…why Dick and Jane aren’t numerate. Margaret “Privileged” Wente:
Too many teachers can’t do math, let alone teach it
…
Unfortunately, the people who educate the educators sound like the wacky wing of the NDP. Here’s Fern Snart, the dean of education at the University of Alberta: “To educate students beyond the superficial,” she writes, “we must engage them in transformational processes and deep thinking such that they understand the Western position of privilege that is often reflected in issues of diversity, power, and justice, and that they move to an internalization of responsibility related to this privilege.”
No wonder little Emma doesn’t know her times tables. She’s way too busy learning how her Western position of privilege entrenches gender relations. Or something like that…
More on modern, er, educators:
Rhizomatic?
“Privilege”? Western society EARNED its position.
Fern Snart? Fern Snart?! Nobody’s named Fern Snart, you just made that up.
I was amazed when I found out how many math courses future math teachers had to take in a 4 year university degree. In engineering school we had them all completed in the first year of study.
Great. I just shelled out $3K for tuition (1 semester) and $4.5K for residence for junior at the U of A faculty of education. He’s majoring in high school sciences. Perhaps I should have steered him clear of university and all this “gender” and “social justice” hokum and sent him to trades school to take up welding or millwrighting. From my understanding, you don’t have to take “Queer Studies 101” in order to get a journeyman ticket.
The systematic changes to instruction, discipline, evaluation and curriculum are the main reasons why I decided to pursue IT and go into business even though I completed a secondary education degree after my BSc.
It’s good to know my disciplines (math, physics and comp sci) are still desired by some boards, though. 🙂
Below is another wacky item.
Toronto District School Board Resource
Teaching about Human Rights: 9/11 and Beyond
A Resource Package for Educatiors Grades 7-12
Definitions:
Racism:
While people in different contexts can experience prejudice or discrimination, racism, in a North American context, is based on an ideology of the superiority of the white race over other racial groups. Racism is evident in individual acts, such as racial slurs, jokes, etc., and institutionally, in terms of policies and practices at institutional levels of society. The result of institutional racism is that it maintains white privilege and power (such as racial profiling, hiring practices, history, and literature that centre on Western, European civilizations to the exclusion of other civilizations and communities). The social, systemic, and personal assumptions, practices, and behaviours that discriminate against persons according to their skin colour, hair texture, eye shape, and other superficial physical characteristics.
Link: http://www.tdsb.on.ca/wwwdocuments/programs/Equity_in_Education/docs/Teaching%20about%20Human%20Rights%202003.pdf
============================================================================================================
What do you think about the definition above, especially the part that defines racism… “as an ideology based on the superiority of the white race”?
Does that sound like all whites are racists to you?
It is my observation here in the States that most teachers avoided any class in college that involved math. Notable exception, of course, would be math-science teachers.
And it is true — “education” classes in college are taught by liberal far-left wingers. This means that by definition, they are prone to whatever liberal fad is being passed around at any given year.
Most education professors are also “feelers” instead of “thinkers” — nothing wrong with that, except that “thinkers” are made to feel uncomfortable and face an uphill battle.
Eskimo at 10:03:
Not yet you don’t. Wait a year or two. They call it “sensitivity training”.
Back in the early 1980’s I was finishing my B.Sc. and was volunteering my time on the student union as the Science Faculty rep at a small university. One day the student rep for the Education Faculty came to me in a panic. This was because he had decided to take the “Introduction to Earth Sciences” course offered by the Geology Department. It was his choice for the one science elective that he was required to take. Turned out he was writing a mid-term the next day and he was freaked because in three years of teacher training at the university he had never had to write an exam of any kind. Ever.
For some reason he had found out I had taken the course and he needed help in trying to understand what it was he was faced with. I asked him if he had tried “studying” for the mid-term. His response was that studying wasn’t necessary for an education degree.
True story. Only one of many regarding the high-priced babysitters we call teachers.
The rot started a long time ago.
Much to my surprise,the comments at the G&M support Margaret Wente,many of the commenters are teachers or former teachers.
