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Comment by jordigh | Hacker News Reader

As a McGill math grad, I must say that it was a running joke in the math department how the Education students didn't really need to know any math (some B. Ed. students shared classes with us during the first year or two). The B. Ed. students freely accepted this joke and were quite self-deprecating about their mathematical skills. Several of them even felt cheated for taking our "advanced" math classes which were, in their opinion, far beyond anything they would ever have to teach in high school or CEGEP.[1]

I guess these jokes had some basis in reality.

[1] Québec has a somewhat outdated education system where the last year of rough equivalents of high school and first year of university in US are done in a somewhat "vocational" college called a CEGEP which is an intermediate step between high school and university. The original purpose of this was to help bring more students into university.

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Several of them even felt cheated for taking our "advanced" math classes which were, in their opinion, far beyond anything they would ever have to teach in high school or CEGEP.

Are you saying that people would go to school to be math teachers and say "teach me the math I need to teach my students"?

That's nuts.

I can't imagine a Spanish teacher who only knows the Spanish in the textbook. Or a woodshop teacher who only knows how to make napkin holders. Or an English literature teacher who's who's only read two of Shakespeare's plays. Or a computer programming teacher who only knows one language.

My dad taught civics and American history. I could ask him anything about those topics and he would answer, and love answering. My attention span would run out way before his knowledge and passion ever did.

I can't imagine a Spanish teacher who only knows the Spanish in the textbook.

I don't need to imagine her; she taught me for three years in high school.

danielweber ought to damn well be able to imagine it too because I guarantee beyond a shadow of a doubt that he had teachers that worked like that too.

It's easy to miss when we're kids and we still have that presumption that the teachers must know so much more, but what little left of that illusion I had was shattered when I got to college and on a whim started examining the curricula of the teaching degrees. No, they do not necessarily know more than they are teaching. They may. They can. They may even know a lot more because they really love it. But there are plenty who do not.

True, I had some teachers who were just reading from the book, like my health teacher.

Mine was a French "teacher". Fortunately only for one year. She normally smelled of stale beer.

Are you saying that people would go to school to be math teachers and say "teach me the math I need to teach my students"?

This is how teachers in Ontario (who avearge around $75k/year) learn how to teach math.

As long as everyone has equal access to education, there isn't a problem here.

This notion that you only need to know as much math as you're going to teach is ridiculous. The more your students struggle in math, the deeper your understanding of the subject needs to be. It takes a fair bit of skill and understanding to accurately diagnose and address misunderstandings.

Knowing higher level math also lets you help younger students learn things in a way that sets them up for success later on. Students can learn "advanced" concepts at a young age if presented at the right time, in the right way. But you can't introduce those concepts if you don't know them, and recognize when it's appropriate to introduce them.

This is an excellent couple of points. A math teacher doesn't just have to be able to know how to do the problem himself; he also has to be able to figure out where the student's misunderstanding is and how to correct it. Not only that, he needs to be able to do this for dozens of different students, all of whom have their own difficulties and misunderstandings.

I'm sure that there are people with only high school math understanding who can do this... but it just seems to me that the kind of personality traits that would make someone learn how to teach math like this would also make that person extremely passionate about learning it to the best of his ability and potential. I can't imagine a passionate history teacher who isn't also passionate about learning more history. Same thing with an English teacher who only reads John Grisham books (not that there's anything wrong with John Grisham).

I just spoke to a family member who's also a McGill grad and was told the education program is "the worst by a mile".

It seems a little disingenuous to lump the education program in with the rest of McGill.

It demonstrates how little the administration cares to maintain an acceptable standard of education in one department. Where else are they dropping the ball?

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