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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

#31

Post by cbgb »

klenwell wrote: post #6

Could they figure out how to do it in less than 5 minutes if the stakes really mattered? I agree calculating averages is a pretty basic skill that I find has many day-to-day applications. But this also smells like a lighter version of the trick interview question. Which is to say, I'm sure there are people out there who would smirk at me when they found out I didn't know how to tie a square knot off the top of my hea…

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?

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#32

Post by cafard »

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…

The verbal portion of the GRE didn't used to involve writing--I haven't taken it in a long time. But some of what I see written by and for teachers makes me wonder how good they are at writing, and at distinguishing good writing from bad.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#33

Post by 3pt14159 »

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 cars?") I've met engineers failing out during first year that didn't understand basic units (ie, velocity (m/s) times time(s) equals meters (m = m/ss).

Fuck, I even went to a private school and when a teacher went on maternity leave a history teacher had to teach grade 11 math. After a week I told her I would do it (and I did it) because she couldn't even handle basic, basic y = mx + b stuff, let alone hyperbolas.

The worst part of the whole thing is that Canadian students know* our system is fucked. We have so many immigrants from countries like India and their kids are years ahead of us, but nobody cares! 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. The whole system rewards minimizing absolute failures until around grade 10 or 11. Then people can finally split up into different achievement levels.

It is insane. Also, we underpay our teachers and we don't pay more for math teachers. So for someone like me, I can either earn $200k running a tech company with my Applied Science Bachelors or I can go back to school to get an education degree and earn less than what I earned coming out of university.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#35

Post by acjohnson55 »

This is alarming but not particularly surprising to me, if the culture of education is similar between the US and Canada. Judging by this piece and one I read hear a few days back [1], there may be more similarities than I'd thought.

Ed school for far too many is a compelling choice for people who want a relatively easy college degree. I don't want to diss the countless teachers who choose that route out of genuine passion and love for education and knowledge, but we don't do a whole lot to filter for these people.

And it's an incredible shame, because my brief two year teaching career convinced me that it's one of the most demanding career paths a person could choose. I'm a lead engineer today and was once a startup founder, and neither job comes close to the stress, the emotional demands, the direspect, the time demands, the politics, the motivational skills, and the relationship building teaching required of me.

We act like it's such a big mystery why we have such problems in education. To me it's pretty simple:

1. It's an extremely demanding job that's only becoming more demanding with the constant shifting of accountability (i.e. blame) onto the teachers.

2. Teacher prep is largely horrible. Many ed schools will take anyone with a heartbeat, and highly selective alternative prep programs like Teach For America (of which I am an alum) give people minimal training in comparison.

3. Segregation, poverty, and policy create a situation where the students in the greatest need are the worst-served. This is what really kills our system, because students of privilege often have enough advantages to make out okay even in spite of the first two issues.

No amount of draconian accountability standards, school privatization, or winner-take-all compensation schemes are going to fix these things.

There is some hope though, if we're willing to reach for it. We have a lot of human capital in our education system, but I think we're applying it poorly. Instead of feebly demanding that everyone suddenly become an 10x teacher, we should find better ways to utilize the competent (if not universally brilliant) people we do have. Reduce teaching load and scale back the job to something people can excel at without having to be a martyr.

[1] https://medium.com/precarious-physicist/enoughs-enough-6c56a...

[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/05/...

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#36

Post by jordigh »

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, in their opinion, far beyond anything they would ever have to teach in high school or CEGEP.[1]

I guess these jokes had some basis in reality.

[1] Québec has a somewhat outdated education system where the last year of rough equivalents of high school and first year of university in US are done in a somewhat "vocational" college called a CEGEP which is an intermediate step between high school and university. The original purpose of this was to help bring more students into university.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#38

Post by ravitation »

Look, I understand that this should be a topic of conversation. I have no problem with that. If Québécois feel like the education they are receiving is sub-par then there definitely should be a discussion about it.

But! What I also think is distressing is that, based on this article (and its author) alone, there is also an extreme lack of understanding of statistics. The evidence presented is purely anecdotal. I read the entire article waiting for the author to cite some study or personal research, but that never happened. So, unless there is more compelling evidence out there, maybe the author, McGill students, McGill faculty members, or Québécois (or Canadians in general) should start by gathering some more information before discussing solutions.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#39

Post by Roboprog »

cafard wrote: post #32
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…

The verbal portion of the GRE didn't used to involve writing--I haven't taken it in a long time. But some of what I see written by and for teachers makes me wonder how good they are at writing, and at distinguishing good writing from bad.

True: the GRE verbal was multiple choice, not actually writing. Closest proxy I could come up with to compare the writing results.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#40

Post by japhyr »

Raphmedia wrote: post #10
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…

That. Growing up in Quebec, I can honestly say that my mathematical education was really, really bad. I remember spending a whole year where we had no math teacher, so instead we had one of the french language teacher teach the class. We did mostly math related crosswords. All the kids were failing the class, so they simply made us all pass. Great job, school. I still have a lot of issues because of this. Hard to lea…

What makes it so hard to find a math teacher in Quebec?

I've traveled through Quebec a number of times, including a bicycle trip that went through Chibougamau - as a visitor, I love the province. I can understand that some remote areas of Quebec are hard to staff effectively. Is this more than a rural/ urban issue?

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