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> McGill is not a great university

It still ranks pretty high:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGill_University#Rankings_and...

and they still sell those "Harvard: The McGill of America" sweatshirts every year.

https://glasgowuniversityabroad0910.wordpress.com/2009/10/16...

That B. Ed. students are coming so unprepared from McGill is quite sad.

Its liberal arts programme is also much bigger than Waterloo's, but comparable to UofT's.

>"Harvard: The McGill of America"

mmm and they didn't realize that McGill is in America too? May be the parent post has a point...

As a Mexican, I don't like it much either, but I'm also tired of trying to convince the world that America isn't the US.

Here is some consolation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29g57XTYgLE

There are three [0] "America"s -- North, South, and United States of. Clarification is only required when context is inadequate to distinguish between them.

Similarly, "star" can refer to a shape, a celestial body, or a talented/lead performer or athlete. You wouldn't interrupt a conversation about sports to say "stars aren't just guys like LeBron James; Aldebaran is also a star." That would be asinine and obnoxious.

So please, out of respect for everyone's time and sanity, learn how to use contextual clues and stop trying to argue that "America isn't the US".

[0] OK, there are actually even more "America"s -- a band, multiple cities, ships, movies, etc. But the contextual clues in this post suggested we had "large regions of land" in mind, so I left the other forms of "America" for the footnote.

> "America isn't the US".

Depends whom I'm talking to. When I talk to you and others like you, I'll be careful to note that unqualified "America" to you almost always means "the United States". It never meant that to me growing up, nor to a bunch of other people. However, due to the global influence of the US, most of the world considers "America" to be the "US".

It's not really about context or anything that could be called objective. It just means different things to different people. And because for me "America" has very emotional meanings (such as for example, Morelos' proclamation that "... so Americans may only be distinguished by vice or virtue"[1] or Luis Miguel's song "América"[2], or Las Águilas del América [3]), I will never personally accept the meaning of "US" for "America".

You may have other emotional attachments to the meaning of "America", so I will try to respect those when I use the word around you or others like you.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentimientos_de_la_Naci%C3%B3n

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SL3u7qU_09w

[3] note their logo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_Am%C3%A9rica

> "It's not really about context ... [it] means different things to different people."

The identities of the speaker and audience are part of context. As you correctly inferred, if I'm speaking, an unqualified "America" probably means "the United States". If you're speaking, it probably means "the largest landmass in the western hemisphere". If we're quoting Obama speaking to the Senate, or Morelos during the revolution, we can infer what they mean by "America".

Accept the meaning the speaker intends, when it's communicated clearly enough that you can infer it. That's how communication works.

> The identities of the speaker and audience are part of context.

I cannot in general assume that information on the internet.

Depends on which part of the internet. (The context of the context ;) )

that's not context, that's because USA is the biggest power in the Americas, so powerful that it overshadows all the other regions/countries, and that's why some people living in the Americas feel belittled by that.

I know you were not replying to my post directly, but to clarify my position: I'm european, I don't particularly care about the distinction, I just found that it was a very depressing message to put on a university t-shirt from outside USA.

Ah, and please, out of respect for everyone's time and sanity, stop patronizing other people.

Please don't mistake confidently arguing for patronizing.

"The USA is the biggest power" is a form of context. "The speaker is from [country X]" is a form of context (Churchill, definitely not from the USA, once famously said "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else.") There was adequate context for the original t-shirt to make it clear what "America" was referring to.

Which makes the "not just the US" argument come across as similar to if you argued that "LeBron isn't the only star, Aldebaran is also a star". Virtually everybody knows there are multiple meanings of the word "America"; we don't need to be told that every time we use it to refer to the US. The appropriate standard for word usage is "the same republican principles as American civil and ecclesiastical constitutions" [Noah Webster], that is, popular usage. And in popular usage, "America" can be used to refer to the US, or to the landmass as a whole; arguing against that is like arguing that we should stop calling famous actors "stars" because they're not luminous spheres of plasma. It's incorrect, and also annoying.

There is also the point that the United States of America was the first state to incorporate "America" in its name. It was an independent state when the rest of the Americas were at least nominally colonized by European powers. Much of the rest of the world got used to calling the USA "America".

For that matter, the official title of Mexico included "United States"--should I apologize when using "United States" or disambiguate in case somebody wants to mention the United Mexican States?

I was depressed mostly by the very lame message, I just find it sad.

Rankings and reputation are interrelated, but not the same thing. For example, rankings punish large class sizes, but well known professors like Larry Smith command 500+ person classes; simultaneously reducing rankings while improving reputation.

I would argue that McGill hits the right numbers, and certainly has a great law program, but it is middle of the road in terms of reputation.

