Blog: Articles filed under education

A few weeks ago I discussed gender stereotypes in ads with my Grade 8 class. I knew I would have no trouble finding examples to bring in to demonstrate what I meant. Indeed, I found this awesome website, the Gender Ads Project, with thousands of scanned magazine ads categorized by the stereotypes they portray. What I didn’t anticipate was how difficult it would be to find ads that both clearly demonstrate a stereotype and are safe for a Grade 8 classroom. I knew ads were hypersexualized, but it has never been more apparent than the hour or so I spent discarding various ads for being too racy for the classroom.

This annoyed me, but the source of that annoyance was not the advertisers themselves. Oh, I’m plenty miffed by advertisers for all those gender stereotypes they perpetuate in their attempts to sell, sell, sell. But in this case, I was annoyed by how, as a teacher, my hands are often tied in a way that prevents me from truly addressing important issues in an authentic way. It’s silly to think that kids aren’t being exposed to hypersexualized ads outside of the classroom: these ads pervade every medium, from television to the Internet to the stray magazine lying around on the coffee table. Yet I just know that if I don’t walk the line carefully, some parent would be up in arms about how I’m exposing children to inappropriate images.

This fundamental disconnect between what’s acceptable within the classroom and what is acceptable (whether or not it’s appropriate) outside the classroom poses difficulties for us as teachers. We’re asked to prepare children for “the real world” while simultaneously charged with maintaining, for as long as possible, a false sense of innocence by eliding over certain aspects of that real world. It’s similar to how parents and religious groups regularly challenge various books in bids to get them removed from school libraries or class reading lists. The Hunger Games was a popular challenged book last year, as was a series of novels by Lauren Myracle that are apparently “sexually explicit” and “unsuited to age group”. There’s that mentality again, that wishful thinking among certain groups that kids aren’t already starting to think about sex or learning about drugs from each other (not to mention TV, video games, and the Internet).

It’s true I have a certain literary bias here, so take this observation with a grain of salt. It seems to me that books are a medium that allow kids to grapple with serious topics like sex, violence, and drug use in a way that is both deeper and safer than that provided by television or video games. (That doesn’t mean I think it’s impossible for TV or video games to educate kids responsibly, but the majority of content in those media do not do that.) Aside from the fact that banning such books is ultimately ineffective—if kids want to read it, they will find a way to read it—I would argue it’s also harmful. Pre-teens and teenagers are starting to have uncomfortable questions about themselves, their bodies, and their places in society. Sometimes parents don’t want to or don’t know how to answer those questions. More likely, kids aren’t always going to be eager to ask their parents for help figuring things out. So then, where do they turn? It’s a shame, therefore, that some people want to ban books that might help kids work out these issues in the safety of their own bedrooms.

I’m sure that as I gain experience teaching I’ll develop a better sense of how to walk the line—and push the boundaries. Yesterday I led a discussion on homophobic language. Last week was Anti-Bullying/Anti-Discrimination Week, culminating with Day of Pink. Our class’ literacy periods were entirely consumed by another commitment, so the anti-bullying lesson had to be deferred. I wanted to address the use of language because I had heard it very often from people in the class: “That’s so gay” is a common pejorative. I adapted an activity from the Pride Education Network. We began by watching Rick Mercer’s rant on teen suicide, then we discussed racism and compared racist slurs to homophobic slurs. (I also talked about the Charter of Rights and Freedoms for a bit; in a nice bit of serendipity, yesterday was also the 30th anniversary of our adoption of the Charter!) I was a little nervous about inviting the students to contribute examples of slurs and discuss their meanings. The lesson went off well, though. I’m not sure how well I got through to the students, but even if some of them took to heart the initial discussion of the difference between sex and gender, then I’m happy.

Clearly, it’s possible to have meaningful conversations in a classroom. I just think there’s some irony that the classroom, that safe environment to help prepare students for all these things they’re encountering in the real world, apparently has to be safe by dint of these constraints placed upon what gets brought into it. Advertisers, on the other hand, have no such constraints and no scruples. Hopefully, as the Internet and new media continue to change our perceptions of entertainment, news, and literature, our ideas of what’s appropriate for the classroom will shift as well. And maybe as a society we can become a little more conscious of what commercials are really saying.

