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A professor of mine in college (I'm currently a freshman — this happened a few months ago) told me a story _exactly_ like this — just at the University of Pittsburgh Masters in Education program and wherein nobody knew (or cared) that 1 was not a prime number.
I may be more dumbfounded now than I was sitting in his office during office hours... one is an anecdote, two is pattern.
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.
I think it's also an example of the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which parents think that just because they have kids, it makes them experts at education.
This is ultimately harmful because it makes parents feel superior to educators in their respective field.
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, i…
It seems a little disingenuous to lump the education program in with the rest of McGill.
The solution is obvious don't allow outside observers into education classes. /s
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.
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…
I work with retailers - we make eCommerce systems - and I never cease to be staggered at how many CFOs/finance people/buyers/business owners don't:
- Know the difference between "gross" and "net" when talking about prices, tax, or margin. - Know how to calculate a percentage. What's 10% off £90? No idea. - Virtually all fall for the "mark it down by 10%, then mark it up by 10%... same price!" fallacy. - Completely fail to grasp statistics. "Me" is not a statistically significant sample size.
So long as Western society treats mathematical literacy with contempt, this will only get worse - and treat it with contempt we do, for if you are able to figure out the average of two single digit numbers in your head, you are a "braniac" or a "geek", which is fucking incomprehensible.
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?
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…
Likewise, in grade 11 the trigonometry teacher had to leave and the wrestling coach had to fill in. The students had to teach him the material.
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…
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…
It's worth noting that the market for higher degrees for teachers is maybe not what people unfamiliar with it would expect. Plenty do get "real" higher degrees because they actually want to learn something, but there are strong incentives ($$$) for universities to offer fairly worthless higher degrees marketed toward working teachers, and many of them do.
Around here, at least, it's expected that a teacher will eventually get at least a master's. It's not expected that they'll choose a challenging program, or that they'll come out the other side substantially more knowledgable or capable at their job than they would have been without the course work. A master's from a top university puts you on the same pay scale as the guy or gal who went with State-U's-Cash-Cow-Teacher-Degree-Mill-Correspondence-Program—except that the school probably paid a much higher percentage of their costs than yours.