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Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

• fidotron 12y ago
  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 which allow this to perpetuate. Edit to add a useful reference: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/dismal-dropout-rates-among-french-speaking-students-worry-minister-1.2771757 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/dismal-dropout-rates-... "Last year alone, only 40.6 per cent of the boys followed in the 2007 cohort at the French-language Commission scolaire de Montréal graduated in five years."
  • Raphmedia 12y ago
    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 learn advanced concepts when your basics were screwed up. That being said, one of the beautiful reason that not many Quebecers don't make it to university is the fact that the CEGEP can throw you into the work force for a low price and a short amount of time. I wouldn't want this part to change. High school however? The whole program is a mess.
    • japhyr 12y ago
      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?
      • fidotron 12y ago
        Note that the stat I pulled out is from a school board in Montreal.
      • Raphmedia 12y ago
        We have a lot of underfunded school. The particular school I am talking about is next to a train track and a metal foundry (everything was covered with yellow dust and there was smog all over) and uses a parking space as a recreation area (hey, you can play hockey on it during winter...). In 2009, one of the wall/window fell during winter and the kids had to wear their coats indoor for a month, since plastic garbage bags and duct tape was all that was covering the hole. As for what happened to the math teacher in question, I believe that she had left the school because she had to teach multiple groups (can't remember how many groups, but it was without a doubt too many) that were too bigs and filled with kids that shouldn't have been there in the first place. Learning disabilities, violent teens, etc. all crammed in a small room, groups of... I think it was 35 students.
    • mcgrill 12y ago
      The public French school boards tend to have lower passing rates in maths and sciences then the public English boards though, chalk it up to the shit-show you need to be allowed to learn in English or whatever else might be at play. But the math and science reforms that Quebec implemented 8 years torpedoed basic math and science proficiency across the board.
  • jkot 12y ago
    > No, in the developed world it's probably not. You could even argue about developing world. Children usually have a strong motivation to learn, and unless there is civil war, they do.
  • spunwasi 12y ago
    Well to be fair, we don't know that the 6 students called were from Quebec. McGill is a fairly popular school for kids from Ontario and the Maritimes provinces too.
    • nkassis 12y ago
      And Americans. It's a cheaper (or was given recent international tuition increase) option for those who can't afford even in state tuition in some states.
  • olihb 12y ago
    As anything else, the situation is more nuanced. Quebec schools as a whole are pretty good: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/editorials/quebec-math-students-do-better-because-of-private-school-competition/article19223963/ 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.
    • fidotron 12y ago
      So if 60% of the 80% condemned to use the public school system are failing to achieve the already lowered standards this is mere nuance? What you have in Quebec is an elite (both english and french speaking) that gifts their children a private bilingual education with actual competition while they actively deny those rights to the rest of the public. Poor monolingual french speakers are actively screwed from birth to such a degree that they don't even notice how bad it is.
      • olihb 12y ago
        I'm just saying that we must be careful citing CSDM numbers because they represent a special situation. The CSDM have a lot of first generation immigrants, poor students, students with learning disabilities, etc. The middle class students are in good schools in the suburbs or in private schools. The CSDM in Montreal has such a bad reputation that if you're not accepted in a specialized program (let say, international baccalaureate), you go to a private school if you can afford it (4k$/year). And don't let me start about union rules for new teachers... On the other hand, if you're a special ed teacher, CSDM is hiring like crazy. Not so much for math, social science, french, English teachers though.
        • fidotron 12y ago
          The CSDM is not a special situation at all. You can go to the townships, Lanaudiere, through every Montreal suburb and find the same phenomenon at work. The root problem is Quebec's monolingual french speakers have been force fed a diet of anti-intellectual nonsense for so long they no longer see the value of education. Hockey is seen as the way out, but failing that the government will always be guilt tripped into paying welfare for them.