(Or maybe I’ll just stop worrying and have the class read Slaughterhouse-Five, censors be damned.)

Last Thursday I wrote my final exam as an undergraduate university student. This marks the end of my formal schooling (for now). I have this week off, which is a welcome break and short vacation, and then I begin my second five-week practicum. Come the last full week of April, I will be finished completely. No more assignments. No more tests. I’ll be a transcript and some bureaucratic processing away from being a certified teacher.

I have mixed feelings about being finished school. On one hand, it is a relief. This last term of classes went by slowly. Many of my friends remarked that they were not getting much from their classes this time, that they were anxious to get back out in the field or to be done … and I can see whence this line of reasoning comes, and I agree in part. We had an intense conversation about this in my Philosophy of Education class, about how we would redesign the teacher education program if we could. All of us spoke with the voices of very tired teacher candidates.

On the other hand, it is also terrifying. This is it. When I entered university, I entered as a concurrent education student. I knew I would be doing five years, four of them for my honours degree and one in the Faculty of Education. Now I’m finished. This is the culmination of my five-year plan, and I feel a great sense of accomplishment … and a corresponding sense of “nowwhatedness”. Now what do I do? (I need another five-year plan, of course!) The year before me is a year of transition, a year in which I will redefine myself. I will go from student to teacher in earnest, look for jobs, look for other ways to gain experience. Depending on where I end up—but that is another post—I will be making new friends (and maybe new enemies!) and learning how to live on my own, as an adult, something I have yet to experience. This is going to be a Year of New Things. It is bound to be both intimidating and exhilarating, probably all at the same time.

I get lots of queries about graduate school. I give off, I suppose, this latent sense of academe. I am the stereotypical ivory tower individual: white, male, book-smart, autodidactic, possessed of certain idiosyncrasies, and socially-awkward. (All I’m lacking is the strokable beard. I think I would look terrible with a beard, so I’ve never tried growing one.) Many people I know assume or have voiced an expectation that I will end up in grad school and, ultimately, a university professor. Well, I did my stint of research and know it’s not for me—that is, I don’t want to do it for the rest of my life. Plus, the life of a professor is not as flexible in terms of where I can work: I’d have to go where there are positions, and those would be in large cities, which I want to avoid. Finally, North American society is churning out too many postdocs as it is. Statistically, this is a poor time to to be pursuing a doctorate. That probably wouldn’t stop me if it was something I really wanted (or needed), but it does not sweeten the deal.

But what about a mere masters? After all, many high school teachers have those now; it is close to becoming an expectation. Indeed, this credential inflation is one reason I am avoiding grad school for now. It may be silly, but I’m being contrarian. Also, once I´ve found a stable teaching job, I can do my masters gradually on the side—this is probably more financially sensible than doing it now, when I have no strong source of income. I need to start saving, start putting money away for those rainy days and for retirement, and I need experience. This is the bottom line. In the end, it comes down to one thing: I have no real-world experience.

I went straight out of high school and into five years of university. I don’t think it’s my place to start doing research on how to teach or how students learn when I have no conception of what actually happens in a classroom. And I don’t want to be swallowed up by the (sometimes toxic) culture of academe and the ivory tower … university is a wonderful place of learning, but it is also problematic, and I would like to step outside it for a while and get a chance to learn in other ways. I have book-smarts, and I will continue to acquire book-smarts. But now I desperately need some street-smarts as well. I am very comfortable being an academic student, but I also recognize that this comfort is itself a siren song that could lure me to limit my development and keep my mind on a very narrow path. Now that I have the opportunity, it is time to shake things up—not too much, mind you, but enough to get some practice all up in my theory.

So this is it, the end of this road for now. I will probably return to school at some point, whether it is to get a graduate degree or simply to take more undergraduate courses that strike my fancy. (I will be doing Additional Qualification courses and other professional development workshops too, but I don’t count those as a “return” to university.) As a teacher I should be a lifelong learner, and learning has always been something I just do anyway, so I don’t think I will be able to stay away from university forever. For now, though … other things lie ahead. The world is not flat after all.

