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Comment by rdlecler1 | Hacker News Reader

If you're going to inspire students you're going to need a lot of teachers who are experts in CS. Unfortunately, our current education system doesn't allow experts to teach so now someone who knows CS is going to have to go get an education degree as well, just to take a massive pay cut.

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A different opportunity around this is the TEALS[1] program. CS professionals teach a early morning CS class two to three times a week. The member school in my area is close enough to make it to my morning stand-up at work afterwards.

Granted, the teacher stipend is inconsequential so it's much more of a volunteer position, but that's significantly less sacrificial than being a dedicated teacher.

1:https://www.tealsk12.org/

This is true of all subjects, though. The purpose isn't to train world class engineers out of high school, it is to expose more people to the subject and the thought processes that go into it.

> This is true of all subjects, though.

No, it's not. You're not going to do better with your English degree than English teacher so there's no disincentive to becoming one. Hence, students get reasonably competent English teachers.

High School CS teachers, on the other hand, have to be completely incompetent or insane to choose to teach for $40k when they could be writing CRUD apps for $100k.

Ah, but that $100K will last for but one generation as the market is flooded with students that can write CRUD applications.

I write firmware for $90k and I'm insane enough to have always wanted to be a teacher.

Now I'm imagining what "Firmware Madness" would be as a fear mongering video to scare kids away from writing firmware.

>our current education system doesn't allow experts to teach

This isn't true in my state.

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