As far as potential jobs go, I think teachers salaries are looking pretty good.
I know of a young man who went into teaching, kind of floating through college, taught high school science of some sort and decided after 2 years to go back to school and recently graduated from medical school.
You have to like the aspect of teaching of going back over the same stuff, year after year. I think that doesn't suit a lot of gifted people unless you get to do research and write papers at the college level.
One big problem is union rules. A math major may not get a math teaching job is they don't have the math creditation. The math creditation has nothing to do with knowing math, just how to teach the math. I found this out when I found out the math coach in our school had no math background but she got the math creditation. Is that ridiculous? I bet they don't have that problem in Finland where they score a lot higher.
I think the reason you find so many non-math specialists teaching math courses in school in the US (same thing for sciences) is that teacher salaries are so low in the US compared to other jobs in science/engineering fields.
And while we've run into more a few teachers who perhaps weren't Davidson-level gifted, we've also known many more teachers who were in fact clearly intellectually gifted (even in preschool), and who were teachers simply because they loved children and they loved to teach. Having an incredibly high IQ is just one part of a gifted person's self - there is also passion and personality, and I imagine that there are many many inspired highly and profoundly gifted people who come alive teaching in the classroom.
polarbear
ps - I'm not a teacher, just an admirer of many teachers