Once again Margaret Wente, my favourite Globe and Mail columnist, has delved into the gritty underworld of math education to expose the truth. This time she is concerned that we’re not teaching basic arithmetic in schools any more. She takes issue with recent trends in math education, which emphasize discovery-based learning over drill or rote-based learning. As a consequence of this shift, the standard algorithms for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division are no longer a core part of the curriculum. Wente, as well as some parents and teachers, thinks this is a bad idea. And while I agree with her on one point—it’s essential for students to know basic arithmetic as they go on to high school—once again I have to protest how she has chosen to argue that point.

Before I discuss Wente’s arguments, I think it’s important to mention one thing that Wente does not make explicit. Education falls under the mandate of the provincial governments. Hence, every province and territory in Canada has different math curricula. There are similarities, but we still have to be careful when we are talking about math education across the entire country as if it were some uniform curriculum.

Canada is “Behind the Times”

One of Wente’s more absurd reasons for rejecting the current curriculum is that “this approach to math education has been repudiated” in the United States, and this apparently makes us “behind the times”. Heaven forfend that we don’t copy the United States in every respect! You would think we’re a sovereign country or something crazy like that. We are allowed to structure our curriculum differently from our neighbour to the south. And without being too indelicate, let’s just say that the American education system in all its forms does not instil much confidence, at least for me personally. I’m not sure it’s something we should be striving to emulate.

This Is a Plot by Private Tutoring Firms (And Thus Puts the Poor at a Disadvantage)

Since kids no longer learn arithmetic in school, parents are forced to turn to private tutoring companies—Wente names Kumon as one example—for these skills. At the conclusion of her article, Wente decides to deploy the heavy Scare Tactic weapon:

The biggest losers aren’t your kids, of course. The biggest losers are the kids of parents who can’t afford tutoring, or don’t have the time to teach them times tables, or don’t even know their kids need help. It’s called two-tier education. And it’s here.

I love the way Wente phrases this: the biggest losers aren’t your kids; they’re the kids of those poor people. Those two sentences tell you all you need to know about who Wente assumes is reading The Globe and Mail.

I’m not sure how to refute this argument simply because it’s a conspiracy theory, and Wente doesn’t even try to disguise that fact. I suspect that if our curriculum magically amended itself to reflect Wente’s visions, then Kumon and its ilk would find other ways to get clients. They are a business and target their marketing accordingly. It just so happens they’ve found a niche here.

But two-tiered education has always been around. That second tier is called private school.

The Standard Algorithms are Better Because They are Efficient

Wente calls the standard algorithms “efficient and foolproof”. And they are. She blasts the alternative methods, “such as breaking numbers into units of thousands, hundreds, tens and ones” for not being efficient. I would disagree, but first we probably need to decide what we mean by efficient.

If one’s goal is to add two numbers efficiently, then my suggestion would be to use a calculator. Savants aside, computers are just better than humans at adding and subtracting. And now that calculators are commonplace, not just in schools but on our computers and even in our phones, there is no reason not to encourage their use. Should you be able to add basic numbers without a calculator? Absolutely! There will be instances where a calculator isn’t in reach, for whatever bizarre reason, and you will be glad you can do arithmetic. But those instances are becoming increasingly rarer. And so when they come, are we really worried about efficiency?

An algorithm is a series of steps that one repeats until one reaches a pre-determined stopping point. The first algorithm that most of us learned (and one that is apparently no longer taught, to Wente’s chagrin), is the long division algorithm. In this case, you repeat the same step over (dividing a digit of the dividend) until the remainder is less than the divisor (your pre-determined stopping point). As Wente points out, the nice thing about algorithms is that they are foolproof. Whether you are dividing 30 by 12 or 3000 by 1250, assuming you recall the steps correctly and don’t make a mistake while implementing them, you will always come up with the correct answer. This is comforting.

But algorithms are also cumbersome for humans. Unlike computers, which thrive on algorithms because that’s the way we built them, our brains do not always think linearly. We make intuitive leaps, and we often think spatially. Thus, training ourselves to use algorithms to do arithmetic might be a waste of our brains’ potential. The method that Wente disparages, which we can call the “place-value method” is ingenious: it short-circuits arithmetic by allowing us to take advantage of our base 10 number system.

