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For those of us who are not from Canada, can someone explain what McGill is? I feel like I'm missing a lot of context. edit: apparently it's a very prestigious university. I was assuming that it was a remedial high school program. Holy crap.
An university.
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…
This isn't just frighteningly ignorant, it ends up having a devastating impact on many young people. One anecdote: I knew a bright young student who loved learning, but hated school. Why? He took algebra and french in 8th grade; he passed algebra and failed french. When he got to 9th grade he was placed in algebra again, and french 2. The school would not budge from its original placement; I don't know the rationale.…
We have a reputation for being an "easy" school, so I asked him what the value of earning a D- in Algebra 2. His response: "At least they've been exposed to higher math." That's such an elitist answer, and it does such a disservice to students.
The interesting part of the story is that he started to question the value of a D- when asked in this way. He stopped comparing basic algebra to Algebra 2, and started comparing a B- in Algebra 1 to a D- in Algebra 2. It's an interesting comparison.
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…
You could even argue about developing world. Children usually have a strong motivation to learn, and unless there is civil war, they do.
> Some of their answers, like 16 and 18, were lower than any value in our sample.
> Some of their answers, like 120, were higher than any value in our sample.
It suggests that people not only don't know how to compute the average, they don't have a solid grasp of what the concept even means.
For those of us who are not from Canada, can someone explain what McGill is? I feel like I'm missing a lot of context. edit: apparently it's a very prestigious university. I was assuming that it was a remedial high school program. Holy crap.
An university.
Why is this #1 on the homepage?
Partly because programmers love to talk shit about their peers who studied non-STEM subjects and had a lot more fun in college.
Why is this #1 on the homepage?
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…
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 crumbs of bread, they'd never notice. Every once in awhile, the school stumbles across the rare child that is starving, absolutely ravenous.
How long do you think it'd be before that child started to hate school?
> want smart teachers to take control of education so this s* doesn't happen nearly as often as it does.
Teachers aren't in control. They're prisoners of the classroom every bit as much as any child is. Maybe more so, they can't hope to be expelled or to flunk out or to graduate. Teachers will never be in control again, if ever they were.
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…