Not an opinion, a fact, admitted by your own words... "Teacher salaries may be above the median individual income" Teaching is a four year education, by which after 8 years of teaching you have had 4 years of vacation. Most teachers suck and couldnt explain their way out of a paper bag. Im well aquainted with the education system, my father was an adminstrator, my sister a teacher, married to a proffessor, uncle a professor, aunt a teacher, two great aunts that were teachers, knew everyone in my fathers faculty and dealt with the morons when my daughter was in school. As well as having been a property & school tax payer for 20 years and have seen the school budgets skyrocket 300% over this time, all into the pockets of the faculty and adminstration and the fucking "computer room".
Teaching is
not a four year degree. First of all, you have to earn a Bachelor's in education, which is four years by itself. After this, you can be hired as a teacher, but you still have a limited time to earn your Master's degree before your contract expires, at which point you are not certified as a teacher and you have to look for a new job (in another field). In case you didn't know, earning a Master's degree generally requires at least three additional years of study, and graduate credits are much more expensive than undergrad credits.
Did I also mention I think all college grads are over paid for what they actually get accomplished in this life ? Which is little to none, unless you consider paper shuffling a biggy.
A very large part of that paper shuffling
requires a higher level of education, because it deals with math or field specific concepts that are beyond the grasp of laymen. In fact, one of my friends just graduated with an accounting degree and was hired right out of school for $70,000+ per year, plus housing and travel costs, and she was the only person hired out of dozens of applicants just from our school. The reason for this is that she's dedicated herself to understanding and mastering everything there is to know about accounting for the past four years by studying non-stop, and even taking graduate level courses during her senior year as an undergrad.
Consequently, she's raking in the big bucks because she applied herself to her field of study, she mastered it, and she out-competed everyone else in her field, all of whom also earned the same degree she did. Obviously, she's earned that income. You haven't.
I would rather assume that teachers became teachers because they wanted to expand the minds of their students. Perhaps they are cheated by their college education which surely concentrates more on technical knowlege than how to get the interest of and the point across to hormone charged and socially distracted teens. I know for a fact many high honor children become lost in highschool as teens. Teacher need to learn how to keep interest and stimulation, not become a boreing droning sound of technicality. In too many instances you are dealing with teachers that are fanatics of their field, be it math, science, history or english, so they teach as if everyone else in on the same page, everything is taught on a technical level rather than applied.
I dont think teachers are truely morons, only that they go about their job as a moron that makes assumptions that everyone is naturally... for example: a math geek as they have always been, or a book worm because they have always been. Apply the stuff to real world situations, add some excitement to class and keep everyone on their toes. Make it interesting, not painful. Teach in class rether than sending teenagers with social priorities home with massive study and homework programs to learn the stuff by themselves.
You obviously have no idea what it takes to earn an education degree. My brother is a double major in education and biology and in order to remain in the education program, you have to maintain a 2.5 GPA or higher, including all the gen. ed. courses that you have to take that aren't related to your field of study. Everyone in the education program took classes in high school that they weren't interested in, and every single one of them is taking courses at college that they don't care about, so they're certainly not strangers to that fact of life. Additionally, you have to take classes about
how to teach and earn a satisfactory grade in each of those courses. It's not as simple as mastering the field of study that you care about.
Even after this, many teachers are hired into positions that they didn't apply for, because depending on your concentration (biology, history, etc.) you can be assigned to teach any number of related fields in addition to, or even instead of, the one that you're primarily certified for. For example, since I have a psychology major and a zoology minor, I could potentially end up teaching a paleontology, evolution, human anatomy, anthropology, or genetics course. Some of these fields interest me. Some don't. However, I can certainly relate to students not being interested in a course regardless of whether or not I like it, because I've already been there and done that.
I went down this road, aceing summer school with the condenced highly involved 6 week program after being driven to extreme frustration and boredom by months of droneing. The stuff is easy to learn if they can keep a body awake.
I've taken summer courses at my college for the sake of earning extra credits and I can honestly say that learning a semester's worth of information in three weeks is easier for me, while I share your pain when it comes to sitting through slow boring classes during the regular year. However, you have to remember that a class can only go as fast as the slowest students. When I took math in high school, I was the slow student, and I needed all the extra time I could get, but I also know how frustrating it is when I understand a concept right away in bio, but I still have to wait for the slow students in that class to catch up. Being a teacher requires you to have to find some sort of balance between the two, and it's not always easy.
EDIT: Or did you mean that you took summer classes after failing the original classes? If this is the case, then you're not receiving the same education that everyone else in your class did, you're getting a bare-bone-essentials, dumbed down version of the class.
