Posted on 09/11/2011 9:59:06 AM PDT by george76
Math professors are appalled at the lack of math skills they see in some education students -- who in turn can't adequately teach math to their own students when they get in a classroom.
"We've kind of been watching a train wreck," University of Winnipeg math Prof. Anna Stokke said Friday.
So far, 184 people have signed a petition demanding far higher standards for admission to faculties of education, 173 of them math, science and engineering professors. They're demanding the provincial government beef up high school graduation requirements for people intending to become teachers.
Some teachers didn't get adequate math courses when they were in high school and thus can't teach their students properly, the petition alleges.
...
The professors want the province and faculties of education to require future teachers to have Grade 12 pre-calculus or applied math.
"We're seeing a lot of (university students) coming in with consumer math," Stokke said. "It's a disaster. They're coming in with grade-school math.
"We're seeing students come into education with extremely poor math skills."
(Excerpt) Read more at winnipegfreepress.com ...
As a former kanadian, the only thing we were taught rather well in school was to vilify and hate/put down America in everyone of our lessons.
Our school district ( SE PA) considered switching to Everyday Math a few years ago during a re-evaluation of the elementary math curriculum. Fortunately they didn’t go for it, but they switched the 5th grade to a more team-learning based curriculum. I was mightly glad that our sons were already through this level and in middle school by the time the math curriculum was changed. They had mature teachers who added worksheets of math drills and memorization to supplement the curriculum. They understood that the standard curriculum was weak in basic skills and they took personal responsibility to teach the students what they needed in life. With a good teacher, kids can survive weak curriculum. Unfortunately, many teachers don’t have the skills, knowledge, or inclination to do this.
Poor grounding in math will hobble a student for life
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You are so right (says the woman who, well into adulthood, is still trying to catch up in that area).
Don’t get me started about math books. I love the way they are silent on how to do particular problems in a problem set (for example they are discussion domains for a x variable - all examples are with one variable, suddenly in the problems you have several two variable problems. Now the available domain is a function of both these variables - not discussed in the answer - what is my daughter to do?) Another example is the teacher is stuck up on standard order for the polynomial expression - all examples one variable again - problem set two variables.
Final example from my younger daughter - this was a head scratcher for her teacher as well. Four variables listed as such ab/cd (you substitute values). The answer in the book would be correct for (ab)/(cd) or even ab/(cd), but neither is how I have been taught and the textbook is silent on the subject. The best the teacher could do (and my daughter could tell he disagreed) was that it the parenthesis is implied without an explicit multiplication sign (a new one for me).
On the filp side we are not paying our teachers enough (now don’t shout). They make less than $40K/yr, and all three of my middle school math teachers were worth every penny. They recently hired a Naval Academy grad with a B.S. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering to teach math at the High School for less than $40K. They got him, but I am amazed he agreed to it. My company would hire him for $80K without any trouble.
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God help our country if we continue the team learning concept. Team learning = making the diligent kids do you work for you. Both my daughters hate it.
Grumble, grumble, grumble...
My most egregious personal curse to teachers
who teach children to not be able to think
I believe it works like this - after flunking out of every other major - a student picks ‘education’...
But they know how to recycle and want to prevent global warming.
I tutored grade school kids in math after school and was specifically told not to do “flash cards” or any rote facts. I was supposed to teach them fractions (reducing) without previous knowledge of multiplication facts!
Luckily, I slipped through an unapproved phonics program for reading and many of the kids having trouble reading picked it right up.
My ninth grader is doing this for the first two weeks of school. I told him I wanted to see his work for the entire project.
The rest of the kids seem to be AWOL. Besides, the project could be completed in one day alone. Why do 5 kids need two weeks?
I met a chinese woman in college who had exceptionally good hand calculation skills. I asked her how she got so good, and she said in remedial math levels in china they do not allow electronic calculators period, they stress wrote memorization where appropriate, and require the use of such things as the babylonian method for quickly extracting roots by hand that are considered obscure by today’s high school level students.
rote
2) Take, and pass with a C+, Calculus I. They would sit in the same courses, shoulder to shoulder, with the engineering, math, and science majors.
Yes, I know. Most teachers don't need Calculus but it would help guarantee that they had a high enough IQ to be teaching the nation's children. It would also weed out those with extreme math phobia.
The phobia! I’m glad you mentioned that. Kids today learn that math is hard and boring. I have an uphill battle trying to get them to believe it is easy and fun.
My dad made us learn that. In college, I would give the answer almost immediately and the professor would wait for someone with a calculator to finish typing it in and then look amazed when I had been right.
That's the way it used to be taught. I can still see the nun at the blackboard, circa 1960, with the pointer making us kids recite the multiplication tables.
That’s alarming, as Canada’s schools are better than the schools in the United States.
When we homeschooled, I did not allow my kids to use calculators until they were in about 7th grade and doing algebra problems where doing the math long hand was too time consuming.
But by then, they had demonstrated a proficiency for being able to do math in their heads and the same thing would happen, they’d mentally calculate an answer in half the time it took the public educated kids to enter the problem into their calculators, not to mention the additional time they spend arguing over who had the right answer because most of them got different answers.
My eldest son had an easy time in high school.
He learned math with his dad because there was a wierd advanced math program experiment in the school. Other parents who were paying attention, hired tutors for their high school kids so they would not graduate and take the SAT without learning advanced math. Sick.
Public educrats are seriously irresponsible.
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