I was screaming about how I hadn't learned anything in math between grade 4 and 8. Nothing. Think about that. We did fraction math for four and a half years

I ended up being taught the same thing many times in math classes, but I noticed that my classmates -- even in honors classes -- had completely forgotten the last time we had learned this. They insisted they had never seen it before. The teachers had been through this many times so they weren't surprised.

I don't know why I could remember it when other students cannot. A tiny part of me says that those kids hated math and shoved it out of their brain as soon as they could. I'm not sure that's fair of me. My wife says it isn't and that I'm the unusual one with the math brain.

I think a surprising number of people simply can't math.

This seems incredible if you're one of the people who can math.

But really, I've known otherwise bright people whose brains fall apart at the first hint of abstraction.

Basic arithmetic is fine, but you can forget about trying to teach them anything more complicated.

Simple equations? Trig? Basic stats? They just can't do them, no matter how many times you repeat the explanations, or how many different ways you try to present them.

So I think it's not unlikely that an aptitude for math and symbolic abstraction is unusual, and not something you're going to find in most of the population.

Remember, by the time you get to a university you're in the top 20% of the population anyway. (More like 10% for STEM.)

So it's maybe not so realistic to assume that's how most people are.

There are two theses I have, not sure which is right:

1. Those people biologically can't math. (Alternatively, we are the mutants who can math.)

2. Culture has given them math anxiety, which causes panic when being asked to do math.

I think it just that Math requires abstraction and abstraction is genuinely hard. Because it is hard and highly desired skill very few teachers are good at it

There's an awful lot of people who think they are bad at math but they never really tried it because they find arithmetic difficult/tiresome/whatever.

Ask them how long it will take to drive somewhere, no problem, they can calculate it.

Ask them to solve an algebra equation with 1 variable? No way, they don't know how to do that.

TL;DR I am currently taking an adult who "can't math" through Khan Academy from K-2nd on up and she's "mathing" wonderfully now that we're comprehensively filling in the understanding gaps. Too bad she still doesn't like it. :P

I know someone in that class of people that "can't math". Initially I tutored her in algebra and she did alright when we were working together, but as soon as I turned her loose or she went in to take a test she couldn't remember or apply the techniques. She was allowed to go into Pre-calculus (she wants to be a Chem Major). But without extensive help on each section she would fail spectacularly. And after a while it became obvious why. She could think logically and when explained clearly or relating to other concepts she's recently learned it all made sense, but she had so many deficiencies in basic math that nothing past that would really stick. As an example I taught her the formula for computing the area of a square multiple times, but she would swear this was the first time each time because there was no foundation to hang that new knowledge on.

Now I but I have her working through Khan Academy from the ground up (K-2nd) and now that she's up to 5th grade and I've explained how basic concepts relate together, like multiplication and area or fractions and division she's actually starting to "get it".

She just lost the thread of "mathing" around 3rd grade and never found it again. Now that she can go through it at her pace and has someone that can patiently explain it from multiple angles it makes sense and she's doing things on her own that I was afraid she's never "get".

That said without Khan academy and a detailed list of sub-topics in math (45 individual skills for dealing with fractions for example) I'd have never been able to cover all the small things that add up to a detailed understanding of arithmetic. I'd have covered fractions from maybe a handful of angles and called it good knowing that it wasn't enough practice without having an answer for how to practice more without stupid rote repetition of the same kinds of problem.

I think for a lot of people the problem is that they don't know there is a map (a lot of mathematics fits together quite nicely).

I also think that a lot of instruction is pushed at people that are missing some fundamental bit or another, so even though the concept is close within their reach, it doesn't end up sinking in.

It's another example of how we humans arrange things so that the winners keep on winning (that is, people who are caught up end up actually learning the new stuff, people who are behind waste the time).

Somewhat unrelated, but if you had to pick an American school that Toronto would be 'our version of', Harvard is probably a better bet than Columbia:

> from 2000 to 2004 U of T professors produced more publications in the fields indexed by Thomson Scientific than faculty at any other public research university worldwide... the University of Toronto stands second only to Harvard in publications among all private and public universities.

(The numbers are a bit out of date, but Toronto's relative place among Canadian universities is probably unchanged).

when a teacher went on maternity leave a history teacher had to teach grade 11 math

Likewise, in grade 11 the trigonometry teacher had to leave and the wrestling coach had to fill in. The students had to teach him the material.

McGill is a great university for a lot of the more "classical" fields.

However, you're right, McGill is far from being the top engineering university in Quebec.

From what I've heard McGill is very dependent by program, and education is by all accounts by far the worst program they offer.