That’s true of some people, but it’s hardly a blanket statement that holds for all (or even most) people with scientific education.
Count me in as a software developer who would be very interested in teaching if the incentives were better. I have experience working with children in day care and summer camps, and working as a tutor during both high school and college, so I have at least some evidence that I would be good at it. I bet there are plenty of people who become engineers despite not having the stereotypical temperament you mention because they are capable and the compensation is so much better.
I forgot to reply to this bit of nonsense. I am an engineer, but, more importantly, I’m heavily involved in a large conference where pretty much all the attendees are engineers. Some are mediocre speakers, but there are plenty who are fabulous speakers - I’d say at least up to the average of other groups I’ve been involved with. I’m not just imagining this - we collect audience feedback and have collected it for years, and speaking ability is an important measure of who gets invited to be on a panel. So there are plenty of engineers who would do just fine as teachers.
I don’t know that Daniel Webster would be a great teacher, either. I’ve never been a teacher but I think it’s not the same thing as being a public speaker.
The main trait I’m thinking of when I talk about skilled technical people and education is skilled technical people tend to not be very good at repeatedly answering dumb questions. There’s a reason most tech companies don’t have engineers as their salesmen. I’ve seen higher up people who came from the tech ranks at say, companies like HP that were making sales pitches to the government, and when you’d have a totally non-technical person asking essentially the same “dumb” questions repeatedly even the HP executive who had been years removed from actual technical work was clearly starting to respond in a way not conducive to making the sale.
Children are like that x10, I actually have a good memory of my childhood and I remember students would often ask essentially the same question in slightly different form sometimes 10 times in a row. It was one of the major reasons I got bored in school, and also probably why lots of higher performing students get bored. At a certain level of aptitude, some people cannot understand generalized answers, but instead need it take to the absolute specificity of their question. Whereas many people who have been engineers for years are used to people that have the ability to take an answer and apply it to their situation without need for extreme hand holding.
It’s really bad in the early grades. My wife’s a first grade teacher (many of you probably know that already), and you can’t believe the stories she brings home sometimes. Most kids do OK, but once in a while there’s a child that’s stuck on something that to adults seems ridiculously obvious. There was one little five-year-old girl who simply could not understand 0+1 = 1 no matter how often it was explained. Apparently, she just couldn’t get the concept of zero.
Yeah,I have to practice deep breathing pretty often. A kid recently couldn’t tell me whether, if she had ten apples and I gave her fifteen more, she’d have more or less than ten apples. So we modeled it with blocks and she counted them. Then I asked her whether, if she had 20 apples and I gave her 15 more, she would have more or less than 20 apples. She couldn’t tell me.
This is crap. I can find no data that suggests areas of high crime (USA) are the result of incompetent/underpaid law enforcement personnel.
The less capable segments of our society are not over breeding because of lack of access to contraceptives or opportunities to murder their unborn children. This is a cultural issue within that segment that needs to be changed. And providing free meals to their illegitimate offspring is not going to help motivate these changes. Just the opposite: it is actually another reward for unacceptable behavior.
By your standards then, Charlie Sheen would be a great cop and his neighborhood would be crime free?
Somewhere there are geniuses that could solve our crime problem if we would just cough up the money to pay them? Really? Really? really? You really believe this? Really?
Provide a CITE that areas with higher paid police officers have lower crime rates only BECAUSE the cops in that area are paid more.
I had 25+ years in law enforcement, on one of the largest departments in the state, and would have gladly accepted more pay because some know it all on the internet said the crime rate in my district would be lower if I made more money.
Provide cites to your accusations, explain why I had outstanding (A+) performance reviews for my district, and how, exactly, I could have lowered the crime rate in my district simply because of the amount of money I took home, and provide an alternative (BY NAME, A**HOLE!!!:mad:) of who could have done a better job than me by being paid more!!!
I’ve been both (TAing, not elementary school) and there is a lot of similarity. In both cases you need to make concepts clear to your audience and make sure to not put them to sleep. I bet Daniel Webster would have made a fine teacher.
Well, some do and some don’t. Being a salesman has a lot of other aspects, and I do agree that most engineers wouldn’t make good salesmen. However, all the presentations I get when people sell to me include a salesman and a technical guy who does most of the actual presentation. I used to do this myself. One of the smartest engineers I know also makes absolutely excellent technical presentations to customers. Now, not all engineers are good at this. In the demo room at one trade show, when one of our engineers was doing a demo, a prospective customer asked about doing a certain thing with a tool. He answered, “that person would be brain dead.” He never did any more demos. But you quickly learn there is only one answer to dumb suggestions: “that’s very interesting, we’ll look at it.”
I’ve seen exactly the same thing happen at question periods after talks, and in technical meetings. A good teacher tries to figure out the underlying misconception behind the question. When I went to school we were tracked, and I was rarely bored, and I’m all for this - but it just means that the misconceptions are at a higher level.
Good teaching takes real smarts, because it involves continual problem solving. I went to school in the '50s and '60s, in some of the best schools in New York, and I remember very few teachers who weren’t smart.
