A Letter to Barack Obama

Obama claims he wants to hear from the people.  So.  Here's the text of a message I sent to him, via the "my policy" link on his webpage.

Your Blueprint for Change encourages us to contact your campaign if we have thoughts about the policies in it.

I want to address the education policies, specifically the K-12. I want you to consider the idea of having science and math education taught by graduate students. You see, I'm an incoming graduate student at UCSC this fall, and while I've been hired as a teaching assistant for the university, my *total paycheck* after I pay fees and tuition is something on the order of $16,000 a *year*. To live in one of the highest-cost areas of one of the highest-cost states in the nation. For comparison value, I rent a 200 square foot studio at a cost of $950 a month. A half-gallon of milk sets me back almost three dollars.

I am going to be teaching *college* calculus and statistics. There is no reason in the world why I couldn't teach high school students, especially in the advanced placement programs---after all, if I'm good enough to teach *real* college courses, logically I should be good enough to teach high school students. I'd be *delighted* to either put aside a few more hours a week to teach a high school class, or to take a year or two off in the middle of my degree---or after I finish---to teach high school full time.

But the thing is, I don't want to be a teacher for the rest of my life. I want to eventually get my PhD and go into R&D work. I'd want to teach at most a year or two of high school full time.

What I propose is that instead of trying to get teachers who are qualified to teach the advanced placement programs, we instead offer graduate students in the sciences a deal: extra financing for graduate school, in exchange for a year or two of teaching high school science or math in their field. We could have the best minds in the country teaching our children, people who are at the cutting edge of their fields.

No more rooting around desperately to find people who are qualified to teach advanced placement sciences, who know more than their students about what they're teaching. We have hundreds of these people already available, who are struggling to put food in their mouths. If we're really promising that we want to fund R&D and education, that we want every student to have the best education they can get, shouldn't we *want* a program that *both* helps the upcoming minds in research *and* ensures that science teachers are highly qualified?

Thank you for reading.

--Teresa Jacobson