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Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

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Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#121

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

djrogers wrote: post #64
growlix wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> teaching is viewed as overpaid babysitting I'd vehemently dispute that chartacterization. I've never once in my life run in to anyone who felt that way, with the possible exception of some politicians and union heads.

Dispute it all you want. It's true. This plagues the lower echelons of society which you may be too distanced from to be aware of. Ask anyone from a school with a large population of students from poor families. When a kid's parents are illiterate and innumerate they tend to not rise above their station.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#122

Post by testguy34 »

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 want smart teachers to take control of education so this s* doesn't happen nearly as often as it does.

This is the job of parents, not teachers. What does take control even mean? Public school teachers have no control.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#123

Post by ptaipale »

danielweber wrote: post #78
akgerber wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Finnish teacher at midcareer appears to make pretty much the average wage in Finland: http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/teachers-salaries_tea... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_a... That said, 'Finland's teachers have high status, professional support, and good pay'[0], teaching 4 hours a day for 190 days a year. One can also presumably make that wage pretty much anywhere in the coun…

Earnest: how hard are they to fire?

Quite difficult. Generally, in Finland, firing a teacher requires an incidence of gross misconduct, such as violence towards pupils.

This is quite rare, though actual statistics are hard to come by. I know of one case in Helsinki area two years ago; this made headlines after a teacher physically removed a disruptive pupil from school cafeteria (generally, touching pupils is a no-no) and someone posted the scuffle in Youtube. The teacher was dismissed by headteacher, but it turned out that at least a partial reason was an earlier schism (perhaps political) between this teacher and the headteacher, and eventually the teacher was reinstated by the local school board.

Generally, firing a teacher is not very different compared to individual dismissals in other jobs in Finland; generally, processes for downsizing companies are not that complex while usually an individual dismissal is tricky.

Teacher salaries in Finland are not particularly good, but the profession is popular because pay in other university-trained professions is low (compared to US, or Germany, for instance) and therefore there are lots of applicants to teacher training. And the students can be assured that there are jobs, which is not the case for many other professions.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#124

Post by Jtsummers »

strictnein wrote: post #57
cs702 wrote: post #4

In Finland, graduate schools of Education admit students only from the top 10% of college graduates.[1] In the US, nearly half of all new teachers come from the bottom third of college graduates.[2] Evidently, Canada is more like the US than Finland. Depressing. -- [1] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Why-Are-Finlands... [2] http://www.mckinseyonsociety.com/downloads/reports/Education...

For [1]: [2] disputes [1]. It states in [2] that it's the top 20% of _high school_ students on page 17. A very different stat. And [1] doesn't say college graduates, it just says graduates. For [2] It's strange when I see these stats. Where I live in the US, 60-80% of high school teachers (depending on school) have advanced degrees (masters or higher). And that's also a weird stat to cite. What percentage of teachers…

IME most school teachers with advanced degrees obtain them from pay-for-grade schools. Those degrees are essential for them to either move up the ranks in their programs or bump up their salary (here in GA a master's degree can be a $10k or more pay raise). It creates a strong financial motivation to get the degree, but they don't actually have time or desire to earn it. Same thing in military service (officer's in most branches were required to have graduate degrees by a certain rank, though at times this requirement has been dropped). Also federal civil service, many of my colleagues in a federal government job got their degrees from schools with lame graduate programs (observing their course work it was no harder than 3rd or 4th year undergraduate work at a second tier US university).

Advanced degrees are like bachelor's degrees used to be. Essential for jobs, so everyone's getting one. In 30 years all our children may be doctors just so they can flip burgers.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#125

Post by VLM »

The funniest part of the story is the article got the formula for average wrong.

The article listed all this "add them all up and divide by how many" but thats totally wrong.

The real way averages are calculated is you write a script for an actor wearing a lab coat to sell more toothpaste, and some liberal arts grad picks a number that rolls off the tongue and sounds good. Sometimes politicians use "average" as a verbal filler. like "like" or "um", it doesn't mean anything numerical it just sounds good and fills space.

So the kids that wrote 18 or 120 are the only kids who got it right. You put your nose in the air and sniff what someone wants to hear about a conclusion they've already drawn, and if higher or lower is better, well, thats what the answer is.

The answer to "whats the average of one 100 and nine 20s" is NOT, repeat, NOT 28. Thats never going to sell toothpaste in TV commercials, sounds terrible.

If you have a system of commerce built entirely on lies and deceit and asymmetric unfair marketplaces, some weird rant about mathematical truth is like asking how many angels dance on the head of a pin.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#126

Post by swalsh »

Retric wrote: post #97
cbgb wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO, calculating an average is something every teacher should have to do many times throughout their career (at the very least for calculating how well individual students performed on a test relative to their peers). Calculating an average is the statistical equivalent of 2 + 2. Who could respect a teacher who had to look up the algorithm for 2 + 2 every time they were asked to compute it?

I would hope most teachers stopped calculating averages by hand a long time ago.

You still need to know the algorithm though to understand it's limitations.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#127

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

danielweber wrote: post #65
3pt14159 wrote: post #33

McGill is not a great university, but it isn't poor either. It doesn't have the pride that Waterloo (our MIT) or Toronto (our... Columbia? Dartmouth? We don't have a Harvard or Yale) has, but it's solidly mid-tier. And this does not surprise me one bit. I've met engineers failing out during first year at Waterloo that didn't know the second law of thermodynamics ("why don't we put wind turbines on top of electric car…

I was screaming about how I hadn't learned anything in math between grade 4 and 8. Nothing. Think about that. We did fraction math for four and a half years I ended up being taught the same thing many times in math classes, but I noticed that my classmates -- even in honors classes -- had completely forgotten the last time we had learned this. They insisted they had never seen it before. The teachers had been through…

I think a surprising number of people simply can't math.

This seems incredible if you're one of the people who can math.

But really, I've known otherwise bright people whose brains fall apart at the first hint of abstraction.

Basic arithmetic is fine, but you can forget about trying to teach them anything more complicated.

Simple equations? Trig? Basic stats? They just can't do them, no matter how many times you repeat the explanations, or how many different ways you try to present them.

So I think it's not unlikely that an aptitude for math and symbolic abstraction is unusual, and not something you're going to find in most of the population.

Remember, by the time you get to a university you're in the top 20% of the population anyway. (More like 10% for STEM.)

So it's maybe not so realistic to assume that's how most people are.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#128

Post by rayiner »

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…

Having a retirement plan already puts you well above average in terms of jobs in the U.S.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#130

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

Roboprog wrote: post #5

Before we get too smug, don't let the education majors challenge you to a writing contest :-) A few years after I finished my BS in Comp Sci, I took both the GRE and the CBEST (California teaching test). The percentile ranking skew between the two populations was interesting. A 98th percentile ranking in "verbal" in the engineering group only put me at the 50th percentile ranking in writing in the teaching group. (OT…

Writing exams are subjectively graded. If you're a liberal arts major you've been indoctrinated into the same system as your graders and are trained to write in a style that they are biased toward. Adding essay questions to standardized entrance exams was a huge mistake I'm glad to have missed.
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