Teachers, and successful students

In my K-12 years, I had quite a few fantastic teachers.  The fact that years later one of them couldn't even vaguely recall me, but could clearly remember so many of my classmates, was, however, a tad depressing :)  From math (or, maths as it was called in India) to English to science .... they were good awesome.

When I was in graduate school, a professor, Jim Moore, and I were once talking about the teachers we learnt from in K-12, and Jim said that perhaps it was thanks to all the gender discrimination that he lucked out with great teachers.  His logic was that talented and qualified women were not encouraged to go into professions.  The only one that was acceptable was, well, teaching.  The net result, Jim figured, he had these awesome teachers who wanted to make the best of the only opportunity that society would allow them to pursue.

I told Jim that might be my story as well, particularly because we lived in an industrial town where spouses couldn't easily find jobs.  Teaching--and vastly underpaid at that--was all they could find.  Lucky for me, and unlucky for them! 

Since then, teaching has been spoilt by people like me, who give the profession nothing but mashed potatoes :)

Here is the funny thing:systematic research is leading us to the same conclusion:

In the 1950s, smart women, except for truly determined trailblazers, had few professional options beyond teaching. Ditto for blacks and other minorities. If you had a particularly smart and ambitious daughter, people would say, "I bet she grows up to be a teacher!" While many things have happened to public schools over the last 50 years, one of the most important is that this low-cost captive labor pool of extremely talented men and women has evaporated completely—and along with it the respect that was once automatically accorded to those who entered the profession.

In some ways, isn't it an irony that by "professionalizing" the profession we have ended up with an attitude that teaching is merely a career choice?  "Should I become a police officer, or a teacher?" does not have the same weight as teaching as a calling, as something one would want to do whether there is money in it or not ... (there is no money in it, as far as I can see, and looking at the bills I have to pay!)

So:

the question remains: How do we lure more, talented people to the profession and give them—and the many superb teachers who already exist—the support and respect they deserve?

Unlike a politician, I am readily willing to admit that my response to that question is this: I have no idea :(