The education systems of Canada are as in need of repair as almost any other government run system. It’s time some of our politicians bucked up their courage and addressed the situation,instead of pandering to the powerful educator’s lobby.
It’s not just math either ,I’ve noticed so many high school graduates that can’t read or write at more than about a grade eight level.
Check out OISE if you want to see where the real rot exists.
OISE?
@dmorris: I got my first degree in ’95 and went back in ’04 to upgrade, and the difference in the calibre of undergrads in the same faculty and program was significant.
It’s hard to tease out of that how much of it was the lack of Grade 13 (which existed in Ontario in 1991 but not in 2003) shorting the kids an extra year of education and maturity, but a friend of mine who works on the university staff confirms the qualitative difference in attitude and engagement amongst the undergrads across all the faculties.
Education or Indoctrination?
My first year university son, informed me last week that “Communism worked pretty well under Lenin”. WTF … I nearly spit out my dinner. we proceeded to have a good discussion about communism and later googled for more information.
We finished by finding this poem (which he decided summed it up nicely, therefore he immediately posted to his facebook page) proving the SDA premise that humour is a great strategy to fight lies and liars.
“There was an old Marxist called Lenin,
Who did two or three million men in.
That’s a lot to have done in,
But where he did one in,
A Marxist called Stalin did ten in.”
Unfortunately when I was taking my undergrad degree in a science-based dicipline, I discovered that a lot of people going into education were doing so because they couldn’t hack it in other areas. Pretty sad – I would guess that at least 1/2 of the time teachers consist of these people who failed at other things (I guess that’s where the saying ‘Those who can’t do teach’ came from). I personally think that if you could achieve over 92% in high school math or any other subject for that matter, you should be qualified to teach it – forget about the degrees.
Stern Fart is a foot soldier of the new world order …. the HIVE is being created … you know … like they have in China … a few rich drones and huge number of worker bees…. A pismire culture, nameless, faceless carbon units …. all obeying their masters who will no longer care about cultural and other sensitivities once the HIVE is under control.
Bet on it.
Maybe the answer to the education systems math/science deficit disorder is to use computers to teach those subjects. Well designed programs track progression and allows parents to check their child’s strengths and weaknesses. It gets around the teach-the-test standardized testing problems and more quickly identifies struggling students. Computer educational “games” are also more fun and engaging than traditional classroom methods and obviously more effective than the “discovery” method.
Of course, the best solution is more school choice and cleaning all the BS out of the education system but that is a long, difficult battle and the kids need to learn math and science skills now.
Why don’t they just name the introductory course ‘Self Loathing 101’?
Why do they even bother with all the unearned self esteem in grade school if they plan to strip it from the post-secondary students by teaching them the culture they came from is heinous?
(rhetorical questions)
The problem with public shcool teaching is that the education industry pays on the basis of the number of years a teacher spends in university plus years spent teaching. There is seldom any emphasis paid to the quality of the students produced – the result of the process.
Sadly, that has very little to do with actually pounding some useful knowledge into Little Johnnie’s head. Students are encouraged to express themselves but to ignore spelling, grammer and sentence structure. Math students often don’t know their multiplication tables because some idiot convinced everyone that memorization is not a good thing. – Try watching a kid at the cash register trying to make change.
Finally, most teachers couldn’t tell their students what the practical, real world uses for what they are teaching are. In Nova Scotia, one math specialist wanted students to be able to “think mathematically” but failed to understand that if they can’t add, subtract, multiply and divide in their heads, students will never think mathematically.
The hallmarks of primary and secondary education are too many educational theories and not enough practicality. That allows students to arrive in university without basic literacy and numeracy.
I sorta gave up years past.
When I first opened my metal fabricating business….I discovered my welders etc didn’t even know what square-root was let alone use it.
Basically, they relied upon cut and try….since it was my metal/stock they were cutting up and wasting time I paid for, to produce substandard product this had to stop.
My larger competitors employed a draftsman to draw up plans for just about anything…including a replacement simple belt sheild when the orginal was not available.
Simply because their people could only assemble using a welding jig…for anything.
