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Too many teachers can't do math, let alone teach it
Is your kid struggling with math? Is she
flustered by fractions and laid low by long division? Here’s a secret:
Her teacher may be struggling, too.
An alarming number of elementary-school
teachers are so uncomfortable with math, they can’t teach it properly.
This means that more and more students are arriving at university
without having grasped the basics.
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.