How would you divide 110 by 5? Margaret Wente would like you to use long division, in which case you would follow these steps:

1. Recognize that 5 goes into 11 evenly 2 times.
2. Multiply 2 by 5 to get 10.
3. Subtract 10 from 11 to get 1.
4. Bring down the 0 to get a new divisor of 10.
5. Recognize that 5 goes into 10 evenly 2 times.
6. Multiply 2 by 5 to get 10.
7. Subtract 10 from 10 to get a remainder of 0.

Or, you could do it this way:

1. Recognize that 110 = 100 + 10.
2. Divide 100 by 5 to get 20.
3. Divide 10 by 5 to get 2.
4. Add 20 and 2 to get 22.

I suspect that the second method is probably closer to what most people do in their heads, whether they were taught that way or not. You can do this for multiplication too. It’s all thanks to the nifty distributive property. And hey, look, suddenly instead of memorizing two algorithms, you only need to know one strategy. Furthermore, the long division algorithm is exclusive to, well, long division; it’s very difficult to use it as a template for solving different types of problems. In contrast, knowing how to exploit the place values of our number system will leave you in good shape for a variety of problems. Generalized knowledge!

I’m sure some people prefer the long division algorithm instead, and that’s fine. In fact, that brings me to Wente’s next argument.

Discovery-Based Learning Sucks Because Students Have to Start from Scratch on Every Problem

Wente dislikes the alternatives to the standard algorithms because, instead of just giving other methods to students, teachers instead encourage students to find those methods themselves. In addition to her lament that this is not efficient enough for her tastes, it also means

every time a student sees a new problem, he has to start from scratch—and pick his “strategy”. It’s like playing the piano without ever learning scales, or hockey without basic drills.

Those are quite evocative analogies; it’s a shame they’re false. Solving math problems bears little resemblance to playing hockey and even less to playing the piano. When playing piano, the goal is to reproduce a series of sounds by triggering the correct sequence of keys. For a given composition, that sequence is always the same—and you know the sequence beforehand (unless you’re playing some kind of weird piano game where you reproduce a sonata by ear). A new math problem, by definition, is one a student has not seen before.

Let me tell you from personal experience on my practicum: if you put a problem on a test that is identical, except for the numbers themselves, to one on the review, the majority of students will not recognize this fact and will instead approach it as a novel problem. Encouraging students to make connections is one of the most difficult tasks a math teacher faces. Those moments when a student goes to ask a question and then says instead, “Wait, it’s like what we did yesterday, right?” are golden—and far too few.

So let us suppose students do have trouble making such connections, that they do approach each problem from scratch even if it is of a type they have seen before. What can we do to help them solve the problem anyway? Wente would have the student, like a good computer, apply one of the standard algorithms and arrive at the solution. No need to find a new strategy! Yet this assumes the student recognizes which operations are necessary to find the solution. And therein lies the crux of the problem. Incidentally, this is also why computers suck at solving word problems.

Discovery-based learning actually works better in this case. By encouraging students to look at what they know and what they need to find out, then develop their own strategy to get there, we are building general-purpose skills that will work whether they recognize the type of problem or not. This is the beauty of mathematics: there is one correct solution but not one correct method. Wente would rob students of this beauty.

Failing to Learn the Standard Algorithms Makes It More Difficult to Learn “Higher” Math

I left this argument for last because it’s the one with the most validity. One of the reasons I am so passionate about teaching high school mathematics is because I have seen why my peers are struggling with their university math, and it’s usually not because the university concepts are too hard. No, most university students just suck at fractions. And I saw this while on my practicum too: fractions and basic algebra are concepts that students fail to master in grades 7, 8, and 9, and it haunts them for the rest of their schooling.

So Wente has a point here: students do need basic skills in order to go on to higher-order thinking. And it’s not clear-cut, despite what either side might have you believe, whether drill-based or discovery-based learning is superior in teaching these skills. I can’t really evaluate them properly, because despite my passion for this subject, I’m a fledgling teacher with very little experience in the field. I can tell you what I have reasoned a priori, but experienced teachers are expressing frustration, so there must be something else going on.