• japhyr 12y ago
  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 teachers thought you could just look at the number of questions the students got correct, and see if the students "score" went up. My colleague pointed out that the questions on the 50-point test had twice as much weight as the questions on the 100-point test. One of the three other teachers realized their mistake - the other two just chuckled and said it didn't matter. This isn't just frighteningly ignorant, it ends up having a devastating impact on many young people. One anecdote: I knew a bright young student who loved learning, but hated school. Why? He took algebra and french in 8th grade; he passed algebra and failed french. When he got to 9th grade he was placed in algebra again, and french 2. The school would not budge from its original placement; I don't know the rationale. He failed algebra because he refused to do any homework, and failed french because he couldn't make any sense of the class. I want smart teachers to take control of education so this s* doesn't happen nearly as often as it does. Also, I've taught middle and high school math for 20 years now, mostly to students who struggle with math. I don't think I've had many groups of students who could come up with six different answers for a simple average problem.
  • kiba 12y ago
    This isn't just frighteningly ignorant, it ends up having a devastating impact on many young people. One anecdote: I knew a bright young student who loved learning, but hated school. Why? He took algebra and french in 8th grade; he passed algebra and failed french. When he got to 9th grade he was placed in algebra again, and french 2. The school would not budge from its original placement; I don't know the rationale. He failed algebra because he refused to do any homework, and failed french because he couldn't make any sense of the class. I want smart teachers to take control of education so this s% doesn't happen nearly as often as it does. Sounds like passing a student with 80% grade, only with 60%. It's like passing a student who didn't master 40% of the content, and compounding it over and over again with each grade level, until eventual nothingness. That's what it means to pass a student with a B, C, or an F. This is not quite the same thing as mastery of the subject, but it's a good proxy. Even an A student will miss some stuff.
• cs702 12y ago
  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-Schools-Successful.html http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Why-Are-Finlands... [2] http://www.mckinseyonsociety.com/downloads/reports/Education/Closing_the_talent_gap.pdf http://www.mckinseyonsociety.com/downloads/reports/Education...
  • aianus 12y ago
    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?
    • growlix 12y ago
      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.
      • happyscrappy 12y ago
        Massachusetts is larger than Finland and has a better educational system. How does Europe fare when compared to the US?
      • djrogers 12y ago
        > 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.
        • 12y ago
• Roboprog 12y ago
  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. (OTOH, I was at the 99th percentile in math in the teaching group, but I had a reasonably high score at math in the GRE as well)
  • streptomycin 12y ago
    Engineering majors score higher than education majors on the verbal section of the GRE: http://www.ncsu.edu/chass/philo/GRE%20Scores%20by%20Intended%20Graduate%20Major.htm http://www.ncsu.edu/chass/philo/GRE%20Scores%20by%20Intended...
  • cafard 12y ago
    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.
    • Roboprog 12y ago
      True: the GRE verbal was multiple choice, not actually writing. Closest proxy I could come up with to compare the writing results.
  • protonfish 12y ago
    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.
  • 12y ago
• klenwell 12y ago
  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 head.
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  • cbgb 12y ago
    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?
    • Retric 12y ago
      I would hope most teachers stopped calculating averages by hand a long time ago.
      • swalsh 12y ago
        You still need to know the algorithm though to understand it's limitations.
      • cbgb 12y ago
        Similar to another comment, how can you evaluate the correctness of the computed value if you don't know how the computation is done?
      • j2kun 12y ago
        But understanding what an average represents is obviously important.
• tashoecraft 12y ago
  I believe these problems extend beyond Canada and into the U.S. I know several of my peers who have started, or are applying to get their masters in Education/teaching to become teachers. I have heard them willing admit that they are very poor in Math like it is something to brag about. I've seen them struggle to compete basic arithmetic, and yet somehow they believe this is totally ok and that they are qualified to teach. Math needs to be elevated and respected, and it is going to take a restructuring of the curriculum in order for it to happen.
• pavel_lishin 12y ago
  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.
  • Raphmedia 12y ago
    An university.
    • refurb 12y ago
      One of the most prestigious universities in Canada!
