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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

#61

Post by protonfish »

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…

May experience is different. During a masters program in education a TA confided that when grading our papers he found that the writing from those with math and science degrees was OK, but they all were competent in their subject matter. The writing quality for English/History majors was all over the place - some of the best and worst. We concluded it was because it is easier to objectively test math and science proficiency. Profs are OK with failing you even if your work really hard.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#62

Post by happyscrappy »

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.

Massachusetts is larger than Finland and has a better educational system. How does Europe fare when compared to the US?

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#63

Post by jordigh »

100timesthis wrote: post #60
jordigh wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> McGill is not a great university It still ranks pretty high: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGill_University#Rankings_and... and they still sell those "Harvard: The McGill of America" sweatshirts every year. https://glasgowuniversityabroad0910.wordpress.com/2009/10/16... That B. Ed. students are coming so unprepared from McGill is quite sad. Its liberal arts programme is also much bigger than Waterloo's, but compar…

>"Harvard: The McGill of America" mmm and they didn't realize that McGill is in America too? May be the parent post has a point...

As a Mexican, I don't like it much either, but I'm also tired of trying to convince the world that America isn't the US.

Here is some consolation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29g57XTYgLE

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#64

Post by djrogers »

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.

> 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.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#65

Post by danielweber »

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 this many times so they weren't surprised.

I don't know why I could remember it when other students cannot. A tiny part of me says that those kids hated math and shoved it out of their brain as soon as they could. I'm not sure that's fair of me. My wife says it isn't and that I'm the unusual one with the math brain.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#67

Post by runeks »

foobarqux wrote: post #55
rayiner wrote: post #24

I think this is the biggest problem: > 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.

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.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#69

Post by IgorPartola »

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 have a different perspective on this. School, especially in the later part of K-12 is many different things. There is a lot of bullshit, academically speaking. I'd say about 2/3 of my highschool teachers were pretty mediocre. Then there were the good ones. I actually liked studying math in high school because I got placed in advanced classes, and in a grade above my own. It provided a challenge, but also the teachers did a good job of explaining what I might use this math for: becoming an engineer or a researcher. The 10th grade algebra teacher actually had us do labs that would normally be reserved for physics classes: let's measure the swing of the pendulum and show that it's a harmonic oscillator empirically.

So I wouldn't say "I hated school", but I would say I hated my gym, art, and health classes for sure (don't get me started on sex ed. and I grew up in a fairly liberal state).

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#70

Post by jrells »

I'm helping teach a math education course at an elite university. We should be teaching how to teach, but we actually teach elementary school math to education majors who struggle with the material. It blows my mind how difficult this course has been for the students. It seems that every week we are lowering our standards a little more. We have no real hope of finishing a significant amount of material in one semester (but that is all they will probably take). I doubt we would be able to just fail the whole class and keep our jobs. Our goal is to teach them one single concept, so they know what it feels like to really understand something, and then maybe they will chase that feeling later.

The author mentions that education students are generally chattier and less respectful during lectures. This is also true for our class, and we have had ridiculous problems getting students to arrive for scheduled meetings and stay on top of their responsibilities. On the plus side, most of them are highly energetic and charismatic, which are great for teachers.

I knew about these problems before this class, but I could have never possibly imagined they are as dire as I've seen.

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