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from the those-who-can,-do,-those-who-can't,-teach dept.
In the US: this article presents an analysis how a person's chosen college major corresponds to their IQ. The interesting thing is that the relationship has remained essentially stable over the past 70 years. At the top of the list are math, science and engineering. At the absolute bottom of the list: education.
These data show that US students who choose to major in education, essentially the bulk of people who become teachers, have for at least the last seven decades been selected from students at the lower end of the academic aptitude pool. A 2010 McKinsey report (pdf) by Byron Auguste, Paul Kihn, and Matt Miller noted that top performing school systems, such as those in Singapore, Finland, and South Korea, "recruit 100% of their teacher corps from the top third of the academic cohort."
The article points out that it isn't quite this simple: Top schools place high requirements on all of their students; poor schools generally attract lower quality students in all of their programs. Still, the national averages are clear: overall, the least intelligent students go on to teach. This is an odd priority.
Educational organizations, of course, have a different view. This article claims that teacher quality declined from the 1960s through the 1990s, but has since recovered, with teachers being barely below average (48th percentile) among college graduates.
On a related note, there is a strong international correlation between teacher pay and student outcomes. The (rather obvious) theory is that higher pay attracts better candidates to the teaching profession.
No conclusions - just thought this might spark an interesting discussion...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 01 2016, @02:29PM
Ever met someone who is a member of MENSA? Did they seem like they would make a great teacher? Chances are they were the kind of person that a classroom of fifth graders would chew up and spit out.
IQ is a single number that correlates well with some abilities and is practically meaningless for predicting some other abilities. Seems like we shouldn't be talking about a generic benchmark when evaluating suitability for a specific profession. Instead we should be looking at metrics that try to measure abilities most relevant to the job.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday July 01 2016, @02:56PM
You have a better benchmark of someone's ability to learn and extrapolate further from what they've learned? If you can't grok it and extrapolate further on your own (what IQ measures), you've no business "teaching" it to others.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 01 2016, @03:13PM
Lol
We must measure something!
IQ is something
So we must measure IQ!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday July 01 2016, @03:22PM
Sure, let's just let the kids be taught by 90 IQ simpletons. That should turn out well. Oh, wait, we already do.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Friday July 01 2016, @07:19PM
To be fair, high IQ is pretty useless, and maybe even counterproductive in a situation where what we call "learning" is really just rote memorization. I remember getting admonished in high school when I asked "why?" until it was obvious the only answer available at the time was "because it's in the damn book."
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday July 01 2016, @07:31PM
Not really, it's only a hindrance after however long it took you to stick X in your head. Then homework instead of a learning tool becomes a test of how much pointless bullshit you can put up with. Come to think of it, that's probably good life experience. I'm pretty sure I didn't need that many years of practice though.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Friday July 01 2016, @07:54PM
I don't disagree, but I think we're talking two different things here. You're talking about how it should be, not how it is. Any benefits provided by high IQ would suggest that there would be less time teaching to the standardized tests, which I understand to be the "only thing that matters".
High IQ teachers would be a good thing if class time was more organically constructed. That SHOULD be obvious. Thing is, if your entire curriculum is focused around basically teaching a standardized test, then there's really no point.
Sigh, I don't know, man. Maybe you don't see that around you? Might just be a "the midwest sucks" kind of thing.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday July 01 2016, @08:03PM
Nah, it's exactly like that here too. Reality vs. Should Be. I'm just not adjusting my ideas of what's good for students down to fit the insane and useless public school system we have.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday July 01 2016, @09:09PM
I dunno, I think there's probably more legitimate reasons why a 160 IQ teacher may not be the best even in an ideal classroom. Because not all students have a 160 IQ, and the teacher needs to be able to explain the concepts to all of them. If you're asking questions the teacher can't answer, you're smart enough to go look it up yourself (although in a perfect world, the teacher should help you with that). But if the teacher is explaining things in such a way that only a handful of kids get it, then they're leaving everyone else behind. In later highschool and university classes you can certainly make the case that such people *should* be left behind if they're not willing to work for it...but there's plenty of classes for which that is not an acceptable strategy. The teachers need to understand what they're teaching, but they also need to think about and understand it in a way that their students will be able to grasp too.
Basically...we don't want this:
http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3565 [smbc-comics.com]
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Friday July 01 2016, @03:59PM
The paper used a number of metrics for grading. Even with the metrics broken into verbal, spacial aptitude, and math the top fields were out-performing the lower fields across the board.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 01 2016, @06:02PM
None of those metrics are particularly applicable to social skills like empathy, ability to motivate, and to communicate at the level of the audience - the kinds of things that teaching requires. Just because you can write like Dickens, apply numerical methods and have an intuition for spatial theory doesn't mean you can convince a teenager that math is worth exploring or that mastering a musical instrument is rewarding.
(Score: 2) by BK on Friday July 01 2016, @09:35PM
Just because you can convince people of things doesn't mean you know what to convince them of - or what to do once they're convinced.
...but you HAVE heard of me.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by SecurityGuy on Friday July 01 2016, @03:09PM
Yes. A childhood friend of mine has been an active member of MENSA for years.
Actually, she teaches special education students. If any classroom of kids is going to chew you up and spit you out, it'd be them. She's been doing it for a long time and she's great at it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 01 2016, @06:42PM
Actually, she teaches special education students. If any classroom of kids is going to chew you up and spit you out, it'd be them. She's been doing it for a long time and she's great at it.
Really? I don't think that's a good example. I think lots of people have more patience with dumb animals and really stupid people. Look at the amount of shit they put up with from their cats/dogs and how well they still treat their cats/dogs in return. And I'm not sure it's because cats and dogs don't get the right to vote... Then compare with how much patience many of the same people have with other people...
