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Teachers Be Crazy
Barmymoo:
I'm at one of the top universities in the UK and I can add up, multiply and divide up to three digit numbers, deal with simple fractions and work out percentages by trial and error. I'm not sure we're any better! Things are also going to get very interesting soon when universities lose all their funding for arts subjects because the government doesn't believe they matter.
Skewbrow:
That's ok, for in many a university program you won't need more math than that. My complaint is more about that we used to teach things like Euclidean geometry at the junior high level (in the 70s). Complete with proofs. Not to all and sundry, but the students were split into separate math classes according to their aspirations. That stopped. Then the invitable happened, and we no longer have enough teachers who could be trusted with that job (damn computers are sucking kids from the same talent pool). These idiots at the ministry all chant the mantra that teaching kids a little bit extra math at junior high level is leading to elitism and such.
I am aware that many (if not most) citizens can function well in the society without knowing a thing about proofs, but the attitude that it is elitist to teach more to those kids who could learn more makes me squirm. All the more so because there is no shortage of schools spending (I guess I'm moving to the high school level at this point) extra hours in sports, arts, music, acting, et cetera. All these have their place, but why is that not elitist, but teaching math is!!!?
Did I say that you hit a nerve?
pwhodges:
When I went to university in 1965, to read physics, there was a surprising variation even then between how much maths people had been taught at different schools. Some of this was because half of us had done maths as a single subject at A-level (typically called Maths for Science), and the rest had done double maths (Pure Maths and Applied Maths as two subjects), and some was variation between the syllabuses for the equivalent exam set in different places. As a result, for example, half of us had a grounding in vector analysis and matrices, and half had never heard of it - that lecturer assumed we had done it, and grudgingly gave over half of a single lecture to summarising the basics (up to dot and cross products) after which we were assumed to be up to speed.
Regress:
It's funny, I had the same experience with upper level economics courses. I started out in a math heavy program so my upper-division courses were no problem, but the kids who transferred in from theory heavy schools had a look of horror as the professors assumed we all knew advanced econometrics and had at least gone through Calc. 4.
snalin:
--- Quote from: Method of Madness on 09 Jun 2011, 21:13 ---Hey, just wondering, for people who aren't from the States, what's involved in being licensed to teach? Does anyone know anyone who moved from the States and taught? I know this is slightly off topic, but it'd be really helpful.
--- End quote ---
To be licensed to teach at schools here (Nurrway), you have to take a three or four year uni course (not quite sure). I found a page about home education in Norway, it's fairly interesting. You don't have to have any special education, but you have to report to the local autorities that your kid is being home schooled. They'll give you a supervisory teacher from your school (every kid is automatically assigned to a school), and they'll check up on your kid once or twice a year, with talks and tests. If he or she decides that your kid are not being taught well enough, you will be forced to send your kid to school.
Because of the Pisa-tests, the Finnish system is always mentioned at least once a year as "the system we should take inspiration from!". Of course, the international tests checks basic skills, and those are quite ridiculous as they give no real indication of how good you are at these things (I just aced an uni maths exam, but I would have to stop and think for a while if you asked me to multiply 11 and 13). It's still worrying how little people know after the first 10 years of school. My biggest problem with the system is that the teachers are required to give everyone teaching at their own level of competence, but with 1 teacher for 25 students being the standard, that's not going to happen. So they'll have to dump everything down to the lowest common level that still gets us through the curriculum.
EDIT: oh, there's a law about what the education should contain! The things you have to teach your kid, even if you teach from home is:
RLE (the religions and ethics course), Norwegian*, maths, "foreign languages" (English + one more is common), gymnastics, "knowledge of the home" (a cooking course everyone has for one year), "knowledge of society and nature" (nature and social science), aesthetic, practical (painting and woodworking) and social education.
For the social part, the home education thing recommends sending your kids to the SFO, a kind of "stay at school after school" thing where kids basically can hang out with other kids until their parents gets home. Sounds like a brilliant idea, really.
*I could make a whole other post about how they've rammed so much down the troath of this that you don't really get anything covered properly.
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