While on my practicum, I had the opportunity to sit in on a meeting between Grade 9 math teachers at my school and Grade 7 and 8 teachers from the “feeder” schools. This very dilemma came up during our discussion: the push from the Ministry of Education and curriculum experts is to have students discover their own strategies and take ownership of their learning. At the same time, however, these teachers feel a responsibility to ensure that students are prepared for high school and for their EQAO tests, and sometimes discovery-based learning makes this difficult—for one thing, it can take more time. So I can see why there is frustration among teachers who are trying to work with this new curriculum but seeing less-than-stellar results.

Of course, the curriculum will always need refinement. Continual revision and renewal of the curriculum at regular intervals is a hallmark, at least in Ontario, of the high quality of our education system. It’s never going to be perfect, and as our society and our needs change, so too will the curriculum. Right now, I think a lot of what we are seeing is simply growing pains—teachers who are used to the previous curriculum are still finding the their way with this new curriculum. Moreover, this is clearly a complex issue, one with a plurality of perspectives that should be considered.

And that’s why I take issue with Wente’s column: I agree that arithmetic is important, but once again I wonder why she feels the need to create a dichotomy where none need exist. She would have us return to the methods that turn kids off math and lend credence to their cries that “math is boring”. Picture me going to my knees and pleading as I say this: it doesn’t have to be that way. Math can be fun and full of wonder. Please, parents, don’t make math boring. Computers do their math in binary, but there is no reason our math education has to be an either/or scenario. And I wish The Globe and Mail would talk about that instead of choosing to be sensational and blame it all on the corporate interests of Big Tutoring.

I keep meaning to write a more general post about my experience in professional year, but other things always seem to be happening. Such a post will happen eventually. Or maybe it won’t, and I’ll look back at this blog three years from now and wonder what I thought about learning how to teach—except that, hopefully, the threads of what my nascent personal philosophy of pedagogy will be visible in some of these posts. Now that I am fast approaching that moment when I can call myself “teacher”, I am always thinking about how I am going to teach. And everything I read or watch or see relates to that, in some way.

Take Slutwalk, for instance. We talked about this in my Media, Education, and Gender class last week. We discussed it in relation to violence against women and how to prevent sexual assault, as well as the implications of “reclaiming” a word like slut. Indeed, we asked some very interesting questions: who can reclaim the word, and why would that group want to do so? The N-word was brought up as a comparison. So imagine my surprise when, this weekend, Slutwalk and the N-word intersected again in an extremely dramatic way, as one woman at the New York Slutwalk held a sign proclaiming “Woman is the N-Word of the world” (the sign itself is uncensored).

This prompted a flurry of conversation on Slutwalk NYC’s Facebook page. The conversation has been preserved for comment by Latoya Peterson on Racialicious and has sparked some great discussion about feminism and intersectionality. The Facebook conversation is rather long, but it’s quite interesting, and it’s ultimately some of the comments contained therein that motivated me to write this post.

For the past few years I have more tenuously been exploring a public identity that includes the label “feminist”. I would like to claim that, thanks to some good parenting, access to great books, and a cadre of highly intelligent female friends, I have always had an open mind when it comes to issues of gender and gender relations. However, until recently I haven’t really had the language to discuss those ideas in any way that I would choose to share with the wider world. I took some courses, like Philosophy and Gender, that had feminist themes. I even brought feminism into my Aboriginal Education course by reviewing Feminism FOR REAL as my final project; the book is a collection of insightful essays, including one by Peterson and several that address feminism from the perspective of indigenous peoples. I have read a few other feminist books since then (perhaps most notably The Beauty Myth), but I keep coming back to Feminism FOR REAL because of that focus on intersectionality. It doesn’t hesitate to point out that feminism as a movement or an academic discipline is just as vulnerable to the influences of colonialism, racism, classism, etc., that pervade our social institutions. And that really got me thinking about my position in these institutions, in society, and my personal position in relation to feminism as a movement rather than a very abstract and vaguely-defined term ascribed to an ideology.

Part of the theses of Feminism FOR REAL and the above Racialicious blog post is that there is an unfortunate trend in certain circles of feminist discourse where white feminists appropriate those points of view “for the cause”. In the Facebook thread, Nicole Kubon expresses it eloquently like so:

The fact is that often times white privilege is invisible to those who are white and it is not a one-time self-investigation where you read Peggy McIntosh and then abandon all of your unearned privilege. It is an ongoing process and it is important that we as activists be able to accept responsibility when we realize in retrospect that our lens is limited. We need to teach one another and be willing to learn from one another.