These semi-literate drones (my welders) became an asset after a bit of deliberate tutoring on my part. No longer were they were producing wobbling stuff using a square…but checking square with Pythagorean numbers….which they found faster and easier…..and infinitly more accurate.
I rapidly found I was running a lucritive “custom shop”…my competitors were referring customers with “one offs” or prototypes to my shop. And I discovered the clients would readily pay a premium for this….
Somebody once said the only way to get a good secondary education was to attend university….I doubt that is accurate now.
Sounds like self-loathing conditioning of slaves for a new world order of social engineering autocrats. Once you condition a children to hate themselves for who and what they are, you design the pennence for the guilt to be unquestioning service to the utopian global state which is in fact your political/agenda aims.
Was Aldous Huxley a prophet?
one of my kids was having problems with grade 8 math to the extent that it was recommended he go into modified program. I signed him up to KUMON (you know..where they teach the basics of math) and within 6 months he was ahead of regular class. I’ve had it up to my ears with educators (?) always spouting the new methods and how stupid I must be to disagree with them. KMA. Most teachers are just entitled driven public union leaches.
At our all candidates debate on Tuesday the Liberal MP and former Education Minister Kathleen Wynne was gushing how wonderful our education system was and how many more students were graduating. Her trained seals in the audience wildly clapped for her comments, which were just plain BS as the teachers commenting on Wente’s article have posted.
My son’s public school teacher years ago told me when I asked when do you teach the times table that it was my responsibility to teach him this basic life skill!
Here is a great post from Wente’s comments:
I’ve been teaching basic math and communications part-time at an Ontario technical college over the past 10 years and the decline in both literacy and numeracy that we’ve seen over the past couple of years is frightening. For example we’ve assessed whole classes of these highschool graduates in math and they’re sitting (on average) at the Gr 7 to 8 level. (The average age of a class is about 20.)
The college’s response has been to institute ‘foundation’ and ‘upgrading’ programs where we now simply re-teach what they were supposed to have learned in the K-12 system. Politicians and the ‘education industry’ folks brag about how well that we’re doing on this test or that test in comparison to other countries but this is certainly not getting better from my perspective, and there is a whole army of college instructors that will agree with me. The college administrators are just too frightened to to make a big noise about it for fear of repercussions from the provincial government.
Like Peak Oil and Climate Change, it is a self solving problem. Stop teaching them math and the privilege will soon enough be gone.
During the last year of my BSc in engineering I took a 1st year history class as a non-science option I was required to take. It was a very interesting class and the prof really knew and loved the subject matter.
He had been teaching this and other 1st year history classes for a couple decades. He warned us that he hasn’t changed his grading scale to reflect the poor writing ability of entering undergrads. For a paper to get an A it had to have the same quality as an A paper from years ago. It was very enjoyable to listen to a bunch of new undergrads whine about how they got 90% on the English 30 diploma exam but he gave me a C on this paper.
The prof was good about it, if you didn’t like your grade he would give you a C paper and an A paper from years back. Then have you defend your position that your paper was just as good as the A paper of years past.
He message was, its not fully the students fault that the system has failed to teach them to communicate effectively. At the same time that failure wasn’t his problem and he wouldn’t lower his standards just because the public education system had.
Very, very true! Trace back the history of most teachers and I suspect you’ll find that most are 4 year Arts grads. Discovering that this education makes them no more qualified for a barista position than anyone else, they do the extra year to “become a professional”.
But there’s a reason they went into the Arts rather than the Sciences after high-school: they couldn’t handle the latter! So why on earth does anyone think that they’d be remotely qualified to teach even basic mathematics later in life?
Don’t even get me started on the lack of competency of high-school Computer Science teachers!!!
One of my friends installs industrial shelving for a living. He related how he and a competitor of his were working on the same site. A point of contention arose when the one system did not line up or square up with the other. The site super called the two crew chiefs together and asked how they arrived at square. My friend answered that he had used a 3 – 4 – 5 triangle. His competitor looked at him and asked with a straight face, “What’s a 3 – 4 – 5 triangle?”. My friend’s competition was run off the site.
