Of education, I have to say this about it: Most of it is done by idiots.

Seriously, outside of grade school people have no idea how to teach, and most education is done by the students themself, who learn early the most important lesson: Give the teacher what he wants. And if you can learn something useful in the meantime, so much the better. Let me make myself clear; this is not necesarily a bad thing, students should learn to learn themselves, it’s how the rest of life happens. But it takes a lot of pressure off educatores to excel, and that’s a shame, considering what some of them get paid.

I have been very fortunate to have a few really great treachers, and a few really superior private tutors who rapidly understood how I learn, and used that knowledge effectively. I was horrible at math until my parents found a retired math teacher to spend mornings with me in one summer. I went back to school with mad skills, and never looked back. I was fortunate to learn trig from a guy who made me use it in real world scenarios, and then it was hardwired; this was in a day when if you wanted to know the cosine of an angle you got it off a trig table or read it off a slipstick. I learned Statics from a guy who had worked as a professional architect for his whole life- he understood that carrying decimal places out four beyond was ignorant, he reminded us that building to an exact load ignored the fact that Nature loved to surprise us. That class begain with a movie, and from that moment I understood that if something is worth building, it’s worth building it too strong.

Good teachers have an impact. Great teachers can change the world. Teachers that do, and teach because they want to pass on their knowledge, as opposed to teachers who merely teach, are the most vital resource we have.

And I bet none of the $70k plus a year morons in Chicago fill those requirements.