A large part of my journey, if you will, has been to understand what kinds of biases and privileges I bring to the discussion as a white, able-bodied, heterosexual male who identifies as a man. As I have learned in my autodidactic endeavour, this means I have lots of privilege—that is to say, these attributes of mine result in advantages in society that people who differ from me in those areas might not have. I find myself coming back again and again to this concept of privilege; every time I think I’m actually looking at another issue related to feminism, suddenly it becomes about privilege again. It’s a tricky thing, especially because feminism is a movement that is fundamentally about equality. And so the common resistance that people put up to notions of privilege is that, if feminism is about equality, then everyone should have equal abilities to contribute and express their point of view. You might not be surprised to learn that this argument is often advanced by straight white men, usually after they have been accused, directly or indirectly, of having white privilege and not understanding what that means when they open their mouths to speak.

As Kubon says above, there is no quick and easy way to divest oneself of all privilege—and it’s easy to forget this. I’m not going to pretend I have “solved” my privilege or somehow managed to cast aside, but I would like to think that I have reached the point in my personal growth where I understand the role my privilege plays in mediating my relationship with the feminist movement: I can still be a man and be a feminist, but because I am a man, my role in feminist movements is one of an ally. That owes to the simple fact that, for all the reasons I mentioned above, I do not know what it means to be systematically oppressed and marginalized.

I don’t. I happen to belong to a group that has been institutionally favoured by the system. I am privileged. And I think that realization, and acting in accordance with that realization, is key. I can talk about a lot of things related to gender and feminism, but I have to be careful lest I begin over-generalizing or, worse, putting words in the mouths of those who are oppressed and marginalized:

What kills me is that white folks still have NOT moved one inch past telling women of color how to feel or think about anything and everything. Even worse, we are still explaining that we are both BLACK and WOMEN, all day, everyday….There is something just plain sad about feminism and feminist movements that can’t get this basic concept. Regardless of the “intent” or what white folks “think” the sign was supposed to mean, black women in significant numbers are offended, deeply. To make light of those feelings, to keep trying to avoid responsibility for the screw-up, makes the ability to have any kind of positive dialogue about what went wrong impossible.

That’s from Tracey Salisbury in the comment thread quoted by Racialicious. She has really cut straight to the heart of the issue raised by Slutwalk NYC and the N-word sign: a white woman holds the sign, and there is a furor around it. And the people who come to her defence say, “You don’t understand the intent behind the sign!” As if good intentions preclude any possibility that someone might take offence. As if intent obviates the need to apologize. Equality means we don’t get to tell anyone else how to think or whether they should find something offensive. There will be differences of opinion, and sometimes you will have to step up, admit you made a mistake, and learn from the mistake.

This all relates back to what Kubon says above about the need to be willing to listen, to teach one another, to learn from each other. I think that’s good advice in general, but it’s really important I heed it both as a teacher and as a feminist who is a man. In both cases, I am a person in a position of power/privilege/authority of some kind. And so my role in Kubon’s exhortation to teach and to learn is essentially captured by another recovering white male, John Scalzi: “shut up and listen”.

It is difficult to listen to someone when you are talking over them.

That is one reason I have been reluctant to write often or speak too loudly about my evolving views on feminism. They matter to me, and I’m sure others find them interesting, but I also know that the Web and blogging in general is still a very male-dominated space, so I’m not really helping in that respect. My Media, Education, and Gender professor made a similar request at the beginning of our course—specifically, that the people who tend to speak up in discussion consciously try to avoid dominating the conversation and allow other, less outspoken people the chance to contribute. It’s all about attempting to create an environment that is safe, open, and welcoming, an attitude I see as very important in schools and online. I can’t be a good teacher if I spend all my time talking to (or at) my students and never listen to them.