Also the really stupid people usually don't have enough intelligence to get under your skin or figure out what really pushes your buttons. Their parents are very unlikely to expecting you to get their precious princes and princesses into MIT. Neither you nor others expect as much from them so you're not as annoyed when they fail.
It's like how people treat 2-3 year olds finger painting something that's really not amazing, "Oh honey that's wonderful". If a non-retarded non "special ed" 15 year old kid was to do the same painting people wouldn't be saying "oh honey that's wonderful" (unless they're clever enough to pass themselves off as some modern art "artist" ;) ).
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Saturday July 02 2016, @02:20AM
>I think lots of people have more patience with dumb animals and really stupid people.
That's an interesting observation because recently, I've found that the best way to deal with stupid people is to not treat them as if they were equals, but to treat them as really retarded puppies. I no longer get angry about some of the shit they come up with because I don't expect anything from them. The fact that they can form a coherent sentence exceeds my expectations.
What a world of difference a slight change of perspective can make!
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 1) by Francis on Friday July 01 2016, @03:09PM
Indeed, I could probably join Mensa if I really wanted to, and I think you're absolutely right. Some of us are able to effectively teach and to help in ways that people with less cognitive function could, but I think most folks with higher IQs are going to have issues relating to students that are struggling and waste a ton of energy being frustrated by "easy" things being hard for the students to understand.
There's also the issue that folks with higher IQs don't necessarily know anything about study skills. Most of the time, I got my A just by showing up to class and writing whatever the instructor wrote on the board and not much else. It worked because my memory and my ability to systematize the information was way above the typical student, but I think it would have been better if I had been challenged enough to have to actually work at it.
That being said, IQ is probably the best measure we have of cognitive abilities related to our model of education and pulling from the lower half is probably only slightly better than pulling everybody from the top quarter.
Ultimately, having a high IQ might be somewhat relevant early on or if you're presented with a student that needs a very quick on the fly explanation for something that you don't normally do. But, realistically, you're generally doing the same course over and over and over for decades and having a high IQ is definitely not needed to keep regurgitating the same basic ideas each time.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday July 01 2016, @03:32PM
The thing is, teaching is simply a skill. One those with a high IQ could learn just as quickly as they learn everything else.
Interpersonal interaction would likely be the biggest problem. Many of us who ruined bell curve grading systems for everyone else do not play well with others. It's not that we necessarily look down on them so much as it is that it can be exceedingly tiring trying to explain something that you grasped quickly to someone who cannot seem to come to terms with it. Patience is not a skill that IQ helps with whatsoever.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Informative) by jdavidb on Friday July 01 2016, @05:11PM
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday July 01 2016, @06:19PM
Self-awareness and self-control factor in there greatly as well. Both can be learned but IQ doesn't help a whole lot with either.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Friday July 01 2016, @07:23PM
According to this psychologist, IQ can help a lot with self-control - if your IQ enables you to recognize that there is a problem and that there is value in learning to control yourself.
Apparently I wasn't very controlled back in my past. :)
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday July 01 2016, @07:40PM
I know I certainly wasn't. Thank $deity_of_choice for my shrink and Adderall. It makes tedium and stupidity bearable, if only just.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Saturday July 02 2016, @01:51AM
It can be, however it's a very short trip from there to full blown psychopathy. If your understanding of feelings is limited to the intellectual, then you're still not bound by them. You might have more choice in terms of whom you piss off, but it's going to be difficult to have any particularly deep connection to others.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 01 2016, @03:15PM
There are plenty of high IQ people who aren't members of MENSA.
And maybe some of the real geniuses won't do as well in IQ tests because they'll see "correct answers" that the tests won't accept as correct answers. ;)
AFAIK Richard Feynman wasn't a member of MENSA (IQ scores too low) and also:
Feynman once told the wife of a friend who suggested that he apply to MENSA, an organization whose members must have IQ’s of 150 or more, that he could not join because his intelligence scores from high school were not high enough. While Feynman was being completely honest, he secretly disdained the arrogance that such an organization represented
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/physics/brau/H182/Term%20Papers/Ryan%20McPherson.html [vanderbilt.edu]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 01 2016, @03:21PM
Your phrasing suggests disagreement. But your example reinforces the point that high IQ is not a good measure of wisdom.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 01 2016, @06:27PM
It may be true that very high IQ people tend to be worse teachers, but sampling from MENSA may give you skewed/biased results.
MENSA membership is not open to all nor automatic and involuntary on proof of high IQ. You have to want to join, and you have to pay, but only certain types of people are allowed in. While it's not quite like "Old White Men" clubs, it does seem to me that trying to use MENSA members as typical examples of high IQ people and their fitness to be teachers may not be appropriate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 01 2016, @04:17PM
Mensa is a punch line for comedians.
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Friday July 01 2016, @07:38PM
I just took the MENSA workout test on their website. They claim it's not an accurate test to join them, but it's a good indicator on where you stand. I missed one out of 30 questions, and I was rushing because I need to leave in about 20 minutes to go camping.
Before I moved into dev, I was doing full on technical training classes for new hires on the software my company sells. The manager of that group still asks me if I want to come back when I run into him in the hall. This is the internet and full of bullshit, but it's shown me that someone might not make a good teacher because they're in MENSA, but being likely capable of being in MENSA wouldn't prevent someone from being a good teacher. I don't know if that's good enough for you, but it's good enough for me.
And no, I have no interest in joining. As Groucho said, "I don't care to join any club that will have me."
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!