On 24 Nov 2003 21:53:16 GMT, (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.

Those teachers didn't get to $60M very quickly, either. They had to
get a Master's, keep taking courses, and teach a lot of years, like
twenty.

My dad was a teacher and I can tell you that they may not spend eight
hours every day in the classroom, but they make up for it with the
time they spend working at home. And the summers off are spent taking
compulsory courses for currency and increasing pay levels.

There's no "working out a system", either, because schools change
learning programs and texts, workbooks, whatnot, constantly. Plus you
have to teach to constantly-changing standardized tests.

Sixty thousand dollars is somewhat more than half of what I was making
when I retired and I was a civil servant, meaning my pay wasn't that
great. I wouldn't put up with teenagers all day for that. Or
six-year-olds, come to think of it.

Did you know that if you're in a fire and get a visible burn scar you
can lose your teaching credential? Any disfigurement can do it,
actually. That's not the sort of thing I'd like hanging over my head.

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 :-)

They're not designed for people who are broke; they're designed for
those of us who took early retirement, like me, military folks, and
some industry folks. Teaching would give us a chance to get more
retirement benefits without having them docked the way Social Security
is.

To he who hath shall be given. Says so in the Bible. Well, it says
more in the Bible than just that, but quoting out of context is a
time-honored tradition.

Seriously, I'm sorry they've been such a disappointment. Keep
looking, as some may be more honest.

Mary

--
Mary Shafer Retired aerospace research engineer