[tritogeneia]

To summarize a few of the articles you linked: Students do better at math in East Asia than in the US because East Asian math teachers know math and American math teachers don't.

My own experience bears this out. I once taught in a program to help public school teachers get certified to teach mathematics. I simply couldn't believe these teachers had college degrees. I was teaching geometry, and none of them could go to the board, draw a circle with a compass and label the center point A. It took them two weeks to learn that the center of a circle is in the middle, not on the circumference -- and, believe me, I tried to explain it. Of course, none of the teachers could add fractions either. These teachers were impressive people -- it's not easy to play parent, social worker, and cop to fifty teenagers at a time -- but they were absolutely uneducated. It seems that education majors aren't taught the rudiments of the subjects they're meant to teach. Teachers wish they knew math and they're grateful to anyone who will teach them -- they were so grateful to me that I was terribly embarrassed. I don't know what's going on in education departments, but it's a real disservice to teachers and students.

[nunb]

I would be interested to know where in the US this was. I was once in a Statistics program in Ohio with a bunch of students who were working towards their Masters in Education, and they were solidly in the middle-lower end of the class but the upper end was taken up by dept. students anyway.

[tritogeneia]

Chicago.