Anna Stokke shares:

Education professor Martha Koch made several head-scratching claims in her Free Press piece, including the assertion that prospective K-8 math teachers are best served by avoiding university-level math courses. As chair of the department of mathematics and statistics at the University of Winnipeg, I would like to address these claims.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the onus is now on Koch to provide the research supporting her claims.

Education researchers are notorious for making bold claims based on poor research methodologies or passing off opinion as genuine research. Their chokehold on the education system may be why Manitoba students are struggling in the first place. Teachers, parents and the public should be wary of education claims that sound far-fetched or counterintuitive.

Mathematics is not the only subject that has been cut from the requirements for future K-8 teachers: science, English/French, and history/geography requirements have also been eliminated. At least professors of education are not (yet!) arguing that taking English at university will make you a worse English teacher. That argument would be ludicrous on its face, yet professors of education think they can dupe the public when it comes to math.

I would like to stress that future K-8 teachers are not being forced to take courses like calculus at university. Our department offers specialized courses that help K-8 education students understand the math curriculum they will need to teach. Similar courses are offered by the math departments at all universities in Manitoba. Teachers need strong content knowledge in the subjects they teach; pedagogy courses from education faculties are not sufficient.

The government’s change to teacher certification regulations will tarnish the reputations of the many outstanding teachers in our province and will devalue an education degree. The Manitoba government needs to reverse course on this backwards policy. The children in this province, especially those whose parents lack the resources to correct for bad educational policies, will be the ones to pay the price.

Narad Rampersad

Winnipeg