I just read an article on MSN which discussed whether teachers are over or under-paid.

I must say that this subject really pisses me off. “Teachers” are not under-paid. “Good teachers” are under-paid. And “bad teachers” are over-paid.

Good teachers inspire and students learn, thereby getting the product that teachers should get. Bad teachers bore and waste the tax-payers money.

My sister was telling me how their lesson plans are so by the book (literally coming straight from a book), it seems that any monkey can teach a classroom. How can those same teachers expect to make $60 K a year? Why, because you went to college? Because you had to take the MSAT?

The next step is that our public school kids will be taught by real robots, instead of the “At 9:47 AM the student will read Social Studies” robots we have teaching them now.

Put a real metric system in place to detect the good and the bad and I have no problems paying the truly great teachers six figure salaries.

Then people will say “but if we fire all the teachers we deem as bad, we won’t have enough teachers”. No that won’t happen. You will see an inflow of people that would of never taught before because they knew they could apply their talents to another profession for more money. You will get actual “professionals” wanting to teach, and not the “those that can’t, teach” types that so frequent public schools.

There are many ways you can apply metrics to teaching. Off the top of my head you could rate a teacher on an end of year survey by their students and test scores of students throughout the year.

As it usually is in big companies, the people that complaign are usually the ones doing the least work. So until this gets really sorted out, stop complaining! If you don’t like what you are being paid, go and do something! Write a book, build something, apply what you teach! Be an example that you didn’t just turn to teaching because you were too afraid to get a job in the real world, or you just weren’t good enough.