    • ravitation 12y ago
      Consistently one of the best ranked universities in Canada. It also has the largest endowment and highest endowment/student in the country.
    • strictnein 12y ago
      > An university. Did you go to McGill?
      • strictnein 12y ago
        Yes, yes, I get the downvotes. But, come on, everyone was thinking it.
  • volandovengo 12y ago
    It's the #1 ranked university in Canada.
  • throwaway283719 12y ago
    It is one of the top-ranked universities in Canada (roughly equivalent to an Ivy League university in the US, or Oxbridge in the UK).
  • bradleyjg 12y ago
• t1m 12y ago
  This is not surprising. My grade 4 kid's teacher told me that our kid "just might not be good at math, and that's OK". This is a shocking attitude, but one I find commonly held: that basic math is some kind of optional, specialized skill.
  • mod 12y ago
    http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dweck http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dweck She's also exhbiting a static mindset. She of all people should believe in the growth mindset.
  • omegaham 12y ago
    Yeah, it's perfectly fine not to have a good grasp of calculus. But basic math? We use it every single day. Someone who is innumerate is at just as much of a disadvantage as someone who is illiterate.
• growlix 12y ago
  I TA'd a capstone neuroscience seminar at McGill for multiple years, and you'd be amazed at how much difficulty many of the students had at expressing themselves in writing. And I'm talking about those who spoke English as a first language. These are final year university students who got into a very competitive program.
• volandovengo 12y ago
  Why is this #1 on the homepage?
  • screwedup 12y ago
    Partly because it's important to society. Partly because programmers love to talk shit about their peers who studied non-STEM subjects and had a lot more fun in college.
  • growlix 12y ago
    blame the algorithm
  • acjohnson55 12y ago
    Because a largely highly learned subculture cares deeply about education, evidently. Go figure!
  • zaphar 12y ago
    Because hacking education is an interesting problem and a good portion of HN is shade tree mechanic discussion about interesting problems. There's nothing wrong with shade tree mechanic discussions. They are an interesting diversion when you are trying to waste some time while drinking your coffee at the start of the workday.
  • danielweber 12y ago
    Because its average score was high enough.
• rayiner 12y ago
  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.
  • foobarqux 12y ago
    Not necessarily. The respondents may have just applied a mechanical procedure and did not do any kind of sanity check.
    • runeks 12y ago
      > 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.
      • foobarqux 12y ago
        I'm saying you can understand the concept and still fail to do a sanity check using that knowledge.
        • bradleyjg 12y ago
          It's the difference between understanding in some abstract way and internalizing. Once you've internalized a concept something that is so far out of whack would immediately look wrong. For example: 23894739 x 23894739 = 2 I would expect anyone who has internalized the rules of multiplication to immediately and intuitively reject that. Not that they could tell you what the correct answer is, but know that can't be it at a glance. The claim is that the concept that the arithmetic mean is going to be somewhere between the extreme values in a list is simple and fundamental enough that it should have been similarly internalized by university students.
• gdulli 12y ago
  From the headline I assumed McGill would be a grade school/middle school or maybe worse, a high school. But it's a university?
• 3pt14159 12y ago
  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.
  • jordigh 12y ago
    > McGill is not a great university It still ranks pretty high: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGill_University#Rankings_and_reputation 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/harvard-americas-mcgill/ 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 comparable to UofT's.
    • 100timesthis 12y ago
      >"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...
• acscott 12y ago
  Recommended reading: Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innumeracy_%28book%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innumeracy_%28book%29
  • omegaham 12y ago
    Just re-read that book a little while ago. It's dated in a couple of its examples, but it's still pretty powerful and easy to read.
• acjohnson55 12y ago
  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-6c56afe36d00 https://medium.com/precarious-physicist/enoughs-enough-6c56a... [2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/05/15/what-if-finlands-great-teachers-taught-in-u-s-schools-not-what-you-think/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/05/...
