[AlanYx]

>I’ve taught mathematics for 30 years at the college level. I don’t know how a child should be taught an introduction to fractions.

Some of the best K-12 math teaching initiatives right now are run by college-level math profs who've observed deficiencies in incoming students in freshman level courses and have started volunteering their time at the K-12 level to help. See e.g., Anna Stokke's Archimedes Math program or the Navajo Math Circles program. It's not necessary to have an actual academic background in math education; some of the worst program designs come from that cohort, e.g., Lilijedahl's Building Thinking Classrooms and Boaler's YouCubed.

[skhunted]

Some of the best k-12 math initiatives are being run by people with experience teaching math and with training in mathematics. From this you extrapolate that anyone can teach all subjects and levels in K-12? You conclude that no training is necessary to teach kids. Note that Archimedes program uses people with training in math. They don’t hire just anyone.

Also worth noting: Acceptance into our program is at the discretion of the program supervisors.

One program is successful (largely by selecting participants) and from this you conclude that home schooling is OK?

Obviously you can find examples of people being a great teacher without training in teaching. This is not the basis of good public policy. We don’t conclude that medical degrees are unnecessary because there a few examples of someone “doctoring” well without one.

If you think the average parent qualifies to teach all k-12 topics then you don’t understand how stupid the average person is.

[AlanYx]

I was just responding to that particular point in your post. I don't have any strong views either way on homeschooling.

However, that being said, for math in particular, some of the curricula available to homeschooling parents are truly excellent, especially Beast Academy, JUMP Math, and Singapore Math.

[skhunted]

I'll clarify. When I say one needs training to be a teacher I'm talking about statistics. I don't mean literally that no person can be good without training. I mean that statistically speaking it is unlikely that a person with no training in a subject is going to be better or as good as the average teacher of that subject.

[slothtrop]

> If you think the average parent qualifies to teach all k-12 topics then you don’t understand how stupid the average person is.

No different than the average teacher. edit: I cant reply to your post directly, so I will here: there is no evidence that teachers as a group are more intelligent than the average person.

[skhunted]

What is your evidence for this? If it is true that the average teacher of a given subject has no greater understanding/insight/knowledge/intelligence in that subject than the average person then I am wrong in my beliefs on this matter.