Core Dump 2.0

Margaret Wente’s column in this weekend’s Globe and Mail is particularly trenchant. She goes after the teaching establishment for producing a generation of teachers who don’t know, don’t understand, and can’t teach mathematics. From what I’ve seen of my kids’ progress through high school, I think she’s hit the nail squarely on the head. At least at the high school level, a B.Sc with a math minor should be a requirement to teach mathematics, and I’d consider enforcing that down to perhaps the Grade 5 level.

Across the country, university math professors report that the math skills of students who are studying to become teachers are generally abysmal. Basic skills such as adding fractions or calculating percentages are frequently beyond them. “If you don’t know math, you can’t teach math,” says Anne Stokke, a math professor at the University of Winnipeg who has launched a petition to raise the standards.

In Manitoba, education students often arrive at university with no more than what’s called “consumer math,” which is what you take in high school if you can’t do real math. To qualify as teachers, they need only one university-level math course – not nearly enough to make up for years of neglect. Even teachers who aim to specialize in high-school math only need to take a few basic courses. “As it stands, I don’t think they come out of university with the proper background to teach mathematics to kids either in elementary school or in high school,” Fernando Szechtman, a math professor at the University of Regina, told the CBC.

You might think that the nation’s faculties of education – the institutions that teach the teachers – would be concerned about this problem. After all, their job is to ensure that teachers know their stuff by the time they’re unleashed on the classroom.

But this concept of teacher training is pathetically behind the times. Today’s faculties of education have much loftier goals in mind. According to them, their main job is to sensitize our future teachers to issues of social justice and global inequality.

Take a look at the comments on the article too. They’re quite interesting.

Oxford and Cambridge University will be putting many of their lectures up on iTunes Univesity for free download. The BBC News article doesn’t provide a lot of details, but the quality of the lectures should be high.

The material will include historian David Starkey, music from St John’s College choir and physicists who will “strip down science to the basics”.

Oxford University will use its iTunes output to “showcase our research and enable the public to hear from world-leading thinkers on topical issues”.

Among the contributions will be Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank, discussing the global financial crisis and Craig Venter on genomics.