Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Interesting article: Teaching as Self-Sacrifice

Nope, they're percentiles.

Sent you a PM, Zen Scanner.

Answered

You said your source was sorted by field. This means that the secondary school teachers who pursued graduate studies in education would show up in your stats under that column. The ones who majored in math would be counted under another column. My Algebra II teacher didn't have a master's in education. His was in math.


Well, we're constantly adding to our knowledge and revising what we thought we knew, so maybe we should just stop teaching until we know everything that can be known, sometime after the year infinity.

Or, given the numbers of teachers needed to teach math in K-graduate school, if we limit the pool of teachers to those who can grok calculus, then we'll run out of people who can do things like engineering and research. No time for developing new energy sources or mapping genomes, because 2nd graders need to understand how to borrow and carry.

Or, maybe we can be a little more reasonable in how we allocate resources.

Whether teachers are easily taken in by fad curricula is not the point, because they're not the decision makers. They're not always even made by educators.

Come on...don't get snarky. I'm trying very hard to have an honest discussion here.

In private schools, a subset of the teachers serve on curriculum committees. For example, my son's kindergarten teacher was the primary decision maker concerning curricular materials at his school. They used Everyday Mathematics. I wrote to her about its deficiencies (including its treatment of place value), and she admitted to me that she didn't understand my letter, and then said, "But we're going to stick with it." It's the same at the private school my other kids attend. And public school boards often get members who are or were teachers. Around here, when they run for election, they tout their classroom experience as an important qualification.

I agree that high school (not middle school) teachers know more about their subjects (noted in other messages). But there are two points here:

1. The foundation is laid in the lower grades, and that's not happening properly right now. There's abundant evidence showing that teachers lack mathematical knowledge. They can't teach it properly if they don't understand it.

2. The writer in the OP's link used the word "profession" several times. As I've noted, a professional is a person who solves his or her own problems whenever possible. Learning about fractions on the web is an easily available option that doesn't seem to be happening.

A large majority on this board would probably agree that math education is a huge problem in American schools. The textbooks are a big part of the problem. But so are the teachers. There's abundant evidence showing that they lack knowledge as a group (e.g. Liping Ma, Prof. Wu from UCB, this paper, many others ). We can't fix this problem until we admit that it exists.

Sorry for the snark, but you did say elementary school teachers need to know calculus. Since there were only 7 kids in my high school who took it out of a graduating class of 1000 (and I ended up dropping it), I'd say this would be limiting the talent pool quite a bit. I'd also like to think we bring more value to society in our current roles as doctors and systems engineers.

I may have oversimplified things when I said curriculum is not generally chosen by educators... maybe "out-of-touch ex-educators" would have encapsulated the idea better. School boards are generally made up of people who went from the classroom to administrative positions, which are more political in nature, setting them up for the political job of sitting on a school board. So you're generally talking about curriculum choices made by people who haven't been in a classroom in years. You're also talking about 5-9 individuals making decisions on behalf of thousands of teachers. So again, let's not tar all with the same brush. Every time curriculum changes, I hear an torrent of complaints from professional teachers... some criticism good, and some because many people hate change.

I agree with the paper you referenced, but it doesn't say anything about teachers having to know calculus. I also don't understand how you can hold teachers individually responsible for not understanding things that, as the paper points out, were poorly taught to the teachers to begin with, in the same system they are now contributing to.

In fact, you can see the seeds of this nonsense of Everyday Math here, because the paper correctly points out that adults frequently graduate college and move on to teaching professions able to perform mathematical procedures in their sleep, but with very little understanding of why the procedures work. So they attend an Everyday Math seminar, have an overdue epiphany they call "number sense," and think that's something they should have gotten as 8yos. And they have a good point... it's just that EM is well-suited to teaching that to adults, not to 8yos.

Okay, that was a misunderstanding because I added that bit about calculus to my reply to you. No, I don't think that K-3 teachers should know calculus. What I was trying to say was that they should have more than a high school education and that they should understand math several levels above what they're teaching. Algebra 1 and geometry would be reasonable, given that the elementary curriculum draws on both subjects. But IMO, they should know these subjects WELL, and they should also understand the foundations of what they're teaching. It's not rocket science, and I agree that this is where their own educations are playing a role in the problem. Somehow, we have to break the cycle.

Bostonian has said that our schools should hire math specialists to teach math. I agree. If teaching through grade 6, they'd have to show proficiency way above that level (precalc? Differential calculus?). If they don't know what's coming, they can't teach what kids need to know to succeed at the higher levels. I think that extra training about fundamental ideas in elementary school mathematics and how to teach it is also very important.


I think a person who wants to be called a professional should be able to 1) recognize that not understanding a subject at the level being taught (e.g. MoN's post) is not okay, and 2) take steps to learn the material (e.g. Khan Academy, Math Is Fun, Summer Workshops). Again, it's not rocket science.

I'm not trying to say that lack of knowledge isn't the only problem with our teacher corps. You made a good point about political motivations on the school boards. There's also Richard Feynman's analysis of textbook selection, which is still true 50 years later.


I agree there.

I think we've found common ground, then, and the question is, how do we break the cycle?

1) If a contributing factor is teacher quality, then we need to improve the educational culture such that better-quality candidates are attracted to the job.

2) If a contributing factor is general math understanding, then we need an overhaul of how we teach math to everyone.

3) If a contributing factor is curriculum, then we need to get academia engaged in sorting out the bad ideas from the good, and pushing the good ones into the classrooms.

I don't see any of those things being fixed anytime soon, due to politics, money, and general inertia.


The more I've been watching what happens to my DD at school, the more I've been convinced that she should have a math teacher, an English teacher, a social studies teacher, etc. Why do we wait until 6-7th grade for this?

If done, it would mean we'd only need about 20% of elementary school teachers to really understand math. That should be workable with the current talent pool.


Maybe I'm just exposing my jaded worldview here, but in my mind "professional" just means "gets paid." Whether the person is any good at it is a whole other issue.