100,000 New STEM Teachers Being Recruited

Love the concept, Ken, and I'm so surprised that I haven't seen this concept tossed around. Postdocs are an incredible resource for the country and potentially for young people if some of them went the teaching route.

Dave

Dave:

The concept is great. The reality, however, is somewhat different. Teaching is controlled by labor unions (aka cartels) called the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. They have enormous lobbying clout, which means that what they say pretty much goes. This is why private schools can have Ph.D.-level teachers, but a Nobel-prize winning chemist would not be allowed to teach in a public high school without going back for a huge number of courses. On the other hand, once you are in the system, you are in. I had a neighbor who was a history teacher. One day he told me that he had become a science teacher because it paid better. While he was a conscientious guy, and probably did an OK job, I would have been curious as to how much science he actually took in college. I guarantee that it was less than a post-doc, and was probably elementary biology or chemistry.

In fairness, teaching is more than subject matter knowledge. There are issues involved in dealing with a classroom full of adolescents or teenagers that you don't have in college (or didn't have at one time - after watching the news lately, I'm not so sure) that can certainly require a level of non-scientific skills. It is not clear to me that these should take more than a year to learn.

In the interim, there are getting to be more and more private schools, and quasi-public schools (aka charters) that are not enslaved to the unions. I suggest that post-docs look at these. A couple of courses in the mechanics of teaching will be helpful in obtaining these types of positions.

Dick