Math teacher pay doesn't add up

...damn right!

OK, I am taking a brief break from studying for my 21-120 (calc) final tomorrow to talk about math education in America.

Any fellow SHSer's will surely agree that my grade got royally screwed over, on the whole, by math teachers. Brown was out for a long time (semester?) in 7th because of her stroke, and Dunn had a hernia or something in 8th and was out for over a month, as I recall. Granted, neither of those were the fault of the teachers and as a whole those two were good teachers.
Then there was Schulteis. Gratefully I never had him, but I feel terribly sorry for those who did. Basically, they learned nothing that year, making Geometry, even with good teachers like Lampert, very difficult. Then there was Marx in 11th grade. I must say those recordings are comic gems, but surely that class did no good for peoples' math educations.

Now, up through 11th grade I was extremely fortunate compared to many of my friends. I had Goodman in 9th, Lampert in 10th and good 'ole Bowdish (Z-Bar!!) in 11th. However, in 12th I was 'tricked' into Murray's class. I took AB calc thinking that I would get Thor (Mr. V) and all would be well. Instead I got Murray who got into teaching because he was fired from Raytheon, where he had programmed radars. I'm sure his leaving Raytheon had nothing to do with the fact that he had escaped taking any physics classes in the course of getting his MS in math. My God, that's why our missile shield doesn't work.

Anyway, my point in bringing this up is that it seems that the people who are 'good' at math, but likely couldn't find a job in industry are drawn to teaching because the high demand for 'qualified' math teachers. Now, kudos to them for choosing teaching, but I wish they'd just as soon get another job if they're going to do a half-assed, piss-poor job of it.
Bad teachers, especially early on, will only discourage students from pursuing math-based education (including science) later on.

That's the problem with teaching in America in general, aside from the relatively rare, self-sacrificing person who goes into teaching, potentially turning down much higher-paying jobs elsewhere, it's largely (at least in science and math, it seems) people who had trouble getting higher paying jobs in industry (except for Chief, who became a teacher to avoid being drafted, as he said so himself) that become teachers.
This is especially a problem with the rigid payscale applied to teachers, and the fact that many public school-systems are woefully underfunded. SHS lost an amazing Chem teacher, not because she retired (though she certainly could've), but because she was only being paid about 1/2 of the salary she deserved and some school district in NY could pay her what she was slated to get (though she deserved about twice what the payscale would've given her...Long Live the Doc!)

Now, to soothe the anger of anyone who thinks I'm ragging on teachers, I must say that I'm incredibly grateful to all my teachers over the years. I've had tons of amazing teachers, and in most cases I have no complaints. In many cases, the bad experiences I've had were more the result of obnoxious/insolent students in the classes, rather than the teacher being 'bad.'

To teachers everywhere: Thank you, perhaps someday you'll be paid what you deserve.