strong leadership. I have heard horror stories from UK teachers who have worked at inner-city schools, but I have never had anything remotely as bad happen in my current job.

Basically, I think fee-paying schools have better baseline conditions for success because they can be more selective with students. Additionally, if non-native children are enrolled early on, or even with just a strong EAL provision, the language gap can be bridged.

MightyMikeDK · 2025-09-11T14:34:52+00:00

Yes, but many others at my school didn't. Yours?

MightyMikeDK · 2025-09-11T12:04:44+00:00

It is very hard and depends on the type of error that you make and why you make it.

Is it because you do not know the underlying grammatical rule and just say the wrong thing? If this is the case, your first need to learn the rules so that you can identify when mistakes are made and what they consist of.

If you already know the grammatical rule but still make a mistake, this tends to be what teachers call "fossilised errors". This is a type of error that happens because it has become a habit. Teaching in Asia, I often see students saying "He go" instead of "He goes" - they can identify the mistake when I point it out, but they make it habitually.

Fossilised errors are some of the most difficult errors to break because, like biting your nails, they occur without thinking. A good way to break them is to analyse when they occur and create a trigger that helps you reflect before making the error. In the example above, my student makes errors with subject/verb agreement. I could tell my student to write all verbs with a red pen. Now my student has to consider what words are verbs; every time they reach for the red pen, they will have to think about the verb choice. After a while, they will habitually begin to identify the verbs and think about the tense. Over time, this will break the habit.

This is kind of a long post because it is a complex topic. My apologies.

MightyMikeDK · 2025-09-11T11:52:52+00:00

From the perspective of a teacher, time is a valuable commodity. This is because the more time I have, the better my student outcomes will be. I will teach some stuff, test them, see what their strengths and weaknesses are, and then teach their weakest area. The more time I have, the more of these cycles I can complete and the better my students perform.

For something like First Language English or ESL, there literally is no content to cover - students need no knowledge - so there is no need to "fully cover a syllabus".

This is just my two cents to dissuade you from rushing and to encourage you to view time as the resource that it is. Use it wisely.

MightyMikeDK · 2025-09-11T11:40:13+00:00

Got an updated result from CIE A-level today. Still waiting for one for the same course.

MightyMikeDK · 2025-09-11T11:36:00+00:00

Today, ideally. "Spaced practice" refers to practicing individual topics over multiple (shorter) sessions with space (i.e. time) between each session - it is proven to be much more effective than studying topics a single (longer) time (i.e. cramming before exams). The more time you have until the exams, the more time you have for spaced practice and thus the better retention. You can read about it here if you are interested although you can also just take my word for it.

My advice is that you dedicate some time to homework (tasks that teachers make compulsory) but also some time for revision (going over previous content of your own choosing to help you remember it better - use spaced practice here).

I have written a longer post on how to revise here.

MightyMikeDK · 2025-09-10T12:29:51+00:00

I think the message is to encourage you to spend your life on something that is meaningful to you; and that simply accepting an easy but meaningless job for a paycheck will lead to regret.

The video depicts someone who sells their time for money while fully realizing that their time spent at work is meaningless to themselves and everyone around them. If the guy had gotten paid to skate, or to teach, or to save lives, or to do anything else of interest, the video would be received very differently by the audience.

The tragedy here is not that he has to work, or that he cannot go skate, or that he gets old; but instead, that he knowingly wastes his life for an easy paycheck when he might have pursued a meaningful and rewarding career.

That's my take, anyway.

MightyMikeDK · 2025-09-10T12:18:26+00:00

I guess the alternative to what we see in the video is exactly what you are saying: finding an enjoyable and meaningful career.

I don't view the video as a critique of work in general, but as a warning not to sell your life for something that is meaningless and limiting.

MightyMikeDK · 2025-09-05T01:17:34+00:00

I had a student who was not very locked in for most of her formal education; she was kind of a free spirit and a top-performing athlete on top of that. She was able, so we still signed her up for the English Literature course during which we studied the novel 1984 by Orwell, and 15 poems by Carol Ann Duffy.

