kitchen table math, the sequel: pop quiz

Saturday, July 4, 2009

pop quiz

Are You Qualified to Teach Elementary School Math? (pdf file)
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7 comments:

Barry Garelick said...

That's a fairly hard test; I had trouble with quite a few of these.

July 4, 2009 at 2:41 PM
Obi-Wandreas, The Funky Viking said...

This looks really fun. I'm way too tired to deal with it tonight, but tomorrow I'm going to try it in depth.

July 4, 2009 at 6:17 PM
Catherine Johnson said...

I wiped out on number 1.

Though I now know how to represent an odd number algebraically & I don't intend to forget.

It does look like fun, doesn't it?

Tomorrow for me, too.

Also, it's time for me to take another sample SAT math test.

July 4, 2009 at 6:32 PM
SteveH said...

The National Council on Teacher Quality site is very nice. Don't just stop with the test.

Although it's good that they want teachers to be better prepared and more advanced in content and skills in K-8, they don't seem to address the elephant in the room; the fact that schools of education don't want to do that. It's not just a matter of tweaking up the requirements, it's a totally different view of education.

They would like schools of education to select students only from the top half of graduating seniors, but how do you do this? And how do states then require new teachers to meet higher standards without retesting all teachers?

Also, even if teachers do meet higher standards, there is no guarantee that they will select better curricula and make sure that mastery happens on a grade-by-grade basis. The teachers at our schools just don't believe in that.

Even if we completely change the members of our school board, how do we get our schools to do what they really don't want to do? We would be able to select the superintendent, but what can he/she do considering all of union contract constraints. In fact, our state government is limiting our town's leverage when it comes to negotiating teacher contracts.

There is a big problem with bringing in qualified teachers from other states. They lose all seniority. when I was told about how our school lost out on a very good science teacher because of this, it was all on the Q.T. Why? There seems to be this whole world of silence surrounding the details of how our schools work. You would think that school committee members would be publishing all of these details in the local paper. There is a code of silence surrounding all of the dirty details. Nobody wants to discuss how the details affect the quality of education.

July 5, 2009 at 5:20 AM
rocky said...

This ups the ante on being smarter than a fifth grader. My favorite was the watermelon.

There was too much emphasis on probability and number theory, and some of the questions should have been worded better.

In question 14 I got a) and b) but missed the other parts because I thought they were thinking about new random numbers that rounded to 30 and 40 (ie. 25-34 and 35-44), instead of using the original numbers and the new rounded sums as a "given".

The labels on question 25, the star problem, threw me. I thought it was just the internal angles of a pentagon.

But it was a great test and really made me think. As a test for elementary school teachers, it is probably overkill. God bless all elementary school teachers. I couldn't take it. If they could teach them the Singapore primary stuff, it would be enough.

(I worked 17, 22, and 26 using unit analysis. I need a picture of "Unitman" pulling open his shirt to reveal a big "U". This looks like a job for unit analysis!)

July 5, 2009 at 11:38 AM
Catherine Johnson said...

This ups the ante on being smarter than a fifth grader.

Love it!

July 5, 2009 at 1:10 PM
Catherine Johnson said...

But it was a great test and really made me think. As a test for elementary school teachers, it is probably overkill. God bless all elementary school teachers. I couldn't take it. If they could teach them the Singapore primary stuff, it would be enough.

ditto!

I saw something on the web site referring to textbooks they think are good for college students planning to be elementary school teachers.

But I haven't been able to find the titles yet.

July 5, 2009 at 1:12 PM

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