More ironic...

[Samnospam]

Ridiculous to ask a question? Which you never attempted to answer.

[r3020]

Pay, benefits, and job security has a lot to do with a carrier choice. Why spend 12 years and 100s of 1,000s of dollars to become a brain surgeon when you can spend 4 years and 10s of 1,000s of dollars to become a teacher and live a better life?

[sharksoup]

While in college, had a professor friend encourage me to go into teaching.  She was convinced I would be good at it, find it rewarding, etc.

She got quite PO'd when I told I was not interested.  Told her that the only thing I found attractive about it was having 3 months off every year - and that was a P-poor reason to choose it as a career.  Hopefully those in college now who are planning on being teachers are going into the field for all the right reasons.

[Red Steele]

the tenure system leads to a lot of dead weight. The best teachers that I remember were the younger ones...the ones that had not been there so long. Like any other career, you reach a point where the energy gives out.

Not sure how you address this. Certainly, rewarding teachers with more money and tenure does not seem to be the answer.

[KNAPPer]

I am being nowhere near silly and have simply responded to posts in your thread. The question you asked is if anyone has noticed more people going into education and then you remarked that one would think they would choose another more important or profitable field (people should read for themselves because I am poorly paraphrasing here).

To answer your question, no, I have not noticed more people selecting teaching as a career and I would want to see college enrollment statistics to see. If more people are selecting it as a career, I think it is out of interest in........teaching. Getting a teaching degree and a certificate and then a job is no more easy than getting a Business Administration degree. I would say that if less people are going into engineering or medicine, it is because the courses are harder and in the case of medicine, certainly far more expensive. Perhaps people's values have changed from the previous generation? I certainly would not want to teach anything K-12, but where I work, we have classes come for a half day all the time and I wind up teaching them during that time. It's hard work - wears me out. I'd rather be an engineer for sure. There are good teachers and bad teachers and I have no problems with weeding out the bad ones.

I know you like teachers well enough, but I think you are hiding a little disrespect for them and that is probably due to your politics and your party affiliation. My support for teaching is probably due to the same things and the fact that both my parents were teachers.

[Samnospam]

I don't think being realistic equates to disrespect. If I told a kid they should shoot for being a teacher and not settle for washing cars is that disrespectful to those washing cars?

[GoredHusker]

It's a product of the system.  There's a reason we still have the cliche "those who can do while those who can't teach".  A friend of mine's son is a veterinarian.  He got so frustrated while going through vet. school because almost all of his teachers were those who went through vet. school but couldn't become veterinarians because they couldn't pass the bar.  Instead of trying to hire some retired veterinarians that had actually been in practice, the vet. school chose to hire flunkies that couldn't even become veterinarians. 

I'm not quite sure if they still teach there, but UNL had a couple of professors teaching farm and ranch management after they had lost their family farms in the 80's.  Is this who we really want teaching?  I'd rather have someone teaching the courses that actually were successful in the private sector. 

[KNAPPer]

It is difficult to look at statistics of college enrollments by major on a national basis and much easier to do school by school, but I have found some data that supports the individual findings I saw elsewhere. I'm sure you will want more proof of this, and I'll work on it, but here's the skinny and shows that education degrees are shrinking rather than growing. Still, the sciences seem to be suffering and that's a pity:

This data is from 2003-2005, nationally

Undeclaired = 21.3%

Business/Managment = 15.6%

Health = 12.9%

Humanities = 10.4%

Technical/Other = 9.7%

Social/Behavorial = 7.0%

Education = 6.7%

lagging lower than that are engineering, physics,life sciences and the bottom of the barrel is math.

http://nces.ed.gov/das/epubs/2007165/showTable2007.asp?rt=p&tableID=3673&b=tables_figures.asp%23p1

Here is a comparison chart that runs from 1999 to 2010. It shows a drop in education majors while maintaining the basic trends of overall numbers of degrees in the first chart. Pretty much everything BUT EDUCATION has grown.

To put it like in plain english - you are wrong.

http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/figures/fig_16.asp?referrer=figures

[dairy mom]

Actually teaching is not a sure job career choice.  Especially if you want to live in a particular place.  It's a job you have to go to where the jobs are what with all the budget cutting going on.

[GoredHusker]

Most of the schools here take care of this problem by buying out contracts of those who've been at it 20-25 years.  I'm not sure how it works in other states, but here teachers get a guaranteed raise for eight years.  After the eight years are up, they must get further education.  Basically, those fresh out of college max. out their eight years.  Then, they get their masters.  This puts them up to 16 years of raises.  After a masters, some choose to get their phD which puts them up to 24 years.  Most after 16 years wind up getting further education but it's so they can become either a principal or superintendent.  After a teacher has been at it 20 years or so, they've reached a pretty high pay scale.  The teachers are offered either a three or five year buyout so the school can hire someone fresh out of college at the bottom of the payscale.  In the end, it saves the district a lot of money.  Those that accept the buyout can't teach in the state for the period of their buyout, so most choose to relocate across the state line and teach there while being paid their buyout.   

The biggest problem the local schools have is getting teachers to apply for jobs out here in no man's land.  Unless someone wants to coach a sport, it's virtually impossible to get applications.  A lot of the schools have a working relationship that whenever a job opening gets more than one application they pass the ones that aren't offered the job to the other local schools.  If it weren't for incoming school teachers, our local area would have an abundance of single men.  Both my brother and my cousin ended up marrying teachers who came here out of college.