When I started university [elec engineering – where we do *real* math ], I took Intro to Philosophy as an elective. I was all gung ho about this kinda thing.
The professor kept calling me to her office concerning the problems with my assignments. First time, walking over to her office, I was wondering if I had understood utilitarianism correctly, maybe I had made a mistake? I resolved to get it right.
Turns out, my asignment was sub par because of my bibliography. My citation had author first, then doc title, which she told me was wrong. OK, that I could fix.
Next assignment, I was called in again. Did I get Descartes mind-body dichotomy incorrect? Nope, in my bibliography, I had used a semicolon to separate the authors name from the title. “Gotta use a comma”.
Over and over,
My Bibliography.
My bibliography.
After that, I just couldnt take it seriously anymore.
Proud Western Canadian, good for you for supporting your child with their grade 8 math.
My son’s middle school (gr 6 – 8) had been teaching the “new math”(Math Makes Sense) learning system for 3 years when my son entered the school in grade 6. When the school did the annual Gauss math contest, they allowed a few grade 6s to write the grade 8 test “just for fun”.
I saw no signs of embarrassment from the teachers, the school or the school board when a fresh faced grade 6 bested all the schools grade 8s, who had “learned” from the new math system for 3 years. Although they did re-think their policy of allowing younger kids to take the grade 8 test.
After that, we never let him near the Math Makes Sense Series. Around our house, Math Makes Sense is known as Math Makes NO Sense.
If you are looking for the reason why certain university degrees are high cost parakeet cage liners, you need look no further than the comments by Snart. If I were an alumni of the U of A, I would be embarrassed.
“one of my kids was having problems with grade 8 math to the extent that it was recommended he go into modified program. I signed him up to KUMON (you know..where they teach the basics of math) and within 6 months he was ahead of regular class.”
Proud western canadian, I did exactly the same thing…my kids now excel after the same amount of time in the program..funny how actually DOING math rather than only talking about how to approach it works.
I think the only requirements for admission to the Faculty of Education at the U of A are an NDP membership card and a talking Barbie doll that can say ‘math is hard’. Even back in the 1950’s we knew that education was the faculty of choice for anyone who couldn’t cut it in any other program.
Fern Snart is entirely real. I knew her myself forty years ago, and (for reasons perhaps obvious) I’d heard of her before I met her. I’m sorry to report that you’re not actually the first person to make fun of her name, not by a long shot.
However, in those days she was pleasant and harmless. Times change.
The Education Establishment is using smoke and mirrors to prevent you from knowing this basic fact about education.
Your child will learn most when instructed by committed, motivated teachers who know the material. Period.
There are many teachers and potential teachers who meet the above criteria but are admonished by union Reps, fed up by Union rules, burnt out, demotivated or even just weeded out before they start.
Some teachers are so great, that they could teach and motivate a class of 50, while others are so bad they make students stupider for having interacted with them. Some are so small minded that they become the dean of education at the University of Alberta.
I believe Brietbart is planning Big education to add to the other bigs.
Can’t wait for the lefty head explosions when that comes on line.
Some helpul jackass disappeared my Ann Coulter books, so I’m going on memory here, but I remember her offering up stats (re. the U.S.) indicating that there is a direct inverse correlation between the ca@ppiness of a person’s score on the teacher’s exams and the longevity of his/her (let’s face it, “her”) stay in the profession.
In other words, the smart ones quit. The idiots stay. And the qualifications are ludicrously beyond easy to begin with.
And by “inverse” I mean “the opposite of inverse”.
Math is not going to care what class, race or country you are from. Two plus two equals four doesn’t factor in living circumstances. Anyone teaching that kind of tripe should be sweeping floors at McDonald’s on principle. It’s one thing to use different teaching methods; it’s quite another to be Maoist about things.
Re-enrolling my sons int Air Cadets this year I received a pile of paperwork that we did not have to do in the previous years.
