Quiet Quitting

I’ve been seeing a lot of articles like this.

Not going above and beyond? I can’t say I’m there yet, but I know people at my job who are.

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This is in every working place.

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Yeah, I thought that as well. But, I see guys just waiting to get fired and seemingly not even caring about it. Teachers, with decades of experience, mind you, not car wash guys.

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For those teachers, does it have anything to do with those different “ideas” being forced onto students’ brains beside math, english, social studies, and PE by new edicts by various public school districts around the U.S. (wokeism, etc.)?

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I doubt it. More like burnout. My school has 2400 students, is understaffed and suffers from well, ahem stereotypically urban problems.

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Yeh. All school districts are seeing higher student/teacher ratios, putting teachers in the position of having to “control” a lot more students in the same given time to instruct something.

Thanks, man. You really know me. :laughing:

Exactly , waiting to get fired so they get severance… Otherwise they would quit.
I think if one is unhappy, quit and find something better, but this quiet quitting BS is just a euphemism for laziness, not life-work balance. I see it as avoiding work and not caring that your tasks have to be taken care of by someone else .
When i was in the Army we had a name for this type of people, and it wasn’t a nice one.

No, this is a new trend. BuzzFeed said so.

New or not, its good that we are shining some light on it.
Employers should start taking responsibility for creating a workplace atmosphere that leads to such things.

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Nah, they don’t care.

If you “quiet quit” they just stunt any career or personal development

If you actually resign they just say (to justify lack of performance) “we’re under-resourced but in the recruitment process” for another sod they can take advantage of.

I’ve gone beyond “quiet quitting” and at the point of being embarrassed that I ever cared :rofl:

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The trend is across all jobs, why are you blaming teachers? The trend is that young people are showing up to work on time, refusing to work during their break times, and leaving work when work ends. If their boss asks them to work overtime, they ask for overtime pay. They are doing the work they are paid to do. That’s also known as “doing your job”.

Placing the blame on teachers is the favorite scapegoat of so many people who don’t have a clue about teaching. If I, as a teacher, “quiet quit”, lessons do not get planned, homework does not get graded, parents do not get contacted regarding behavioral issues or children needing to be evaluated for learning disabilities, and reflections on what is and is not working in the classroom does not happen. No professional development takes place so nothing “new” is brought to the students. Classroom learning comes from a teacher cracking open a book of preplanned lessons that they’ve never glanced at and the teacher reads directly from it to a room full of bored out of their minds children who learn little.

Right now, I absolutely have “quiet quit”. I do not put one more minute of my day into my job as a teacher than I need to to make sure the classroom functions at the level it can function at if I only work 40 hours in a week. This is because my pay is based off me working 40 hours a week. My boss supports me. I have a one hour lunch break and I leave the building to sit in a park or coffee shop or walk around the neighborhood and just exist. I do not think about what needs to be done in the classroom in the afternoon, I do not print things or make materials, I do not make phone calls other than personal phone calls I want to make for my own personal social connections.

I plan lessons, make materials, and check student work while in the classroom during my working hours. If I need to contact a parent, I ask someone from the office to cover my classroom for me. This past week, far, far less was accomplished than at any other time in my teaching career. The classroom was not nearly as set up as it could have been before the year started and I do not care. I have spent the past decade working for 50 hours a week in the school minimum, often as many as 80 hours a week, going home and worrying about my classroom and my students and lesson plans and everything else related to work nearly 24/7. That’s so incredibly unhealthy.

I now have a life. During the prep weeks this summer, it was very weird to me to realize I was getting home before the sun went down. I’ve had time and energy to both think about what I want to eat for dinner and then actually make dinner and clean it up. To think it was normal for me to come home every night and not even have the energy to pick something to order off foodpanda before is telling. I have reconnected with friends who have also realized they’re doing too much unpaid work and “quiet quit”. This past week, the first week of school, was relaxing for me. I spent a few nights sitting on my balcony watching the sun set while listening to music and I’ve had friends over for dinner that I cooked. It’s like I finally have a life to live.

I fully support people doing their jobs until their working time is over and then turning off work and living their lives. It’s far better for everyone’s sanity. Except the boss-mans who aren’t profiting off their unpaid workforce. But that’s their problem.

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The thing is, in the US anyway, employers can’t find employees for the wages offered. People aren’t willing to flip burgers for under US$15/hr. I’ve lost track of how many stories I’ve heard from people whose coworkers that were the “person you go to to fix/solve anything” that put in a one month’s notice, only to have everyone from the top coming in daily to ask what they can do to retain them. Those are the experienced people who are realizing they’ve been abused by the company for too long. “Oh, now you see what I bring to the table and now you want to give me a raise and better benefits?”

The other side of that is young people. They graduate from college with more loans than the total cost of a house, are living with roommates because rent is to damn high and home ownership is out of the question, and they are not being paid well enough that they can actually do anything with the money they earn. It goes towards rent, food, and student loan payments. Maybe they can eat out in a cheap restaurant or have one adult beverage at a bar, once a month?

Right now, it doesn’t matter where you sit on the totem pole, you have more power as a worker than your employer. People are flexing their muscles. Well, not most Taiwanese people, but even some of my Taiwanese friends are. For me, I know I have skills that most others in Taiwan and the US don’t have, so I can double down on my firm boundaries. But even if you don’t have specialized skills, you have negotiating power. Unemployment rates just aren’t going up, which means employers can’t dangle “do you want to have an income or not?!” over your head with any degree of success. Right now it’s “do you, employers, want employees or not?”

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Too much Simone De B and Chomsky= beaucoup French fries and living with parents :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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Yeah I understand your viewpoint, that assumes the business has some reasonable people in it though. The line managers won’t admit that they need to keep people though, it risks damaging face and their egos, and I mean in the West and anywhere. There is always a spin that the manager can give to make the employee look like a nutter or what have you. “Covid affected them mentally and he wanted to leave so we decided not to resist.”

As for the higher-ups, they may take some action to retain people to prevent a mass exodus, but blaming “the market” and other things are always scapegoats for these guys that you can’t argue against, and they manage to sliver out of the grip of reality which is the fact that their unaccptable behaviour is the reason for these people leaving.

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Maybe Taiwanese should be mass quitting. They would love to make even 10 dollars an hour.

Overtime pay? What’s that?

Breaks? Forget about it.

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Thanks for sharing the link.

Just as I don’t understand why everyone loves to blame the teachers, I don’t understand why everyone acts like college debt is something that is only acquired by people who major in something “stupid”. US universities have an incentive to raise tuition rates in order to force students to take out more loans. It doesn’t matter what you’re majoring in, unless you have rich parents (or poor parents who work six jobs so you can go to school), you have to take out loans to cover the cost of college. Even if you go into a “high paying” career, you will still have debt.

Also, remember that society functions on some people having a lot and some people having little. If everyone becomes an investment banker, there’s no one to make your Starbucks coffee or make sure the gas pump is working. They don’t need college degrees? Ok sure. Since you attacked linguistics, does no one need to learn a second language? Do new immigrants not need to have English proficiency? We have no need to understand the history of the English language I suppose? Human migration throughout time is irrelevant to our existence today? Much better to forget the past and live in the moment. Understanding where we came from and what people before us did to help us get to where we are today is overrated.

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You have not been paying attention. @jdsmith is a teacher, he is talking about people he knows from his workplace. He can’t talk about people across all jobs, he doesnt work with all of them.

And he is highlighting the fact that the trend is across all jobs, even teachers, as he can attest because he is an insider.

He isn’t saying all teachers, either. You’ve written these long posts based on a misunderstanding on your part.

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