It's not that I pity those who have chosen teaching...it's that I pity those that could have used that Ivy League name to go on and do huge things. Do I think teaching isn't huge? At the rate of 30 kids in a classroom in an understaffed k-12 school, I feel it is a futile battle, hence the high turnover rate.
Again you're confusing different things. That the battle is uphill for the hapless American teacher is beside the point. The question you should be addressing is: Is the calling to teaching a "huge" thing? Or are you suggesting people take the easy way out each time? That since a socially necessary activity like teaching is beset with practical difficulties, low esteem, and low pay, it should be consigned to graduates of Swampwater U, while the lofty Harvard types take the plum jobs on Wall Street where they presumably do "huge" things like feather their own nests?
What's so "huge" about making a pile of money? By this criterion we should adulate every billionaire drug trafficker or every kleptomaniac Russian billionaire. Yet what have they achieved of enduring worth for their societies? I don't think cheerleading the Gordon Gekkos of this world serves any purpose.
Teaching on the other hand is a calling. It is a socially useful activity. That it's held in low esteem in a venal society like the USA -- a low esteem you echo -- is another matter.
Frankly, I think so many teachers across America are fighting a losing battle in k-12 schools, due to the anti-intellectual culture here in the U.S. of "the true small-town blue-collar American who's too simple-minded to be caught in the corruption of the politicians and the 'best and the brightest' on Wall Street".
Is that the teacher's fault? And people like you are fostering an anti-intellectual attitude by their single-minded adulation of the rich and "successful." Maybe we should build a temple to Donald Trump.
I believe that it doesn't matter how many Harvard/Yale/Princeton kids with ideals you throw at the problem--the problem is deeper than that. I honestly and truly believe that it is a societal problem with lack of motivation to go and learn. So many kids in school, rather than do math problems, would rather shoot hoops/play cards/you name it.
You're running all over the place, not making sustained and coherent arguments. The problem is "deeper" and part of the reason it's deeper is the contempt of commercial types -- including yourself -- for the world of ideas, intellect, and instruction for its own sake.
There is no harm -- and possibly some good -- in Princeton graduates being exposed to teaching, to a different social milieu, and to some of society's problems. Maybe once they reach the cloistered world of executive boardrooms they will have a better appreciation of the links between their decisions and what happens in the broader world outside. A social conscience will do them no harm and may do society some good.
Being a member of a math club/chess club/other intellectual group is seen as a stigma or a niche position. We are no longer in the days of Apollo vs. Sputnik, during which intelligence was king. These days, we have abundance of everything, and most want instant gratification, and see studying as a stigma.
So? I don't understand your line of argument. Your different "points" are not welded together to make a coherent argument.
Anyone out of TFA who can motivate those kids to actually see intellectualism as a guiding light in my eyes is a hero and commendable--however, this also begs a couple of questions ...
And now you seem to be contradicting yourself. Earlier you've been claiming these people have been wasting their time and should be going on to do "huge things"; now you do a
volte-face and claim that if they succeed as teachers they are heroes. Surely these two statements are at odds with each other?