  • omegaham 12y ago
    One thing that I've become a firm believer in is that teaching isn't the problem; administration is. A good administrator or group of administrators will make the entire school into a team that can excel. They set a clear vision for what teachers need to know and do. They set clear standards for discipline, which are practiced in a fair, evenhanded, rational fashion. They uphold high standards and remove the non-hackers who can't do the job. They respond quickly to concerns and show that they legitimately care. Incidentally, one of the biggest reasons why private schools do so much better is that their administrations tend to be better. When a kid is acting up in class, he gets punished. When a teacher sucks, he gets fired. When concerns come up, they are addressed quickly and promptly. These things are so important that teachers willingly and happily take a pay cut just so that they can be in this environment. In contrast, a large number of public schools have horrifyingly incompetent administrators. The school then becomes a muddled mess where individual sparks are snuffed out by the chaos. Who would teach in such a place? One of my favorite models of people's performance is the "10-80-10" distribution. 10% are heroes, who will do an amazing job no matter how bad things get. 10% are shitbags, to be extirpated with prejudice. The remaining 80% will go with the flow. If your school is awesome, they'll approach the heroes. If it's garbage, they'll approach the shitbags. Administration is what decides where the 80% will go.
• jordigh 12y ago
  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.
  • japhyr 12y ago
    This notion that you only need to know as much math as you're going to teach is ridiculous. The more your students struggle in math, the deeper your understanding of the subject needs to be. It takes a fair bit of skill and understanding to accurately diagnose and address misunderstandings. Knowing higher level math also lets you help younger students learn things in a way that sets them up for success later on. Students can learn "advanced" concepts at a young age if presented at the right time, in the right way. But you can't introduce those concepts if you don't know them, and recognize when it's appropriate to introduce them.
    • omegaham 12y ago
      This is an excellent couple of points. A math teacher doesn't just have to be able to know how to do the problem himself; he also has to be able to figure out where the student's misunderstanding is and how to correct it. Not only that, he needs to be able to do this for dozens of different students, all of whom have their own difficulties and misunderstandings. I'm sure that there are people with only high school math understanding who can do this... but it just seems to me that the kind of personality traits that would make someone learn how to teach math like this would also make that person extremely passionate about learning it to the best of his ability and potential. I can't imagine a passionate history teacher who isn't also passionate about learning more history. Same thing with an English teacher who only reads John Grisham books (not that there's anything wrong with John Grisham).
• bitL 12y ago
  That reminds me when I took one business class during university studies and during the final exam I wrote a formula like: A * B D=------- C Well, this was rejected by the teacher stating that C should be under B and not A. Oh...
• ravitation 12y ago
  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.
  • hawleyal 12y ago
    It's just a student expressing outrage at his classmates ignorance of basic math. Especially future teachers.
    • j2kun 12y ago
      Also something that competent mathematicians interested in education have been discussing for many years. It's interesting how we choose to call anecdotes "writing on the wall" when it turns out to be correct and "unsubstantiated by data" in other scenarios.
• PaulHoule 12y ago
  I dunno, in elementary schools in the U.S. they start teaching the median by grade 2. The mean is good when you want an actual expectation value (i.e. how much fast do I lose money when I play this slot machine) but the mean is not the tool to use for characterizing and unknown probability distrbution.
  • SapphireSun 12y ago
    Well, CLT does guarantee that most means will follow a gaussian distribution if you repeatedly sample from the same distribution. Also, if you're relying on a single statistic to characterize a distribution, you've got another thing coming buddy. ;) Always report first and second moments, range and/or outliers. Histograms are even better tho binning is tricky. You're right to fear distortion, but changing your one statistic isn't gonna save you.
• spikels 12y ago
  The solution is obvious don't allow outside observers into education classes. /s
  • elros 12y ago
    Are you a manager? :-D
• jrells 12y ago
  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.
• pkulak 12y ago
  And teachers make a lot more in Canada than they do in the United States. If you're good enough at math or science to do anything else, why would you be a teacher? It's a harsh way to look at it, but it's true. In the US, states have their own teacher certification exams. They are pretty much just testing your understanding of 8th-grade math and science. I know a lot of teachers and I don't think any of them passed it the first time. It's like passing the bar in the world of teaching. People take it up to a dozen times. After they have gone through two years of graduate school.