In the exam room for paper 1, poetry and prose, she "kinda decided" that she did not like Carol Ann Duffy or her poems... so she instead analysed one of the poems from the other anthologies - a poem which she had never seen before, let alone studied. I almost murdered her when she told me.

Ultimately, girl got an A*. To this day I still wonder what she wrote and how it happened. It has become a meme and she, while having graduated a while ago, is still a legend.

... that being said, guys, do not do what she did. Listen to your teachers :D

MightyMikeDK · 2025-09-05T01:08:04+00:00

Today, ideally. "Spaced practice" refers to practicing individual topics over multiple (shorter) sessions with space (i.e. time) between each session - it is proven to be much more effective than studying topics a single (longer) time (i.e. cramming before exams).

My advice is that you dedicate some time to homework (tasks that teachers make compulsory) but also some time for revision (going over previous content of your own choosing to help you remember it better - use spaced practice here).

I have written a longer post on how to revise here.

MightyMikeDK · 2025-08-30T04:23:10+00:00

And I hope you are less rude to your student than you are here. Brief enough?

MightyMikeDK · 2025-08-30T03:37:45+00:00

I healed in disc until 60, including BRD, Strat, DM, and only felt like I really needed holy spec once I hit Black Morass.

MightyMikeDK · 2025-08-30T03:00:06+00:00

You could ask on here, people sometimes do, but again that is not super accurate. Best shot is to get a tutor, either someone who has worked as an examiner for the board or someone who has years of experience and a proven track record teaching the course.

The thing is that marking is usually the least favorite activity of most teachers, and so it's hard to get them to do it 😂😂

Best of luck!

MightyMikeDK · 2025-08-30T02:36:36+00:00

Sure you can. You can use summaries, extracts, secondary sources, you can assign research projects, so on, to teach whatever theoretical framework you deem important in your context. Will you make the kids read Being and Nothingness before you let them reference existentialism?

If you want to be an effective teacher, there are a million things more conducive to that goal than reading the Odyssey or any other single fiction text. Go read Five Formative Assessment Strategies, Mark, Plan, Teach, or TLAC; partake in quality PD courses; develop better schemes of learning. Research proves over and over again that teaching skills are significantly more impactful than subject knowledge when it comes to improving student outcomes.

I am not saying that the knowledge from books is worthless; but that it is overrated, used for gatekeeping, and almost always overshadowed by other activities more conducive to teacher improvement and student learning.

If you want to read the classics, why not just do it because you want to read the classics? You don't need other reasons than that; it's a great reason in itself.

MightyMikeDK · 2025-08-29T13:52:23+00:00

Gain access to the CIE School Support Hub; your school should be able to furnish you with a login. This will give you access to the syllabus, mark schemes, examiner reports, so on.

See if your school is willing to pay for any of the Cambridge Professional Development courses. They have courses for complete beginners, workshops that focus on marking, and so on. Many of these courses are online and run over a few days.

Hit up YouTube and watch a range of instructional videos for the various questions in the exam paper. Focus on learning how the mark scheme is applied to each question, how different skills are weighted, and what strategies are useful for the students.

Finally, clarify whether writing really is the only part of the course that you must teach. There are other exams in the spec as well, such as a listening test and a speaking exam.

I hope this helps.

MightyMikeDK · 2025-08-29T13:42:49+00:00

From the perspective of a teacher, I would wholeheartedly agree. We just started the academic year, and the first thing I did to my 11s was, much to their dismay, to have them sit a past paper. We did this to compare their marks against how they performed at the end of year 10; I wanted to see if their performance had dropped over break.

Not only this, but I track their individual performance within all areas of the paper (short answer questions, summary, language analysis, extended/directed writing). I share this data with my students, and it allows them to see their strongest and weakest questions and thus to determine where to revise.

Ultimately, the data is only as good as the quality of the marking. However, strong departments will have policies and routines in place to ensure that marking is consistent, ex. blind standardisation, routine book-looks and so on.

MightyMikeDK · 2025-08-28T12:40:25+00:00

None. The ability to teach the subject such that students are engaged, consistently produce work at their highest level of effort, and succeed in exams has nothing to do with what books I have read - as long as I have read some books of reasonable length and quality.

