An article in Business Insider features a list of how well different major did on their SAT score. It is a fascinating article. The winner, Interdisciplinary majors, people who want to study more than one thing do best. It is hard to say what that means because it is not specified what the multiple majors might be, but the two majors after that are Mathematics and Physical Science in that order. It is interesting to me that those majors did significantly better on the Reading and Writing sections than the Social Science and English Majors did on the Mathematics section. That has kind of been our operating theory all along. If you can get the Math, it is possible to do well on the reading and writing, but that is not necessarily true the other way around.
The other thing that was very apparent is that Education majors are very poor on all of the above. It makes me sad for those teachers whether they are working for the government or in the private sector whose vocation are as educators, but who have to suffer the fools who teach them and/or are only in it for an easy paycheck. I know working teachers and some of my own teachers from when I was in government school who were dedicated, brilliant and invested in helping kids. It is too bad those teachers were the exception rather than the rule. We have to get the unions, government and the educational ivory tower out of the control of public education.
Betty Blonde #194 – 04/14/2009
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My wife, who was an Education major, regularly complained that her education classes were the worst. The teachers who were supposed to be there to teach her how to teach … couldn’t teach. “It’s all about classroom management,” she’s told me more than once.
~Luke
Luke, that is exactly what I am hearing from my Education major cousin. She is an amazing elementary teacher who year-after-year gets great results for her students and kudos from the parents. She is teaching in low enough grades that much of the focus is on reading and what would have been called ciphering a few decades back. She says exactly the same thing–if you want to administer a classroom (not a bad thing), you get great training. If you want to teach kids, you have to take it on yourself to learn how to do it. We compare notes frequently. She uses many of the same books as the Sonlight programs we use. Recently, her school district sent her to a couple of seminars on Singapore Math where she believes she received the best training she has ever received with respect to the actually teaching of Math. It is possible to train teachers and it is very, very important. I believe there are really great people who want to do the work. We just have to figure out how to get back to that. Thanks for the comment!