I have a BA in Math and am 2 credits away from an MA in Secondary Education. I've been a web developer for about 10 years now. A math degree is pretty much universally applicable to any profession. Just doing student teaching I found a school district I'll never set for in or have my daughter set foot in. I've had jobs not work out. I live in AZ and currently work for a company in CT and have a handful of other clients. My boss in CT recently mentioned that he may be able to get some work in Data Analysis since I have a math background. There's tons of opportunity out there if you know math. And apparently he's billing his clients at over $200 an hour to do analysis. So it's lucrative as well if you can find work. I'm not sure what entry level pay would be.

It doesn't matter what career you are in, you're going to find places that you just don't fit. You can't change a company. You can't change a district. And you're probably not going to change yourself, so try a different company or district.

One bad experience doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't teach. Take what you learned from that experience and move forward. I switched to a different district for the second half of my student teaching and things worked out very well. I had a student transfer from the first district with a failing grade, she was only at my new school for a couple weeks and got about a 75% on a test she expected to fail. It just re-enforces the idea that the first district can pound sand. I'm very good at what I do and if I end up at a district that won't let me do my job I'll happily work somewhere else.

Genesis also says everything was created from nothing. Even the order of creation in Genesis matches evolution's version of events. The only thing Science hasn't proven about Genesis is that God did it and that he went back to dirt to create man, he didn't grab a couple apes.

You insensitive clod!

I have digital pictures going back about 10 years now. 10's of thousands of them. And video. I don't delete pictures, I copy them to my computer, check them into Subversion and then edit if needed and commit again so the completely unaltered file is available. My subversion repositories are all backed up on a regular basis to an external drive. All the directories are year / year-month and occasionally toss in the day and a descriptive line if it's a special event.

Terabyte drives are moderately priced. Setting up Apache with Subversion isn't too terribly difficult. And any desktop PC will work as a server. With broadband you get a public IP so you can check in photos / video from anywhere you happen to be. All you need is one good flash card for the camera and then download and commit when you need space or don't want to risk the flash drive crapping out.

Keeping photos available is more about having a good system to organize them than the file format or current storage options. File formats aren't going away. If you really are worried though, just save them as BMPs. Uncompressed, straightforward file format that requires pretty much no effort to write a reader for.

Ultimately your resume shows your competence. I got a few salaried positions over the years just putting the date I was going to graduate on my resume (clearly marked as "expected graduation date"). I got my first salary position in my field about 2 years before I graduated. You don't necessarily need the degree. As long as you can show that you're actually knowledgeable and capable and that finishing the degree will not interfere with your work schedule. Obviously, if the issue is paying a debt then you don't have to go to classes so it won't interfere. You might end up with a slightly lower starting salary but that will go up quickly then.

I've been working for a company now for over a year and my boss just recently found out I had a degree in math. At a certain point, they just don't even look at it. It only came up because he was talking about another possible area I could do work within the company. They look at your listed accomplishments and see if you're competent enough to do the initial job they want you to do.

I'm going into teaching. I just finished student teaching, I'll have my certificate for Secondary Ed within a month or two. The *minimum* salary I will be paid is clearly posted and easy to find. There's really no excuse to complain about your pay when going in you know what you're getting into. Schools are free to pay teachers whatever they want above the minimum and many do. Teachers are paid middle class income. If you don't want to earn middle class income, then find a different profession.

And yes, teachers actually have to like their job because if the teacher isn't enthusiastic about what they are teaching, the students aren't going to be enthusiastic about what they're learning. I've been living on 30K for the last few years with a nice house, a decent car, etc. The minimum teacher's salary with my credentials is actually a raise so no, I'm not complaining.

Teaching is not a revenue generating profession. CEOs can quantify their value in real dollars and that's how they get paid. On top of not generating revenue, teachers are barely being ranked on results. By what objective metric can we say that a particular teacher deserves X amount of dollars? Currently we just lump all teachers together and refuse to acknowledge teachers as individuals. Any attack on a particular crappy teacher is turned into an attack on all teachers.

So until that changes, teachers will be paid a decent middle class income. And no, they have no room to complain about it unless they want to change the collective mindset into an individual mindset.

Go into any Big Box store and watch the high end TVs vs the lower end TVs playing the same film.

The first time I saw 48fps+ playing on a TV I thought it was behind the scenes stuff for the movie instead of the actual movie.

That's exactly what a textbook should be. Now, we have about 1/2 a page of actual useful information per 10-20 pages of chapter. A student can actually carry around a reference text. Textbooks today are mostly just question books with no teaching value. I can use Infinite Math to generate questions. What students need is a book that actually helps explain things.

Instead, because the textbooks are useless, they have to rely solely on notes.