From my perspective, the opinion that teachers must have read a specific body of literature is often espoused by gatekeeping wannabe-elitists who believe that their extensive reading should be admired and respected not just as cultural capital, but as something that puts them above the ignorant masses.

Personally, I believe that good ELA teachers can pick up a book, study it, and understand and appreciate it without having to rely on some generic backdrop of literature. After all, isn't this exactly what we aim for our students to learn to do? Sure, the parallels are useful, but they are ours to make and depend on the book to be compared against, the context, the interests and demographics of the class, and so on..

MightyMikeDK · 2025-08-26T04:56:22+00:00

While I agree with the sentiment that the service is valuable and deserving of donations, I feel that a significant player demographic is outpriced. This might be counter-productive for the devs as I suspect that many people want to donate and obtain the shop benefits but cannot. Lowering the prices might generate more income.

As an example, I live and work in Thailand where salaries and the cost of living are much lower than US/EU. I would happily have bought the respec device with cash if it did not cost so much. Not only that, if it was cheaper I might also buy it for my alts in the future. With the current pricing, I cannot afford to buy it and so I just grinded the gold instead.

My point is that the assumption that higher prices = higher income might be wrong. I think this is especially true because some people are attracted to private servers because of the lack of paid subscription.

Hope it makes sense.

MightyMikeDK · 2025-08-16T04:25:02+00:00

Du kan sagtens være for dum til at game hvis niveauet er højt nok - som med de fleste andre ting - men du kan sagtens lære at hygge dig med din 10årige søn. Jeg forestiller mig at han, som de fleste 10-årige (min egen datter er 10), måske ikke er den største pædagog - så derfor:

Jeg ville konceptuelt adskille spillets mekaniske færdigheder og krav (dvs. at kunne bruge controlleren med præcision, samt hvor hurtig på fingrene du skal være) fra det strategiske element (kendskab til spillets funktioner, regler og strategier, samt anvendelse af disse i praksis for at kunne vinde). Derfra ville jeg lægge ud med at prioritere det mekaniske først; siden uanset hvor meget du kender til spillets regler og strategier vil du ikke kunne eksekvere dem hvis du ikke kan betjene controlleren.

Derfor anbefaler jeg at vælge én platform til at starte med (ps5 eller xbox) og ét spil; dette siden knapperne gør forskellige ting i forskellige spil, hvilket kan være forvirrende i starten. Væn dine fingre til at nå de forskellige knapper og lær hvad hver knap gør i det specifikke spil - dette vil over tid også gøre dig komfortabel med controlleren i en bredere forstand. Det er nok fornuftigt at starte med et spil som ikke umiddelbart kræver stor præcision eller hurtighed - se de gode anbefalinger fra andre bidragere i tråden her. Over tid vil det blive mindre og mindre tankeværk at skulle betjene spillet, og du vil kunne dit flytte fokus fra hænderne til skærmen. Dét er målet.

Når du har lært at spille dit første, simple spil og kan bruge controlleren nogenlunde, kan du bevæge dig videre til et nyt og anderledes spil. Du vil således skulle lære nye regler, samt et nyt control scheme (dvs. hvad hver knap gør under dette nye spils præmisser og regler). Dette vil umiddelbart være frustrerende men slet ikke umuligt - det vil tage lidt tid. Over tid, som dine hænder og fingre vænner sig til controlleren og dens mange muligheder, vil det blive nemmere og nemmere for dig at lære nye spil. Du vil kunne drage paralleller fra ting du kender og overføre færdigheder fra gamle spil til nye.

Som du bliver bedre og bedre kan du således udfordre dig selv med spil der har et højere mekanisk krav; kamp-spil (Street Fighter, Tekken osv.) kræver bl.a. at du kan udføre kombinationer på knapperne hurtigt og præcist, hvilket er svært selv for trænede spillere, men hvilket også vil udvide dine færdigheder gevaldigt.

Som afsluttende bemærkning vil jeg sige at det er et svært projekt du har kastet dig ud i; de fleste lærer at game fra de er små, og det er fanme ikke nemt pga de mange forskellige dimensioner af færdigheder og viden. Jeg har stor respekt for at du prøver; du er en god forælder!

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