Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average • Hacker News Board

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#101

Post by fidotron » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 5:33 PM UTC

olihb wrote: post #82

fidotron wrote: post #2

Underneath this is the simple fact that educational standards in Quebec are disgracefully bad. A frightening proportion of kids never graduate high school either, and making it into McGill is near the upper reaches of achievement for those that do. This is going to provoke a lot of kneejerk "but it's worse in [x]". No, in the developed world it's probably not. There are lots of dynamics unique to the Quebec situation…

As anything else, the situation is more nuanced. Quebec schools as a whole are pretty good: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/editorials/quebe... The problem is that good students are mostly in private schools and specialized programs (international programs) so "regular classes" in public schools contain a lot of low performing students and students with disabilities. My gf is a public high school teacher…

So if 60% of the 80% condemned to use the public school system are failing to achieve the already lowered standards this is mere nuance?

What you have in Quebec is an elite (both english and french speaking) that gifts their children a private bilingual education with actual competition while they actively deny those rights to the rest of the public. Poor monolingual french speakers are actively screwed from birth to such a degree that they don't even notice how bad it is.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#102

Post by ashark » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 5:34 PM UTC

bduerst wrote: post #88

ashark wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(not disagreeing, just documenting) The benefits of being a teacher in the US: - Summers off (mainly a big deal because other professions have very little paid leave, not like the 4-7 weeks + holidays common in Europe) - Very friendly to taking time off to start a family (thanks in large part to unionization. See previous item for why this is a big deal in the US) - Health insurance usually good (Only matters because…

Whoa - which U.S. state are you in? Most of those benefits are not really as good as you make them out to be. My dad is a teacher and just announced his plan for early retirement this week. With the stripping of teachers' collective bargaining rights there have been severe drops in take home pay and changes to their benefits. He actually makes a little more money if he retires now than if he waits five years for some…

Right, hence:

- Decent to good retirement, assuming politicians don't find a way to raid it.

...

- Little respect/demonized by politicians. Relatedly, many benefits above under constant threat.

The benefits were a bit idealized, yes, but I think I qualified them fairly well.

[EDIT] And to be clear, I wasn't trying to paint a rosy picture of teaching as a profession.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#103

Post by jeremiep » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 5:34 PM UTC

herge wrote: post #71

woud420 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is pretty sad. Having gone through the Quebec education system and now reflecting over it, I can relate to that student. It seems to me (of course I'm biased but...) that french and history were always seen as more way more important than math classes and that is very unfortunate. I was very lucky to be able to skim through french and math for most of high school. I didn't have an interest in french grammar and…

I don't think you went to the right school. It was made very clear to my classes from sec 3 onwards that taking "higher level math" (436, 536) would open a lot more doors in CÉGEP and university. On the same topic, I firmly believe that CÉGEP offers the best general education in the world for 17 to 19 year olds.

How can you say best education in the world? Have you studied all over the world to have a point of comparison?

I've been to three different cegeps and they all had their share of clueless teachers.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#104

Post by foobarqux » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 5:34 PM UTC

runeks wrote: post #67

foobarqux wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. The respondents may have just applied a mechanical procedure and did not do any kind of sanity check.

> The respondents may have just applied a mechanical procedure and did not do any kind of sanity check. That's exactly what rayiner is saying: they don't understand what they're doing, they're just applying some formula, because they've been told to apply that formula.

I'm saying you can understand the concept and still fail to do a sanity check using that knowledge.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#105

Post by streptomycin » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 5:34 PM UTC

growlix wrote: post #18

aianus wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that work? If you're so educated and skilled, can't you make loads more money in industry than teaching snot-nosed teenagers to solve linear equations? Or does making lots of money not matter as much in Finnish culture?

Finland both pays and respects its teachers. This is not so much the case in the US, where teaching is viewed as overpaid babysitting. Also, prestige/symbolic capital is a powerful motivator. It seems to me that in the US, wealth is a major contributor to prestige, so they're often not dissociated in professional attainment.

Teachers in the US are paid more than teachers in Finland: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/09/09/business/econ...

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#106

Post by jessaustin » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 5:35 PM UTC

danielweber wrote: post #76

jordigh wrote: post #36

As a McGill math grad, I must say that it was a running joke in the math department how the Education students didn't really need to know any math (some B. Ed. students shared classes with us during the first year or two). The B. Ed. students freely accepted this joke and were quite self-deprecating about their mathematical skills. Several of them even felt cheated for taking our "advanced" math classes which were, i…

Several of them even felt cheated for taking our "advanced" math classes which were, in their opinion, far beyond anything they would ever have to teach in high school or CEGEP. Are you saying that people would go to school to be math teachers and say "teach me the math I need to teach my students"? That's nuts. I can't imagine a Spanish teacher who only knows the Spanish in the textbook. Or a woodshop teacher who on…

I can't imagine a Spanish teacher who only knows the Spanish in the textbook.