• sly010 12y ago
  Real story: In Hungary students are rated from 1 to 5, where 5 is the best score and 1 is the worst. During the semester you have multiple tests (both verbal and on paper) each giving you a score between 1 and 5. Your final score is the average of these rounded to an integer. These final scores are the only important measure when you apply to study further, nothing else matters. I had a [5,5,5] and had to take a verbal test which I didn't prepare for. My biology teacher decided to rate it as "three fourth" and logged it as "3/4". [despite being horribly wrong it was commonly understood that it actually means "between 3 and 4"] However... At the end of the semester she calculated my score as: (5+5+5+3+4)/5 = 4.4 -> 4 instead of (5+5+5+3.5)/4 = 4.6 -> 5 Imagine a 13 year old student arguing a 50 year old biology teacher in front of the whole class about how to calculate my score properly. I even tried to convince her to downgrade my "3/4" to a "3" and recalc my score (that would yield 4.5) She didn't listen, eventually I was thrown out of the classroom and finished the year with a 4, because of a math error. Edit: This was long time ago, so I am almost sure the exact numbers are off, but I clearly remember the broken math and the result.
  • wodenokoto 12y ago
    I had similar arguments with my university. They couldn't figure out how to weigh my grades. All grades are weighted by the amount of credit a course is worth, but they added it up wrongly. A Fucking university!
  • rogerbinns 12y ago
    In my first year of university we had to do a maths module. My final score was 120%. Imagine just many different broken and non-mathematical things have to go into that!
    • csours 12y ago
      I graduated High School with a 6.022 GPA[1]! Texas is Awesome! 1. Normal max is 4.0, school gave extra credit for Advanced Placement and college concurrent courses.
      • 12y ago
• deleted 12y ago
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  • tarheeljason 12y ago
    An average is an arithmetic mean. But if you found the question vague, you would ask for clarification. These students volunteered answers.
• keithpeter 12y ago
  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/ 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.
  • madaxe_again 12y ago
    I'm in the UK, and I don't think it's fair to be singling out teachers on this. 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.
    • keithpeter 12y ago
      "Virtually all fall for the "mark it down by 10%, then mark it up by 10%... same price!" fallacy." That is a classic GCSE Foundation Maths exam question: and I have to say most of the teenagers I teach can explain why you won't get back to the same price! I wasn't singling out teachers myself but the OA looks as if it was. There is an honest desire to improve things over the next 10 years in the UK and all main parties agree about the general policy if not the detail so I am slightly optimistic (but teachers have to be)
• aroman 12y ago
  Oh my god — I can't believe it. 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.
  • throwaway283719 12y ago
    In fairness, thinking that 1 is a prime number (or just not knowing that it isn't) is in quite a different league to not knowing how to calculate the average of a list of numbers.
    • aroman 12y ago
      See my comment to the other reply. Ordinarily I'd agree, but these were all graduated undergrad math majors in a course about how to teach math (specifically prime numbers) to high schoolers.
  • zaroth 12y ago
    I think knowing if 1 is prime is almost trivia compared to knowing how to calculate an average. The latter is incomprehensible to me. What age are the students in this anecdote?
    • aroman 12y ago
      From what my professor told me, they were almost exclusively in their mid-20s, having just finished undergrad degrees in math. You're right — knowing if 1 is prime is kind of a trivial point, but this was a course for would-be math teachers specifically about how to teach _math_ to high schoolers. In fact, the specific context of the story was an in-class presentation about teaching kids about primes. I definitely should have mentioned that in the OP.
• ribs 12y ago
  Isn't this story just about a single anecdote? To me that makes it nearly meaningless.
• wodenokoto 12y ago
  For those of us out of the loop: What is McGill?
• dgregd 12y ago
  In my country was a politician who was outraged by the fact that 50% of people earn below the national average.