“Shut up and listen” doesn’t mean “don’t talk”, of course. If it did, I wouldn’t be writing this! But it means that when I do talk, it should be because I have something meaningful to say, and not because I merely want to show off how clever I am. I have a little more leeway in this respect, in the sense that this blog is somewhat off the beaten path, and I often do post something only because I want to register my opinion for my future self to recall when he reads these posts years from now. Not posting here is probably not going to influence more women to blog! Nevertheless, when I do post here, I hope the content I post contributes to the overall discussions in a way that is positive … and if it does not, that some kind reader will stop and take the time to point that out. I do have good intentions; however, as the NYC Slutwalk shows us, intent is necessary but not sufficient.

I woke up on Friday to see a page from Thursday’s Globe and Mail on the living room table. My dad had flagged an article by Margaret Wente as something that I might find relevant. You can find it online under the title “Too many teachers can’t do math, let alone teach it”, but in the paper itself it was published with the headline, “Go figure, because teachers can’t.” I encourage you to read the article, but the gist goes like this: elementary teachers, according to Wente, are failing to teach students the basics of math, because faculties of education don’t take their responsibility to prepare those teachers seriously enough.

By way of disclaimer, I am preparing to teach at the Intermediate/Senior level (I/S), or grades 7–12. As an I/S teacher, and as a formally-trained mathematician, I have to admit to a bias when it comes to this subject: I do worry about how well-prepared elementary teachers are to teach math. I’ve marked for a course that teaches elementary concepts to prospective teachers, and some of the answers to the assignments are … creative. However, my concern isn’t so much with their knowledge of content; I worry more about their attitude toward learning and using mathematics.

When I tell—more like confess, it sometimes feels—fellow teacher candidates that my teachable is math, I’m usually met by some type of cringe, as if the very concept brings up bad memories of a grade 10 test review. As I said in my previous post, I feel like there is a perception of math as something you can either do or you can’t, and if you can’t, then there’s no reason to bother wasting time learning anything beyond what you need to punch into a calculator. Of course, this might be the result of our education system and how we teach math. Whatever the cause, I worry less that teachers won’t be able to teach the content and more that teachers will transmit their anxiety about mathematics to their students. I’m not saying all elementary teachers must love mathematics, but how can one foster an appreciation for mathematics if one does not share that appreciation and is merely teaching it as part of the curriculum?

But I digress.

Wente might be on to something when she points out that elementary teachers need more thorough preparation in math. I don’t know; I am not familiar with the research and can’t step to that claim. (Here’s a York professor’s rebuttal with actual data analysis.) I find it interesting that Wente does not mention any of the current methods that faculties of education use to prepare elementary teachers: here at Lakehead University, Primary/Junior teachers must complete a content test to demonstrate their understanding of elementary concepts in mathematics. The way Wente presents faculties of education makes it sounds like they are resting on their laurels:

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.

Gasp! Teaching our teachers to respect diversity and, shock!, be aware of factors affecting equality among our students? Those naughty faculties of education! Who do they think they are?

What I find really bizarre is how Wente goes on to devote the rest of her article to criticizing this one aspect of education—but at no point does she give any evidence for a causal relationship between the teaching of social justice and a decline in the quality of math education! Dripping disdain, Wente writes:

No wonder little Emma doesn’t know her times tables. She’s way too busy learning how her Western position of privilege entrenches gender relations. Or something like that.

(Wente does not, in general, have a very high opinion of social justice and related fields of study. Earlier this year she wrote a controversial piece about how the “war for women’s rights is over”; the original post is behind a paywall, but there is a good rebuttal on Shameless.)

I hope I’m not making a straw man here, but Wente seems to be saying that teaching social justice, either to teacher candidates or to students themselves, is a waste of time. Apparently it’s a move worthy of “the wacky wing of the NDP”. Yet not once does Wente bother to link this emphasis on social justice with elementary teachers’ abilities to teach mathematics. I guess she’s implying that we spend too much time teaching teacher candidates about social justice instead of teaching them math?

As part of the Differentiated Instruction in Math and Science (mouthful, I know) course I’m taking this year, we are learning how to teach math through social justice issues. Talk about two birds, one stone. This probably wouldn’t placate the Wente, however, for in her concluding paragraph she chooses to take a cheap shot at discovery-based learning, claiming we need to focus more on “practice and problem-solving”. This is a false dichotomy, and presenting these teaching strategies as such is irresponsible and even harmful: discovery-based learning is problem solving. In order to engage students, we provide them with problems they haven’t encountered—problems that are relevant to issues in their lives—and ask them to apply skills and discover new (to them) methods to solve the problems.