I don't need to imagine her; she taught me for three years in high school.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#107

Post by Squarel » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 5:35 PM UTC

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #28

japhyr wrote: post #3

I teach high school, and a colleague of mine went to an education conference a couple weeks ago. She was sitting at a table with three elementary school teachers. They were talking about how to gauge student progress when the students had taken a 100-question test, and a 50-question test. None of the three teachers realized that you had to scale the test scores before making a comparison between the two tests. These…

> I knew a bright young student who loved learning, but hated school. Of course. Any bright student realizes that school has nothing to do with learning, and furthermore often interferes with it. If schools existed to provide food instead of education, they'd start by lining up all the kids at the beginning of the week and doling out a single crumb to each. And if those crumbs happened to be rat turds instead of crum…

I enjoyed the learning part of school, apart from classes I had no interest in, and was terrible at.

The alternative to school currently is homeschooling, and, I do not feel that I would be able to teach my children the range of topics covered at school, and ensure they understood them, even with a university education in a STEM subject.

My role therefore is to pique their curiosity about life in general and the universe, and allow them to explore questions, and show them why the world is so cool. This then enables them to use what they have learned in school to form bigger questions and answer them themselves.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#108

Post by hdctambien » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 5:38 PM UTC

sp332 wrote: post #53

japhyr wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a conversation with a math teacher from another school not too long ago. Both of our schools require a minimum of two credits of math to graduate. My school allows students to spread this credit out developing a deeper understanding of basic math, and beginning algebra. His school requires everyone to receive a passing grade in the equivalent of Algebra 2. The lowest passing score at my school is a B-; at his s…

Sounds like your school is suffering from grade inflation. The average grade used to be a C. (At my college, it still was.) If you tell the teachers that a C is a failing grade, they will not give a C grade to a student who's doing an OK job in their eyes.

Is it more useful for your grade to tell you how much of the topic you know in relation to the other students in your class (C = the average grade) or for your grade to tell you how much of the topic you know (A = you understand everything that was taught, B = you understand most of what was taught, C = you understand some of what was taught...)

If you fit an entire class on a bell curve and give out 1 A, 2 B's, 4 C's, 2 D's and 1 F but the highest grade was actually a 32% would those grades be useful information? Sure, the A student knows more than the C student ... but none of the students really understand any of the material.

Edit: by "how much of the topic do you know" I actually mean "how much of what was taught of the topic do you know"

Ie, if the teacher taught you how to graph a linear equation and you can graph a linear equation, then you should get an A. If you can't graph a linear equation, you should get some grade less than an A. If nobody in the class can graph a linear equation, then what use is it to give an A to the person who can't graph a linear equation, but does it less wrong than everyone else?

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#109

Post by throwaway283719 » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 5:38 PM UTC

aroman wrote: post #91

Oh my god — I can't believe it. A professor of mine in college (I'm currently a freshman — this happened a few months ago) told me a story _exactly_ like this — just at the University of Pittsburgh Masters in Education program and wherein nobody knew (or cared) that 1 was not a prime number. I may be more dumbfounded now than I was sitting in his office during office hours... one is an anecdote, two is pattern.

In fairness, thinking that 1 is a prime number (or just not knowing that it isn't) is in quite a different league to not knowing how to calculate the average of a list of numbers.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#110

Post by bradleyjg » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 5:41 PM UTC

foobarqux wrote: post #104

runeks wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The respondents may have just applied a mechanical procedure and did not do any kind of sanity check. That's exactly what rayiner is saying: they don't understand what they're doing, they're just applying some formula, because they've been told to apply that formula.

I'm saying you can understand the concept and still fail to do a sanity check using that knowledge.

It's the difference between understanding in some abstract way and internalizing.

Once you've internalized a concept something that is so far out of whack would immediately look wrong. For example:

23894739 x 23894739 = 2

I would expect anyone who has internalized the rules of multiplication to immediately and intuitively reject that. Not that they could tell you what the correct answer is, but know that can't be it at a glance.

The claim is that the concept that the arithmetic mean is going to be somewhere between the extreme values in a list is simple and fundamental enough that it should have been similarly internalized by university students.