  • wahrsagevogel 12y ago
    You should look up median and how it is different to the average.
    • hawleyal 12y ago
      Technically, average is ambiguous. Usually refers to mean, but also median and mode.
• VLM 12y ago
  The funniest part of the story is the article got the formula for average wrong. The article listed all this "add them all up and divide by how many" but thats totally wrong. The real way averages are calculated is you write a script for an actor wearing a lab coat to sell more toothpaste, and some liberal arts grad picks a number that rolls off the tongue and sounds good. Sometimes politicians use "average" as a verbal filler. like "like" or "um", it doesn't mean anything numerical it just sounds good and fills space. So the kids that wrote 18 or 120 are the only kids who got it right. You put your nose in the air and sniff what someone wants to hear about a conclusion they've already drawn, and if higher or lower is better, well, thats what the answer is. The answer to "whats the average of one 100 and nine 20s" is NOT, repeat, NOT 28. Thats never going to sell toothpaste in TV commercials, sounds terrible. If you have a system of commerce built entirely on lies and deceit and asymmetric unfair marketplaces, some weird rant about mathematical truth is like asking how many angels dance on the head of a pin.
  • swalsh 12y ago
    http://lmgtfy.com/?q=psychologists+near+me http://lmgtfy.com/?q=psychologists+near+me
• olssy 12y ago
  It is worth noting that McGill has over 60% of students coming from outside of Quebec so this doesn't have much to do with Quebec's education system. http://www.mcgill.ca/about/quickfacts/students http://www.mcgill.ca/about/quickfacts/students
  • poppet_ 12y ago
    But the article is about creating good educators, the problem is't the students coming in, it's the ones coming out of that education program, who will eventually become teachers. The problem is the program.
• grownseed 12y ago
  This is abysmal and unfortunately, it is far more widespread than people like to believe, particularly in supposedly advanced countries. I've worked with programmers who could not do proportions, compounded with designers, managers etc. who were in the same boat, I'd hear conversations along the lines of: "This is terrible, X is 3/4 of Y!" "I don't think you got it right, I got 75%, which isn't that bad" The conversations and quarrels would go on forever, no joke. Sadly, basic Maths isn't the only thing an alarming proportion of people do not seem to understand properly. I constantly see people with Masters, PhDs and whatnot, in various subjects (from Sciences to Journalism, Economics, etc.), who can't read and write properly. Not only do I wonder how they got where they are in the first place, but what worries me most is that there's clearly no fundamental understanding of the underlying, simple logic. Not meaning to offend anyone here, but simply looking at the comments on HN, a lot of people are guilty of bad spelling and questionable grammar, and I'd argue most people here are supposedly more educated than the average person. I see schools competing on how they're teaching four year old kids additional languages, ten year olds how to make mobile apps, and the list goes on, but I'm yet to see a single school that advocates teaching simple logic. For instance, how about teaching grammar again? Most of my friends can't tell the difference between a noun, a proverb, a verb and so on. Not that the nomenclature matters, but I do think the intrinsic logic of a sentence does. I'm not blaming anyone in particular, I'm really putting everyone at fault here. School systems largely aim to satisfy stats as opposed to humanely helping students, supported by politicians who like to give out numbers, whatever they mean, so that disgruntled parents may assign blame where they see fit (which is very rarely themselves), and on and on. Add to that a toxic culture of anti-intellectualism and the cycle repeats itself. People like touting the Education system for all, but I doubt that the huge machinery we created really works for anybody, or at least everybody.
  • j2kun 12y ago
    While I agree with you in general, HN comments should (and do) have lower standards for grammar, spelling, and logical reasoning. If I spent as much time on my HN comments as I do on research papers I probably wouldn't get more than one comment per month.
    • 12y ago
• lpgauth 12y ago
  The private schools in QC are a bit better... at least in my experience. It's too bad, the public system is so broken.