Reading it, I am starting to boil with rage, as apparently it was designed by one of those PC educators. We have a mole in CF/Cadet organization now, who is producing tons of policies, forms and other crap.
The CF apparently want to keep their misguided $75 ‘enrollment fee’. I was hoping they would realize how stupid it was but no, this year we have to chip off another $75 per kid, but to add insult to injury we now have to sign tons of forms, some of them in 3 or 4 copies.
Fark it, we are quitting and will concentrate on martial arts and competition trap instead.
A large chunk of the problem with math education lies in the fact that morons far removed from teaching write the course definitions – what to teach, how long to teach it, etc., then the same morons instruct textbook publishers what they must put in the texts, down to such details as how many exercises will appear in each section. As a consequence, high school algebra 2 texts will have maybe 20 practice problems, while texts aimed at the college market may have 80 or more, to treat the same topic. Because math is learned by working math problems, high school students frequently have not worked a sufficient practice problems to acquire a thorough understanding of the topic.
Now I know how the folks felt after they lost the use of the same language in the Tower of Babel story in the bible. A confusion of tongues indeed. These folks are manic.
They sound like their using English, but its leftist gibberish & code.
If our educators can’t even speak the language anymore ? How can our kids even understand how to learn. Time to take a broom to this monstrosity.
Sad. I note one of the ‘educators’ is “including reclamation of their ‘traditional’ technologies” for natives – what, how to make stone axes???
I had to teach both my sons mathematics and how to read properly as the school system destined them for abject failure. One is now a commercial pilot and one is a computer techie.
And a young relative is taking a Masters of Education programme. One of his “courses” consisted of the whole class going to a chalet for a week and meditating then writing to world leaders about world peace! Time to clean house.
Here in Cayuga, I inquired about setting up computer programming classes for the little relatives at the local school. Principle said she was -not-allowed- to arrange things like that, and directed me to… guess where? Go on, guess.
Cayuga United Church. Yep. That’s where the action is.
That and the Anglican Church in town is where kids are getting access to all kinds of stuff like that. Because all the kid’s parents said “Fine! Be that way!” to the local school board and started up their own frickin’ programs.
So now The Phantom gets to man up and go down to the church for the first time in probably 35 years. Suck on that, liberal atheist weenies.
Black Mamba (In other words, the smart ones quit. The idiots stay. And the qualifications are ludicrously beyond easy to begin with.)
Ouch. I’m one of the idiots that stayed. It was that or go on the road as a solo folksinger and since most of my repertoire was Bob Dylan (but done in a “nice” voice) I didn’t stand a chance.
Actually, I liked kids. I liked the subject matter. I think I did a decent if not stellar job. I was never nominated for teacher of the year–or even of the month. I got a research grant once, but I couldn’t speak the jargon with a straight face and I gave it up.
Just about everything I learned about teaching math (as opposed to knowing math) I learned from my more experienced colleagues. The College of Education did not help me one whit in terms of class management or teaching methods–though there was a decent class in evaluation methods. My colleagues were top-notch. Knew their stuff. Cared about the students and knew how to teach. It’s only in the last few years of my career that I was able to observe the intrusion of the social engineers and see what a sad mess they were making of everything. I knew my time was up when I participated in a survey that was designed to show that I was a “blocker” rather than a “progressive.”
TC:
“OISE” = Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. They have a large office tower on Bloor across the street from what used to be Varsity Stadium.
They are the ones who insist on bringing all the “reforms” to Ontario schools. For example, OISE was the one the who recommended phasing out the year-end “departmental” exams, which previously every graduating senior had to write. OISE introduced the disastrous “whole word” approach to teaching language, discarding phonetics in the process. OISE introduced the “New Math”, while discouraging drill and repetition in arithmetic.
In short, as Dr Tom rightly alluded, all that is wrong and horrible in Ontario schools has its genesis at OISE. Why don’t the terrorists ever blow up the right targets?!
By the way Black Mamba, my late husband was Swedish. I like it better when you bashed on Scandinavians. Heh.
I suspect one key reason math is denigrated is that it’s based upon rigourous logic – and logic is one topic the lefties don’t want to know about or teach the children. The children might start thinking for themselves.
