[extropy-chat] Re: Home-schooling

[David Lubkin]

At 05:52 PM 1/21/2004 -0700, Alan Eliasen wrote:

>They had a breakdown of GRE scores by intended major and, by far, the 
>lowest-scoring group was
>education.  That was sad, and indeed creates a self-defeating cycle.

In college I found that the people who became science and math teachers 
were typically science or math majors who were towards the bottom of their 
class in gpa. As graduation loomed, they realized they had no chance of 
succeeding in their major as a profession, and took the classes to get 
teacher certification.

Obviously, there are a few remarkable science/math teachers -- I had a 
wonderful one myself in high school -- but many are mediocre and never got 
very far in their specialty. (I think of my daughter's 8th grade science 
teacher, who taught them that gravity imparts a constant velocity of 9.8 
m/s to falling objects. We're not talking string theory here.)

Among non-science non-math teachers, I see a bifurcation into those for 
whom teaching was a calling and those who became teachers because they did 
lousy in school.

There's a good assortment of stories about teacher testing nationwide at

         http://www.nctq.org/issues/testing.html

including various states where many teachers couldn't pass rudimentary 
competency tests.


-- David Lubkin.