I’d think about teaching, but my company just refuses to fire me.
The “less capable” are hardly the only ones breeding out of wedlock as a quick glance at the rags in your supermarket checkout aisle will show you. The rich can just afford it better. People have been moaning and groaning about this for thousands of years - if you think you can change our inbred sexual habits have fun, but I’m not going to be holding my breath. Actually I think teenage pregnancy rates are going down, but they’ll never be close to zero, not on this planet.
Notice he didn’t respond to my point about countries who don’t pay their cops being awash in police corruption. It is astounding how bankers and public workers have entirely different motivations and psychology according to the right.
Notice how I don’t give a funk about North-South Fuckuland? I don’t live there nor pay taxes there. You’re attempting to compare apples with orange flavored testicle cream. We are talking about the compensation of law enforcement officers in the USA, not some banana republic you’d rather be in.
There’s a strong Charlie Sheen vibe to your post, true, but that has zilch to do with what I said. If you’d care to take a deep breath, apologize for your insults, and try again to debate like a grownup, I’ll be happy to answer your questions.
pkbites, you’re way out of line here. I’m giving you a formal warning for this post. Your career in law enforcement is not being criticized, so you need to stop taking this personally.
It’s not about any one cop: it’s about the overall caliber of the force you get. Look at it the other way: if every city in the country only paid cops $15K a year, wouldn’t you expect the overall quality of the force to decline? Forced by the need to eat, everyone who was capable of getting a job for any more money would leave, leaving only the absolutely least competent. As the overall competence of the force declined, crime would go up. It’s the same idea in the other direction: pay cops more, and more people will compete for the slots. More people competing means that you end up with an average higher level of competence, which means you get a more effective force overall, which means less crime over time. Now, you hit a point of diminishing returns at some point: at 200K/year, everyone who is even a little interested in being a cop probably all ready is, so you won’t get a higher caliber of applicants by offering $350K/year.
It’s not about the quality of work done by good people already in the profession (law enforcement or teaching). It’s about attracting people who aren’t even in the game right now, and using them to replace the people that won’t or can’t do good work whatever they are paid.
At it’s core, he’s making an economic analysis and saying that if you want the best teachers, you have to pay in such a way that will be competitive with private industry.
You already see this to some degree in higher education, where even non-tenured engineering professors at state schools can make over $100k per year, yet a respected, tenured late-career English professor probably makes half to three-quarters of that if they’re lucky.
I was acquainted with a good proportion of the “best and brightest” at my school (Texas A&M) while I was there, and very, very few had any intention of becoming a primary or secondary school teacher. There was no prestige and no pay involved. Everyone wanted to be a doctor, lawyer, software developer, accountant, etc… but not teachers. I guarantee you that if teaching had paid $50k out of the gate, things would have been much different.
The issue of poor students is a separate issue, but I believe better teachers will find ways to engage the parents that lesser teachers might not. And over time, those better teachers will move into being principals and administrators and the quality of those jobs would improve.
Well, yeah. But what will it cost? That was my question. I know why he’s saying what he’s saying, but are we, as a society, willing to pay that much? Or, can we pay teachers that much and somehow reduce costs elsewhere in the system? It just seems pretty pie-in-the-sky to me.
Alright. The A**hole comment was way out of line as this isn’t the Pit. It was extremely rude and ungentlemanly. I regret posting it and humbly apologize.
But I still want to see some data, or even a quote from a chief, a mayor, or some other official that the elevated crime rate in their given area is a result of police officers not being paid enough.
Somewhere there is a group of people out there that could teach our kids better and make us safer, if only we would cough up the money so we could recruit them. This belief is not only absurd, it’s an insult to those that are already doing those 2 jobs. The belief that paying those currently doing those jobs more will get them to do them better means they should be fired: why are they not already doing their best?
Where is this magic group of people who could teach or children better, and patrol our neighborhoods more effectively? What are they doing now? Working as Community Organizers?
Keep on going your way and no doubt you’ll soon be wondering why you have to slip the cop a $20 every time you go near a stop sign, and why the drug gangs have moved into your neighborhood and deal with impunity. Then you’ll be moaning and groaning about the cops and the criminals, and never will admit you’re to blame. Conservatives never do.
The problem with your request is that currently police across our country ARE paid enough, and you don’t have this problem. And you’ve rejected data from countries where police aren’t paid enough. So no, I can’t meet your request.
When police are asked to work more than 40 hours/week, they get overtime, right?
When I’m asked to work more than 40 hours/week, I get my salary.
I certainly do my best during the 40 hours a week I put into teaching, 7:30 am-3:30 pm every weekday. And I put in my best in the extra hour I work virtually every day of the school year also, until 4:30. But I don’t get overtime.
I could certainly do better if I put in another hour a day. But if you’re not going to pay me for it, why would I? Do you think I’m in this for charity? It’s my livelihood.
Now let me turn your question around. If cops would do just as good a job keeping down crime if we paid them half as much, why on earth are we wasting taxpayer dollars on their large salaries? Shouldn’t we cut those salaries and see very real savings to taxpayers?
