Hacker News Reader

Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I asked about this a while ago, with an interesting discussion ensuing.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=633540

As the submitted article here notes,

"Of course, finding qualified teachers to teach advanced maths courses will not be easy."

Not easy by far. Here is a detailed article about just how difficult it is to find elementary school teachers who know even very basic math

http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf

and how especially lacking such teachers are in school districts with mostly poor students from ethnic minorities. One finding from that article illustrates the grave nature of the problem:

"in my first visit in 1986 to a K-6 elementary school, I discovered that not a single teacher knew how to find the area of a rectangle."

View on HN

Teach for America and Teach First (the British equivalent) are actually doing a great job at addressing this problem. They are able to recruit teachers from top universities to work in some of the worst schools, precisely by focussing on the difficulties and challenges of the job.

From a different economist article: http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?stor... "Nearly a tenth of Oxford’s class of 2009 will be Teaching First this autumn."

I've heard the statistics are similar with a huge percentage of Harvard's graduating class going into Teach for America.

Unfortunately, unions strongly oppose Teach for America: "Teach for America -- the privately funded program that sends college grads into America's poorest school districts for two years -- received 35,000 applications this year, up 42% from 2008. ... Union and bureaucratic opposition is so strong that Teach for America is allotted a mere 3,800 teaching slots nationwide" http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124061253951954349.html

How many studies have there been of the actual teaching competence (as contrasted with the higher education credentials) of Teach for America teachers? Harvard's admission selection is stringent enough that I could well believe that ANY Harvard graduate in any major can determine the area of a rectangle. But, in general, how many of the graduates of Ivy League universities who go into Teach for America are the graduates who had a strong math background at university? There are some very non-quantitative majors at some of those universities, after all.

Note that I think anyone in Teach for America is probably generally smarter than a random graduate of a teacher training college, but I'm still not sure if every Teach for America teacher without exception has a profound understanding of fundamental mathematics.

http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/fall99/ame...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com