jlrc2

I would say being a HS teacher is "safer" in terms of getting a livable income. There aren't many (any?) places where you'd put in 3 college courses worth of work in a HS setting and only get low 20s in salary. On the other hand, there is less salary upside with HS teaching (not that the upside is high when teaching at university, except in a select few situations).

Teaching at the HS level takes significantly less education and opportunity cost as well. Some people spend 7-10 years on a PhD only to find out they can only find positions where they work like dogs and make 25k a year with no benefits and no progress towards job security or increases in pay.

The key when looking into the professorial track is figuring out your specific odds. How is the job market within your discipline? How is it within your subfield? What track record do the schools that accepted you have in placing people in tenure track jobs? What is the average time to degree? How much debt are you likely to incur on the way to the PhD considering your stipend and cost of living? And lots more variables. In the right situation, though, when all the boxes are checked, getting a PhD can be just the right thing.

Oh and while "loving your job" is one thing, hating your preparation for it is another. I see this most often in STEM fields during grad school where PIs have a ton of direct influence over a person's experience and future qualifications.

I appreciate your good intentions in all your responses so please take my explanation as a well-meaning rather than overly critical. Being sympathetic to the BlackLivesMatter movement but also to those who don't get the appeal, I've struggled to come up with a way to explain the shortcoming of the "all lives matter" response. Luckily, other people have, so I'm going to mush the smart responses I've heard together.

So first of all, the intended context of BLM is not to elevate black lives above others (though I can understand why it could be perceived that way). Rather, it is assumed that other lives are already valued, be that police lives, white lives , etc. when someone says this (generally speaking, of course. Always some idiots out there.). It's not a "me me me" statement, it's a "me too" statement.

The best analogy is to imagine going to the doctor for a broken leg. Doctor is a little dismissive, not sure if you need that much medical attention. Doctor pleads with you that to focus on your one broken leg is unfair, because all legs deserve to be healthy. Of course, who would disagree that all the legs should be healthy? It's just that this one is broken!

The useful premise to take away is that, from the viewpoint of people in the movement, is that society in general doesn't recognize the preciousness of the lives of black people the way it does for majority groups. I'm sure you hear comments that insinuate that committing a petty crime or being moderately non-compliant with a police officer rightly create scenarios where a person loses their life. BLM would argue that maybe if the people paying with their life for small or nonexistent offenses were from groups not stereotypically associated with crime, the reactions would be different.

Anyway, this isn't meant to chastise, just to inform you in a way that finally helped me to grasp these tough issues. These things can be overly simplistic; it's hard to convey a nuanced message to a huge number of people. Even in this small setting I've seen your responses get misunderstood and taken out of context, so I'm sure you can sympathize with that.

Best of luck with your YouTube endeavors and a happy life ahead!

There will be at least 10 essays sent to Tufts about pencils now