• relaytheurgency 12y ago
  I tried to make this comment a reply to a separate comment but it errored out. I had a funny thing happen to me in college that ruined my one chance at a 4.0 semester. I had just begun my physics major but had some electives to take as well. I was taking the introductory microeconomics course. At the end of the semester I had received a B and I was relatively certain that I had achieved better, so I went to the professor's office and asked to see how my grade had been calculated. As he started showing me the scores, I realized that none of them had been mine! In the end he had mixed my scores with another student who had the same last name (a very common name, in the professor's defense). I was very happy at that point because I was really thinking I would receive an A! Sadly, the professor shook his head and said that I would still only get a B. I was a bit shocked so I asked what the final calculation had given and he said a 0.8994. There were not 10,000 points possible and final grades had to be a two-digit representation of the semester's work, so I was unsure why this kept me from an A. I explained to him that the last digit was not significant since there was no "point" to represent the digit, basically trying to explain significant figures to him. I then stated that since the grade had to be either an 89% or a 90%, surely it was more appropriate to receive a 90%. He shook his head again and said to me what was probably one of the most infuriating and condescending things I'd ever heard from a moron with PhD. He said that economics as a field was likely much more difficult than my primary coursework and that I should not take it too hard that his course was my lowest grade that semester. Now I do not really buy into the perceived/nearly mythical reputation of difficulty that physics has gained, but I do know that we at least put our dependent variable on the appropriate axis. I am not an exceptionally gifted student, so I never did have another chance to receive a 4.0 semester in my math and physics coursework. I have always held a grudge against that professor. EDIT: I realize I forgot to mention the part that was really infuriating, as I see that it is really not that frustrating as told. The thing that angered me the most, and the reason I went on about significant figures, is that the professor himself was not against rounding! He said that had I received an 0.8995 I would get the A! His entire grading framework was hinged on a poor understanding of math.
  • erroneousfunk 12y ago
    Don't get me wrong, I'd also be frustrated. However, if you view the grades as cutoffs rather than rounded percentages, I think the professor's view makes sense. The cutoff for an A- is .90 Therefore, if the score was 0.8994, then you did not make the cutoff, and your percentage grade of 89% would be more appropriate.
• geophile 12y ago
  I met some education majors in the 70s, when I was in college and grad school, (at McGill, coincidentally). It was clear, even then, that many of them were aiming to become grade school teachers because they could not do math beyond the grade school level. My encounters with my kids' teachers over the years have only reinforced that impression. Two examples: 1) A 4th grade teacher who gave assignments in which presentation counted for 80%, and content for 20%. 2) A middle school math teacher who claimed the answer to the question "Flipping a coin, what are the odds of getting heads or tails?" was 50%. She really meant to be asking two questions, one about heads and one about tails. She completely missed the significance of the word "or" in questions about statistics. This article does not surprise me at all.
  • mililani 12y ago
    I think your point 2) is unjustifiably harsh. It may have been misinterpreted. I think it's an honest mistake.
    • geophile 12y ago
      I talked to the teacher, and she was definitely confused. If not by the math concepts, then by the common English phrases used in talking about probability.
• chm 12y ago
  Purely anecdotal and IMO a bit disingenuous. Most McGill students are not from Québec for starters. I could comb through the requirements set by the government concerning secondary education and easily find many supposedly acquired skills that the author either forgot or never learned. Write the same story about how a lot of anglophone students do not learn to speak/write/read French properly as they simply do not care and you will be overwhelmed by responses in their defense.
• dennisbest 12y ago
  My takeaway: I had no idea the ‽ character was a thing. Hooray!
