Regnirps wrote:

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

Texas did have a good plan to attract business and science folks into
teaching. Haven't kept up to it since I moved but they paid for the
hours needed to get a teaching certificate and paid you to teach while
you went to school at night.

Louisiana, where I now reside, needs to do something, they're about 40
percent shy of having enough certified teachers in the classrooms so
someone's cousin or sibling is teaching without one. Louisiana also has
the best politicians money can buy. At least two ex insurance
commissioners and one ex governor are in the federal pokey for stealing
from the public. And even at that some dumbasses are getting up a
petition to try to let the governor out because he's old and sick. He
was old and sick when he was stealing from the citizens let him rot in jail.

George