Recruit Good Teachers and Aim for the Stars

Re “Let’s Shoot for Quality Teachers, Not for Mars,” Commentary, March 7: Poor Margaret Wertheim. Either she’s never been a child or never had a dream.

Kids don’t go into science and math for money, knowledge or power. They go into it for a dream, for novelty, for excitement -- for learning.

Scratch any scientist or engineer (like me) and ask how or why they got into what they are doing. The answer invariably will be “because I love it, it’s exciting.”

Well, if you take space exploration and “the unknown” away from view, no kid will put up with learning differential equations, much less times tables, as part of a boring exercise put together in some bored of education conference room.

If you want to develop scientists and engineers, shoot for quality teachers and shoot for Mars, Jupiter and the outer reaches for as far as the mind can fathom. And then the kids will flock to those courses taught by good, exciting and well-paid teachers.

Irving Moskovitz

Pacific Palisades

She meant well, but Wertheim missed the mark. If the question were, should we fund science teaching or NASA, the right answer would be teaching. It’s not a good question.

In comparison with, say, farm subsidies or the war in Iraq, a few billion dollars over 15 years is a small expense. In fact, it’s well within our current NASA budgets.

A generation of scientists and engineers, inspired by the space program, just proved that water once flowed on Mars -- enormous lakes and seas of it.

If we find evidence of life, or stranger still, things alive there right now, it will change the world -- in the same way Galileo, Kepler and Einstein changed it. Every science teacher dreams of his or her students being part of that.

At the Planetary Society, we petition Congress to fund Mars exploration along with everything else, for decades to come -- for all humankind.

Bill Nye

Vice President of the

Planetary Society

Santa Monica

As an engineer who is now teaching (and specializing in math and science), I wholeheartedly agree with paying math and science teachers $100,000 a year. However I have no doubt that my fellow teachers and the teachers union would have a great deal to say about paying one area of the profession substantially more than any other. After all, what good is it to make a significant scientific discovery if you can’t write well enough to have your information published?

I can’t predict what sort of advances will be generated in science and industry by a renewed effort at space exploration, but I have no doubt that they will be important in terms of future U.S. industrial might and economic power.

That is the real reason we need to pursue manned exploration of space.

As to development of future math and science teachers, we would be much better off to provide inducements for engineers and scientists who are considering career changes to become teachers than trying to convince engineering and science students to become teachers.

I know of only one reason a person enters into the pursuit of an engineering or science degree, and that is to become an engineer or a scientist, not a teacher.

David Williams

Fontana