Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average • Hacker News Board

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#81

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 5:18 PM UTC

mehrzad wrote: post #51

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>bright student realizes that school has nothing to do with learning Depends on the high school and teacher. My high school (and primary schools) had really great teachers and they motivated me to learn things I otherwise would not have. Young people often need a push to learn things that they don't immediately see as useful. Schooling does interfere with learning, but when the stakes are high (getting into a top col…

> Depends on the high school and teacher.

In the US, each student will have between 20 and 40 teachers by the time they graduate highschool.

Thus, you can't just hope to play the public education lottery and get all good teachers for your kid. Even if things work out better than could possibly be imagined, that's what, 10 or 15 good teachers, quite a few more mediocre and 2 or 3 bad ones?

Sorry. The damage that a bad teacher can do outweighs much or all of the good that the good teachers can do.

If your kid would have 40 doctors throughout his life, only 2 or 3 of which were quacks, would that make you happy? Would you say "but the quacks will probably be the dermatologist anyway and not the surgeon, so it's ok"?

I wouldn't say that.

The only way for any of this to work out is for the impossible to happen, for nearly all of teachers everywhere across the nation to be good teachers. The distribution is pretty natural, the various colleges of education don't act as a filter, and schools are co-opted to do too many non-education tasks for that to ever be possible.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#82

Post by olihb » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 5:18 PM UTC

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…

As anything else, the situation is more nuanced. Quebec schools as a whole are pretty good: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/editorials/quebe...

The problem is that good students are mostly in private schools and specialized programs (international programs) so "regular classes" in public schools contain a lot of low performing students and students with disabilities.

My gf is a public high school teacher in Montreal and they do miracles everyday with the low amount of resources that they have to work with. She has a M.Sc. in her specialization (history), but do mostly special education tasks since the student level are so low.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#83

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 5:19 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#84

Post by edias » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 5:19 PM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #9

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.

I just talked to a a family member who wen't to McGill's business school and according to her the education program is "the worst one by a mile", and is pretty much separate from all the other programs. Courses in the education school wouldn't even count as electives towards her degree.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#85

Post by japhyr » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 5:19 PM UTC

sp332 wrote: post #53

japhyr wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a conversation with a math teacher from another school not too long ago. Both of our schools require a minimum of two credits of math to graduate. My school allows students to spread this credit out developing a deeper understanding of basic math, and beginning algebra. His school requires everyone to receive a passing grade in the equivalent of Algebra 2. The lowest passing score at my school is a B-; at his s…

Sounds like your school is suffering from grade inflation. The average grade used to be a C. (At my college, it still was.) If you tell the teachers that a C is a failing grade, they will not give a C grade to a student who's doing an OK job in their eyes.

It's not grade inflation. We're a small alternative high school, and it's easier for us to do the right thing for students, even if it means going against existing bureaucracy. The smallest unit of credit in our traditional high school is 0.5 credits; at our school it's 0.25 credits. We grant passing grades for the parts of a class students demonstrate an understanding of, and grant partial credit for a class. This mitigates some of the issues involved with averaging over the course of an entire semester.

Usually, when someone earns a B-, they do have a basic understanding of the material they were learning. A student who earns a D- with 0.5 credit at the traditional high school will usually earn a B- and 0.25 credits from us. At the traditional school, they're "done" with that class. At our school, they've got to do something to demonstrate further understanding. It's not a perfect system, but it's not as simple as grade inflation.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#86

Post by geoffbrown2014 » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 5:21 PM UTC

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.

I think you need to expand your horizons. There are large portions of the US population that view our public schools as little more than glorified daycare. While I agree for the most part, I admit that there are exceptions where we do have really solid public schooling. The exceptions are for the rich kids in schools like New Trier, etc.. There is a nearly unlimited number of edu startups trying to address this very problem, they wouldn't exist if we had good schools.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#87

Post by andrepd » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 5:22 PM UTC

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…

The very same thing happened in Portugal, where the Ministry of Education's guidelines for gauging teacher performance included taking the mean of a test graded in percentage points with another evaluation on a 1 to 5 scale.. by adding them and dividing by two!

Made even more embarrassing by the fact that the Minister is a mathematician.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#88

Post by bduerst » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 5:22 PM UTC

ashark wrote: post #58

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...

(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 of the planned changes.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#89

Post by thuuuomas » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 5:23 PM UTC

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…

Their possession of advanced degrees says, sadly, little of their overall educational achievement.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#90

Post by keithpeter » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 5:25 PM UTC

UK has tests in Mathematics and in English for anyone who wants to take teacher training for schools (not needed for 'post compulsory' or pre-school yet).

http://sta.education.gov.uk/

Might be fun to try the practice tests out on colleagues...

Helping managers to aggregate pass rates per class into an overall pass rate used to be a fun thing to do many years ago. They are better at data management now because of our focus on targets in the UK. Not so good for holistic education but managers can certainly hack their stats.