Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

Having French as your native language doesn't mean French class is easy, and a sizable part of Québec's population doesn't speak French natively.

We have a lot of underfunded school. The particular school I am talking about is next to a train track and a metal foundry (everything was covered with yellow dust and there was smog all over) and uses a parking space as a recreation area (hey, you can play hockey on it during winter...). In 2009, one of the wall/window fell during winter and the kids had to wear their coats indoor for a month, since plastic garbage bags and duct tape was all that was covering the hole.

As for what happened to the math teacher in question, I believe that she had left the school because she had to teach multiple groups (can't remember how many groups, but it was without a doubt too many) that were too bigs and filled with kids that shouldn't have been there in the first place. Learning disabilities, violent teens, etc. all crammed in a small room, groups of... I think it was 35 students.

This is abysmal and unfortunately, it is far more widespread than people like to believe, particularly in supposedly advanced countries.

I've worked with programmers who could not do proportions, compounded with designers, managers etc. who were in the same boat, I'd hear conversations along the lines of:

"This is terrible, X is 3/4 of Y!" "I don't think you got it right, I got 75%, which isn't that bad"

The conversations and quarrels would go on forever, no joke.

Sadly, basic Maths isn't the only thing an alarming proportion of people do not seem to understand properly. I constantly see people with Masters, PhDs and whatnot, in various subjects (from Sciences to Journalism, Economics, etc.), who can't read and write properly. Not only do I wonder how they got where they are in the first place, but what worries me most is that there's clearly no fundamental understanding of the underlying, simple logic. Not meaning to offend anyone here, but simply looking at the comments on HN, a lot of people are guilty of bad spelling and questionable grammar, and I'd argue most people here are supposedly more educated than the average person.

I see schools competing on how they're teaching four year old kids additional languages, ten year olds how to make mobile apps, and the list goes on, but I'm yet to see a single school that advocates teaching simple logic. For instance, how about teaching grammar again? Most of my friends can't tell the difference between a noun, a proverb, a verb and so on. Not that the nomenclature matters, but I do think the intrinsic logic of a sentence does.

I'm not blaming anyone in particular, I'm really putting everyone at fault here. School systems largely aim to satisfy stats as opposed to humanely helping students, supported by politicians who like to give out numbers, whatever they mean, so that disgruntled parents may assign blame where they see fit (which is very rarely themselves), and on and on. Add to that a toxic culture of anti-intellectualism and the cycle repeats itself.

People like touting the Education system for all, but I doubt that the huge machinery we created really works for anybody, or at least everybody.

Well, if you make loads of money in Finland, the taxman will take a significant part of it. That decreases the incentives to work in industry.

And yes, making lots of money indeed matters less in this culture than (it seems, I don't know for sure) in America.

But I wouldn't say that teachers are paid that well in Finland. It's just that the expresssion (Finland.compare_compensation(teacher, engineer) > US.compare_compensation(teacher, engineer)) evals to 1.

Overall, the current Finnish political climate seems to be hostile to industry, and I see no signs of improvement. Elections in a few months, and everyone is a friend of the public sector employees, because they are such a significant part of the workforce and voting base.

I think knowing if 1 is prime is almost trivia compared to knowing how to calculate an average. The latter is incomprehensible to me. What age are the students in this anecdote?