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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: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday July 01 2016, @04:02PM
IQ in my opinion doesn't mean dick if you're teaching a bunch of people who (mostly) know less than you do. Can you teach the material in a way which makes them want to learn it? Can you show empathy? Can you answer their questions about the material?
This is a true story. I posted above that my experience with teachers was mostly good. However, there were a couple exceptions - Jews. One Jewish English teacher made the class read Ellie Weasel's Muh Holocaust, by far one of the most boring books I've ever read. She was also mean and frequently sent students to the office for nothing. The other was a Jew, and to give this guy credit, he taught the Holocaust so passionately that he made it interesting. I still have vivid and verbatim memories of his lectures to this day. But he too was an asshole, and although he was smart, he was such a fucking dick that everything besides the holocaust was a terrible slog and I didn't remember a goddamn bit of it. Students have a harder time learning shit when they're associating it with bad memories.
Long story short - if smart teachers are raging assholes, then they're not good teachers.
That was before I was aware of the Jews, so I didn't know they were Jews. But I did know that they were assholes. Come years later, upon learning new facts, my confirmation bias gained an extra couple points.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 01 2016, @06:57PM
Well I had one intelligent university linguistics teacher that was Jewish. She was a very good, down to earth, teacher and was very compassionate and intelligent. Though who knows why she decided to study Japanese as her area of focus (not relevant to our class though, our class was a more general linguistics class). I felt that I learned a lot from that class.
(Score: 2, Funny) by BigotDetectorGoesBing! on Friday July 01 2016, @07:10PM
> That was before I was aware of the Jews, so I didn't know they were Jews. But I did know that they were assholes.
Bing!