• Fando 12y ago
  On Canada's education: I came from Belarus when I was 10 and was put into 5th grade. Until I got to 9th grade, there was no new math taught to me. I didn't know about the unit circle until 10th grade, however, my friends from home learned about it in 7th grade. This is only one example. Maybe Canada's university education is at par, I don't know, but the years leading up to it are mostly wasted, to say the least. Since grade 1 we sat attentively and quietly at desks listening to the teacher, they commanded our respect and their classrooms were always well organized for learning. Compare that with Ontario, when I was placed in 5th grade. We were never encouraged to read out-loud to the class, come to the front of the class to answer questions, solve math problems on the board or to memorize and tell a poem. We did not read classic authors, or poets and learn their works. Our reading speed was not measured, we were not assigned reading, writing or math homework beyond simple "spelling sheets" and "fill in the blank math sheets". We were not taught to keep an organized student planner, or keep an organized notebook. Our homework was not graded, our grades were not tracked and were never revealed to us. We were never told what we needed to improve. We never had to write short, well formatted and grammatically correct paragraphs and short pieces. We never wrote dictations, we never actually wrote anything beyond single worded "fill-in-the-blank" worksheets. Our penmanship was not judged, proper grammar was not encouraged or judged. All these things were taught to us in Belarus from grade 1 to 5. I was shocked to come to Canada and learn that in fifth grade, students had to sit on the floor for parts of the day as the teacher read to them, like kindergarten. Knowing this I often reflect on how much obvious potential is wasted and opportunity missed by Canadian elementary education systems. I visited Belarus when I was in 9th grade, my friends there were writing essays in English and Spanish as weekly homework. Compare that with French language education in Canada, by 9th grade, after 5 years of elementary school French, I could count to a hundred and read a little. I did not know proper grammar or how to write sentences. Anyway, there are many examples in other subjects as well. Each time I reflect on this, I cannot help but feel how pathetic the education is. It's not serious. It then comes as no surprise that there are teachers at conferences who are not able to comprehend weighted averages, as japhyr mentioned. I wish elementary education in Canada were reformed completely.
• sago 12y ago
  I sit on the board of governors of a public school in Wales, which has decided it needs to focus on math after bad PISA results. We had an official from the local government come in to tell us that she'd gone through our testing scores and divided schools into quartiles, so she could focus her efforts. Good, I thought. Then she said, because of how she'd done the calculation, she had ended up with three quartiles. And she hoped most of the schools in the middle quartile (like us) would be able to reach the upper quartile for math next year. I tried gamely to point out she was an imbecile, along with a reference to Lake Wobegon, but most of the rest of the governing body seemed to think this was entirely reasonable.
• edtechdev 12y ago
  I've seen this thing quite often. There's a famous video clip of MIT graduates, in cap and gown, who can't make a bulb light when given a battery and wire. I disagree with the blog author's interpretation that this is about the students being "stupid." I posted the comment below. I wouldn't interpret this as "education majors are stupid." I would interpret it as, all of us, even the best of us, are stupid in certain contexts with certain topics and certain time pressures. This is partly due to how we are taught and how we learn in school. Our knowledge is inert (inaccessible in other contexts) because it is often taught without context. The technical term for this is "transfer" - our learning often doesn't transfer. An older term for this is "encoding specificity" - our learning is "locked" to the context in which it is encoded. For example the myth that if you are drunk while studying you should be drunk when you take the test. Here is a dramatic example that had a huge influence on reforming science education. On the bottom right of this page is a video clip of MIT graduates, in cap and gown, who, given a battery, bulb, and wire, can't make the bulb light. There's also a clip of Harvard students. https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/smgphp/mosart/video_archive_2.html https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/smgphp/mosart/video_archive_2.ht... The full videos that go into why this is happening (because of how they are taught) and how we can address it (contextualized and constructivist instruction techniques like problem-based learning, simulations, etc.) are "Minds of Our Own" and "A Private Universe", which can be viewed online here: http://www.learner.org/resources/series26.html http://www.learner.org/resources/series26.html and here: http://www.learner.org/resources/series28.html http://www.learner.org/resources/series28.html Another brilliant example comes from comedian Father Guido Sarducci's routine on the "Five Minute University" - how he can teach in 5 minutes what you remember 5 years after college: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO8x8eoU3L4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO8x8eoU3L4
• franklinho 12y ago
  If true, this is horrifying. I went to McGill and the Education students didn't seem this incompetent.