Teacher Horror Stories

One day back in my undergraduate days, I was outside a Geometry class that had just finished waiting for the professor, who was my undergraduate advisor. Just leaving the room was a math-ed major, with whom I had taken a couple of classes, who wanted to be a high school math teacher. Actual live quote from said student while explaining that she did not like the geometry class: "When am I ever going to need this?" Well, I'm not sure, but maybe WHEN YOU HAVE TO TEACH IT?!

Picture a math exam room. You see several panicky students, attempting to memorize (rather than UNDERSTAND) basic middle school mathematics concepts like the transitive property. This is a scene we're all familiar with. The difference is that these were not middle school students; the room was filled with college seniors majoring in math education and math teachers. The cause of their concern: The dreaded mathematics subject matter expert exam. And yes, the word expert is used extremely lightly. The exam consisted of 100 questions, approximately in increasing order of difficulty. Elementary algebra made its first appearance around question 75, geometry around question 90. The last three questions consisted of basic calculus. Three hours were allocated; I took 50 minutes. When I left the room, I was able to notice that most of the candidates were still answering questions in the teens and twenties.

After I started teaching, the school where I worked had to dismiss two teachers because they could not become certified. The stumbling block: they couldn't obtain 840 on the SAT. Yes, that's 840 combined on the total exam, 40th percentile. One of them was an English teacher. Keep in mind that even if she got every question on the math section wrong (for a minimum score of 200), all she needed was 640 on the English section (80th percentile). So this ENGLISH teacher could not even perform on a standardized ENGLISH exam at a level that was higher than 80% of the students to whom she TAUGHT ENGLISH. I recently ran into a former student and in the course of conversation learned that this person (who could not break 840 on the SAT) taught the SAT prep course at the school. And sadly, just now while doing a quick Google search looking for some stats on the Florida Teacher Certification Exam, I learned that even this ridiculously low standard was dropped around 1999.

As far as graduate mathematics courses go, applied linear algebra is considered the easiest one in the curriculum. Math (as opposed to math-ed) graduate students tended to stay away from this one. It really didn’t go much deeper than undergraduate linear algebra – in fact at some schools our text (Linear Algebra by Strang) was used for introductory linear algebra. I took it because I was working at the time, and this class was offered in the evening. My friends who were math students basically made fun of me, implying I was looking for an easy A instead of trying to learn something. The class was filled with math education grad students. One of our assignments involved writing a MatLab program that took a bunch of points and determined the polynomial that went through all the provided points. A fellow student asked me to look at her solution before she turned it in. I spent 20 minutes attempting unsuccessfully to explain that her solution could not be correct because it didn't actually go through all the points. Eventually, she told me that something to the effect that she couldn't understand what I was saying and therefore I was probably wrong (how can you argue with that logic?) and turned in her homework as it was.