Wente concludes by reiterating that teachers need to know math in order to teach it. I agree with this statement; it’s just too bad that the rest of the article is somewhat incoherent. Wente does faculties of education a disservice even as she frames a legitimate concern—preparation of elementary school teachers to teach math—in a way that is confusing and unhelpful. The public, and especially parents, have every right to observe and critique the preparation of teacher candidates, for teachers have an awesome responsibility in our society. I just hope that when they do so, they refer to better sources than this piece, which is far more sensational than sensible.

I‘m almost finished my fourth year of university, and with it, my HBA in Mathematics. It doesn’t feel like four years! It feels like barely yesterday I was a nervous first-year student trying to figure out how to get around our campus (which I now realize is tiny compared to other campuses).

I won’t be graduating at the end of the year, because I’m actually in a five-year concurrent education program. For those of you unfamiliar with it and with teaching certification in Ontario, let me give you a brief run down. Instead of completing my mathematics degree and then doing a one-year education program (“consecutive education” or colloquially known as “teacher’s college” around these parts), I have for the past four years been enrolled in concurrent education. As the name implies, I‘m taking education courses concurrently with the courses I need for my math degree. So at the end of the five years, assuming I complete the program, I’ll have an HBA in Mathematics and a BEd. In Ontario, teachers are certified to teach in a specialization defined by grade level. Mine is “Intermediate/Senior,” or I/S, which means grades 7-12. I really want to teach high school, but of course, those with seniority will get to choose what they teach first, and I’ll get what’s left over.

In the I/S specialization, I need two “teachables.” Mine are math, naturally, and English. This is usually where I get odd looks from people and something along the lines of “that’s an unusual combination.” Maybe it is in practice, but I don’t think it is in fact. Mathematics and English share in common a need for clear, precise communication. I love rigorous proofs; I love grammatical constructions. Mathematics is about exploring the beauty of abstract thought; English is about exploring the beauty of our minds, bodies, and hearts. They are complementary.

So anyway, next year is my “professional year,” the big culmination of my education degree. I’ll take courses related to my two teachables, as well as a few more general courses like “classroom management” and some electives. Yesterday I attended an information session run by the Faculty of Education’s Department of Undergraduate Studies (mouthful, that) where they told me about what I could expect prior to and during my professional year. I was sceptical about how useful this session would be, but I actually found it very enlightening. The speakers provided precise information, both written and oral, about what I could expect; I no longer feel like my understanding of professional year is vague at best.

Oh, when I got to the session, the woman at the door asked me what my teachables are. When I said “Math and English,” she looked at the combined teachable schedules she had printed off, and then said, “Email me for your schedule.”

I‘m looking forward to professional year in the sense that I still don’t really feel like I’ve learned much about teaching. My education classes thus far have run the spectrum from “absurdly unhelpful” to “academically interesting, with some practical applications.” Educational Psychology is an example of the former and Educational Law the latter. For the most part, however, I don’t feel like I’ve learned much about the more practical parts of teaching, like preparing lessons and lesson plans, ensuring I meet curriculum expectations, etc. So I’m hoping those tantalizingly-practical titles like “Classroom Management” will indeed contain the golden nuggets of truth that will set me on my way. By which I mean, I know there’s a lot I’m going to have to figure out for myself, but at least this should give me some idea of what my options are.

Of course, the counterpart to these classes is my student teaching, or placement. My year will consist of two blocks of 9 weeks of classes followed by 5 weeks of placement, with Christmas holidays sandwiched between them. I’m very nervous about placement, and the information session went a long way to quelling that trepidation by assuring me that the department offers as much support as it possibly can to teacher candidates, especially in the field. Hopefully, after those 9 weeks of classes, I will feel slightly more prepared to re-enter a classroom, this time as a teacher.

Between now and then, I will once again be researching for the summer. I received another NSERC USRA, and I will be re-revisiting the spreading and covering numbers. Once again, I will miss working with my coworkers at the Art Gallery over the summer, but I’m also excited to spend another summer thinking about math. I start my research on April 26. Until then, I have to finish this year, of course, and try to find time to relax before my summer begins.