Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums THINKING BIG About Gifted Education Closing the achievement gap and gifted students

I agree that you can develop a skill. You don't have to have innate mathematical abilities to use the skill.

Just like understanding derivatives. I can use an example of an option on a house to explain derivatives to someone who never had calculus and they get it. But the example is a derivative.

Ren

I tell my students that people who take more math classes than they have to are more likely to get a job that lets them wear jeans to work and pays well, too. That's what I got from my experience in 17 jobs before I became a teacher! ; )

Well, I became a teacher in my mid-thirties. Five years experience in my field was difficult because so few jobs are tied to an academic field. In a recession, that five years becomes even tougher to get. I guess you could say I did that, if you define my field very loosely, and include the graduate assistant work in university.

After I switched careers and became a teacher, I had to work in education for about 8 years before I got the chance to actually teach a class that was related to my undergraduate and graduate major fields (6th grade social studies, as it happens). Of course, about half of teachers leave the profession within their first five years, and teachers who are assigned outside their area of expertise are even more likely to leave. I'm still teaching because I am unusually stubborn.

Having been on both sides of the fence, I will say this. People in education have a tendency not to value education and experience outside of that field. People outside of the field of education really have little idea what is involved in education. But the real problem with your plan is that it is difficult to retain people who worked in another field before becoming a teacher, because people with experience and skills that are recognized by the world outside the school doors are less likely to be satisfied with the working conditions and pay of a teacher.

I have often had the opposite thought, that nobody should be allowed to enter a teacher training program until they have actually worked inside a K-12 school, even if it is just as a part-time Educational Assistant for a semester. But if we did that, I wonder if we might have an even tougher time staffing our classrooms.

To be clear, I'm not saying that a math teacher needs to work as a mathematician, nor that a history teacher needs to work as a historian. If a would-be math teacher has 5 years experience in engineering, or a hard science, I would accept those as related fields. Similarly the would-be history teacher could work in politics.

Beckee, What you say is true that people who have success outside of teaching may want to stay there, or return there after trying teaching. Salaries may have to be raised to account for the fact that the bar has been raised in one way. On the other hand, Finland has a high bar for teachers, but their compensation isn't drastically higher than it is in the US, from my understanding (by many accounts, it's lower). Also, there are perks to teaching regarding summer vacations, and job satisfaction that aren't found in other industries.

The point is to let the market assess the understanding these teachers gained in the subjects they studied instead of developing subject specific tests for all teachers, while giving the teachers experiences they can relate to their students. Did you ever ask your math teacher the usefulness of understanding imaginary numbers? Could they answer? Mine couldn't. I think he said they were "used in engineering" but had no idea how, and could offer no example. He was generally a good teacher, but my motivation suffered because of his ignorance. (Luckily I didn't need much motivation to grasp math.)

Since you're a teacher with at least some outside experience, perhaps you can comment on whether or not you relate those experiences to your students in a way that enriches their education. My sister-in-law relates my engineering experiences to her math students because she has none of her own (she'd be perfectly capable of acquiring some.)

I notice this in textbooks as well. It drives me crazy. But this may be partly a question of learning style, I think. I like a clear, linear flow of text and hate it when I can't tell what ot read first or when things go off-topic in little boxes. I HATE those DK books for the same reason, but plenty of people seem to adore them. I wonder if some of this is an adapatation for kids who are on the web all the time.

The purpose of textbook publishers these days is to convince educators that the new books add value, so they'll keep buying new books every year. Those images you're talking about aren't intended for the consumption of the child, they're intended for whoever makes purchasing decisions in the local school districts. Upper-management types are often delighted by bright, shiny objects.

It's not like the fundamentals of geometry change drastically every year. We're still pretty much studying Euclid and Pythagoras at that stage.

Don't get me started on math textbooks. I volunteered in all of my kids' classrooms during their elementary years. The 3rd & 4th grade books their school used were ridiculous.

Pages crammed with so many unnecessary graphics that they were a distraction issue for those kids with focusing problems. And they had numerous errors.