Really what has to happen is that people have to decide they aren't going to sign contracts for luxuries. My income has fluctuated so wildly over the last several years that I absolutely will not sign a contract for a luxury. Sure I can afford a $70 a month phone now, but what about 1 year from now? So I go with cheaper, non-contractual alternatives. I pay $37 a month for Virgin Mobile but I can drop it any time and go with a cheaper alternative (TracFone) or nothing at all. For awhile I dropped Netflix, stopped watering my backyard, stuck with TracFone, etc to minimize my monthly expenses.

Contracts lock you into a particular life style that you may not continue to be able to afford. You need to be able to cancel services as quickly as you can lose a job.

People can have nice things even without being rich, but it's the effort to have all the nice things all at once that keeps people in debt and poor. Once the house is paid off, that's $1200 a month I'll have for other nice things. In the meantime, the nice thing I have is a nice house.

MagicJack is all of about $30 a year.. TracFone is probably the cheapest pre-paid plan you can get. You can call 911 even if you don't have any minutes or service days left. If the kids want more minutes have them earn them. Otherwise, 911 is all you as a parent really care they can use. I recently switched from TracFone to Virgin Mobile which is also pre-paid, no contract stuff. $37 a month for unlimited data and 300 talk minutes. Kids mostly text anyway and that's part of the unlimited data. I barely manage to use the 300 minutes of talk time.

Personally, I only care about what bills come in. That's my budget. Anything I earn above that is negotiable for where it goes. I look at my bills and see which I can get rid of. Subtract bills from income (not food or gas) and that's the money you can split between food, gas and fun.

Depending on how old you are, saving money now could be a waste of time. Inflation makes your current dollars worth pennies when you retire. I plan to wait until I'm 45 to even begin saving. That gives me about 15 years to pay off debt instead. I'll be entirely debt free (house and all) which will make the 20 years of saving add up ridiculously fast and I'll easily have a million even without counting interest. And that will be 35 years into the future millions. Not current day millions that will be worthless in 35 years. My current rate of return for paying off debt is about 6.5% guaranteed. I can guarantee significantly more than that with investments so my best investment is mathematically just paying off debt.

Also my year 45 dollars will be worth a lot more than my current year 32 dollars when I'm living year 65.

Also teenagers can get jobs. Set a price limit and make them get jobs if they want something fancier.

You have to realize that teachers teach those misconceptions so they can pretend to teach a particular concept when other essential prior knowledge has not been covered yet. This happens a lot in math as well. For example we covered a problem that could be solved without the mid-point formula but the mid-point formula drastically reduced the complexity. Most teachers would just find a way to fudge it. I went ahead and taught the midpoint formula.

It really is up for debate how much a kid and handle and if we should teach all the essentials or just give them a few hacks so we can teach other parts of the whole. Personally I despise teaching misconceptions but I haven't been around long enough to say conclusively it's not necessary. I just haven't found a particular case yet where it is.

The textbook companies love digital because they can control it and prevent resale. I bought a copy of the textbook my classroom uses for all of about $8 off Amazon. It's something like $100 new. If it were digital only, you can't buy used.

If you want to usurp the textbook companies, you need to start providing cheap, community generated alternatives. Plenty of teachers already ignore the textbooks for the most part. There's no reason Intel and other companies couldn't provide free digital content for various topics that individual schools can then assemble to fit their curriculum.

I'm currently working Khan Academy where appropriate into my classroom so students are more motivated to use it on their own time. But ultimately, I'd like to replace every chapter in the book with free alternative resources that teachers can use. "Infinite Math" is a really slick program that doesn't cost much that can generate problems for many levels of math which takes care of in class practice, homework and tests.

My ex-wife's student loan debt was around $65,000 and I never "made enough" for her and she had no real ambition really to ever work to pay off her debt herself. Which I wouldn't have had much of an issue with if she actually respected how hard I worked and the money I was able to bring in. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with being a highly educated stay at home mom. The divorce cost $30K. The way I look at it, I saved $35K plus life long pain and suffering.

I also walked away with 50/50 custody of our 5 year old daughter, no child support and no alimony. So I also saved $10s of thousands on those areas by spending money on a good lawyer and by self-educating myself to properly handle the personal side of the divorce. It's the stupid shit you do after the divorce process starts that generally gets people in trouble. I also did a lot of work myself so the lawyer had less to do. He was pretty impressed with my fact finding and organizations skills. I didn't waste his time with useless unorganized crap.

So really, the divorce was a bargain.

A spouse should never be a financial or emotional drain.

If you compare the average student teacher ratio for all 50 states and look at their ranking, you will find there is no correlation except when it comes to extreme overcrowding ( > 20). The lowest ranked schools often have just as many students per class as higher ranked schools. 15 seems to be optimal but it's no guarantee for success. The worst ranked state has 16 kids per class on average, and so does the 3rd ranked state.

That's why it's comedy.