Pay Teachers More

[raspberry_hunter]

@MandaJo

As a teacher of high school seniors, I know plenty of kids who go into engineering because it’s the highest paying alternative for the math-and-science types. They are HEAVILY steered that way by their math and science teachers and guidance counselors. Now, I am totally willing to believe that many of those don’t graduate as engineering majors–but they more likely switch to CS or MIS or a pure math degree. Those are the kids I’d love to have look at education.

I’ve probably had half a dozen extremely talented kids tell me over the years that they would pursue teaching if it paid better. Boys, especially, even now, feel pressure to make enough to support a family. I’ve had a student ask me “why are you a teacher? You’re so smart!”. And I have to figure that for each of these, there’s plenty of others that dismissed the idea before they even made it to my class, or never discussed it with me.

I feel hesitant introducing my own anecdotal experience into GD, but this was me. Physics major and grad student. Tutored a bunch of kids from the time I was in high school in math and physics; was a math teaching assistant for nerd camp for two summers, half a summer of which I took on some teaching responsibilities because the actual teacher (a sub) was crap. Oh, I wanted to be a math/science teacher! I took education classes on the side in (physics) grad school and was on track to be certified by the time I graduated.

…The first class I took that required going into a real classroom fixed that. The conditions were horrible – the teachers didn’t seem to be given any respect by the administration, let alone the students. And when it turned out I could get an engineering job that paid more than twice what teaching did, and treated me more than twice as well to boot, and garnered me more than twice as much respect from others, well, guess where I am now.

Now that I have a kid, I’ll probably end up using some of my teaching knowledge to teach her math and science, and maybe if I scale back working at my job I’ll pick up some tutoring gigs again. It seems a little bit of a waste, considering the need for math and science teachers… but I’m not going to do that. Heck, tutoring pays a lot better and is more prestigious, at least around here.