The Mis-Education of Mathematics Teachers

I f we want to produce good French teachers in schools, should we require them to learn Latin in college but not French? After all, Latin is the mother language of French and is linguistically more complex than French; by mastering a more complex language teachers could enhance their understanding of the French they already know from their school days. To correlate their knowledge of French with their students’ achievements, we could look at their grades in Latin! As ridiculous as this scenario is, its exact analogue in mathematics education turns out to be central to an understanding of the field as of 2011. A natural question is why the mathematics research community should be bothered with a problem in education. The answer is that the freshmen in our calculus classes year after year, and ultimately our math graduate students, are products of this educational philosophy. The purpose of this article is to alert the mathematics community to the urgent need of active participation in the education enterprise. It is a call for action. We will begin by reviewing the state of the mathematical education of teachers in the past four decades, and then give an indication of what needs to be done to improve teachers’ content knowledge and why knowledgeable mathematicians’ input is essential.