Mary Shafer wrote:

We aren't willing to pay for the brightest, though.

Say I'm good at math and I like it, so I can go into teaching for some
miserable pittance or I can go into engineering for three times as
much. If I'm as smart as you're hoping for, I'm too smart to go into
teaching. And I save a year of college, because teaching takes five
years and engineering takes the standard four years.

It is true that teachers usually don't start very high, but in the Seattle area
we have classroom teachers making over $60K and they have summers off and
several one or two week breaks and frequent three day weekends. Not to mention
that once they figure out a system they have a rather short work day. It think
it is a pretty cushy racket with excellent retirement and benefits of all
stripes. I come from a family full of teachers and as a child I thought
everybody had summers off.

I have been occasionally induced to look at special programs to get people from
the sciences into teaching. Since I was laid off I have looked into them more
seriously and so far thay have turned out to be political scams carefully
designed to look good but be incompletable in practice, at least for someone
who is broke :-)

-- Charlie Springer