As an aside:
Global TV News is running a teaser on a story “Are men still necessary?”.
It makes me laugh. So long as there are people like Fern Snart, most women are going to need men around to do the math – and the computer programming – and the mech engineering – and the civil engineering – and to build the houses – and the pipelines – and …
Black Mamba writes: “In other words, the smart ones quit. The idiots stay. And the qualifications are ludicrously beyond easy to begin with.”
Yes, and no. In Nova Scotia, all parties agreed back in the early 1990s that all candidates for teacher education had to have a university degree and that prospective secondary teachers had to have a major (or equivalent) in one discipline taught in the public schools and a minor (or equivalent) in a different discipline taught in the public schools. Most of the teacher education programs, which had a cap placed on their enrollments, raised admissions standards (both in terms of grades and experiences working with young people). The time of supervised practice teaching was raised from 7 weeks to 21 weeks or more. And I can confirm to you that the graduates of our programs were, overall, far more talented and better prepared than those who had graduated before (and certainly better than those who graduated with me).
But what did these reasonable reforms yield, other than a pool of better prepared, more experienced teachers (and fewer of them)?
1. Students who were no longer able to get into Education left the province, most for two tiny schools in the State of Maine, which set up open-admission Education programs, almost exclusively for Nova Scotia students. There, they learned nothing about Canadian schools and not a whole lot about any other kind. Like Randy Newman’s “good ole boys from LSU”, they “went in dumb, came out dumb, too”.
2. The reforms to Education reduced the number of teacher education graduates from 1150 per year to just over 400 per year, but with off-shore and out-of-province graduates, we now issue almost 1200 teachers licences a year, despite the absence of jobs.
3. It has become clear to me that the school boards prefer to hire teachers who were indifferent students in sociology and psychology and after a year, put them into classrooms to teach other subjects. Each year, the academic ability of applicants to our initial teacher education program improves, but the academic ability and record of the *teachers* who apply to our graduate programs gets worse. Some were hired through nepotism or other personal connections; some because they fitted nicely into the system. These are, in Black Mamba’s words, “the idiots [who] stay.”
4. There are many good, talented, and profound academics teaching teachers, and some of the comments made about them are ignorant and uninformed. They are, however, a shrinking minority within Faculties of Education, but this is no less true in our Faculties of Arts, Social Sciences, Law, Health Professions, and many others. Similarly, there are a large number of hard-working, smart, well-prepared teachers who do make it into our schools. Some stay and do their best; others, who had succeeded at everything else they’d ever done, move on to other challenges.
5. After many decades in the business, it seems clear to me that every sector of society proclaims the importance of education as the most important key to our nation’s future, but there is not one sector in our society that acts as if this were really true.
6. From every level, from pre-kindergarten to the Ph.D., there are many good people, who are labouring in a system that is tragically corrupt.
Roseberry (It has become clear to me that the school boards prefer to hire teachers who were indifferent students in sociology and psychology and after a year, put them into classrooms to teach other subjects.)
Are you saying that if they had candidates with majors in math or physics or English, the Boards would favor the Psych majors over them?
(Each year, the academic ability of applicants to our initial teacher education program improves, but the academic ability and record of the *teachers* who apply to our graduate programs gets worse. Some were hired through nepotism or other personal connections; some because they fitted nicely into the system. These are, in Black Mamba’s words, “the idiots [who] stay.”)
I’m trying to understand: The “idiots” who stay (in education) are these the ones applying for graduate programs? Is that because they’re no good at teaching?
Also, when you mention the academic ability of the candidates entering education is improving–is this observation based on their high school averages? Are the students with higher averages tending towards Education over other fields? Or is the entrance average rising as an attempt to limit the numbers entering the College?
(Similarly, there are a large number of hard-working, smart, well-prepared teachers who do make it into our schools. Some stay and do their best; others, who had succeeded at everything else they’d ever done, move on to other challenges.)
Is it inevitable that those who are good at other things will leave?
It sounds as if you are familiar with this field.