Teaching Maths

[poliphilo]

A new report, commissioned by the Tories, is recommending that children be taught maths until they're 18.  I so disagree.

Firstly, because lots of people are number blind and it's cruel to keep them slaving away. ( I'm one. Thanks to some very good teaching I passed my "O" level at the second attempt, dropped the subject with a sigh of relief and promptly went back to counting on my fingers.) 

Secondly because these days we've got calculators. 

Leave maths to those with an aptitude for it (like Ailz). 

Comments

[burkesworks.livejournal.com]

Since when did Benecol salesperson Carol Vorderman, who IIRC got a third from Sidney Sussex, become some kind of expert in the teaching of mathematics?

[ingenious76.livejournal.com]

Indeed. Under Gove The Cove's proposals, you need a 2:2 to teach. So she is exactly qualified to pontificate to teachers, is she?

(Plus that, and she's done precisely sweet FA since Countdown...)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Very good question.

[ingenious76.livejournal.com]

Well said. Which subject is the hardest to recruit teachers for and also generally has the worst recorded rates of behaviour? Maths. A colleague of mine at OSA told me that he "hated" being a maths teacher, "Because kids hate maths."

The solution is perhaps to re-vamp the curriculum to ensure that kids are taught maths in a way thats applicable to them - not force everyone to take it until they're 18.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

How awful it must be to teach a subject that kids hate!

There are always going to be exceptional people who think maths is fun. Concentrate on them and give the rest of us a break!

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

I think it would be splendid to have been taught home economics, budgeting, tip calculation, price comparison, gas mileage calculation, etc, in school.

[calizen.livejournal.com]

In my work as a freelance transcriber, I did a group interaction meeting with a person deemed a master teacher in math and 4 inner city math teachers. An eyeopener here was that the people teaching math had been thrown into the classroom with this assignment and didn't like math themselves. That said volumes to me. But this teacher was amazing in her ability to visually explain the intricacies of mathematics, at least in the area that she was teaching, which was fractions and later seguing into decimals. I hate math, but it made me realize that a lot of this was from being taught math by teachers who didn't understand it in the most droning, boring way possible. At the end of typing for her I finally knew what a Prime Number was and how one set up .02 from a graph of 100 squares, 50 years late.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

One of my friends, after graduating from MIT with a degree in mathematics, spent two years as an inner-city high school math teacher.

She liked her students fine. She liked the subject fine. It didn't bother her when one of her students pulled a knife on her -- she looked at him over the top of her glasses, and told him to put the knife away, or she would take it from him and not give it back until after school, so he put it away.

No, she left after two years because she was annoyed by the bureaucracy and red tape she had to deal with, but even more so, because she couldn't stand her fellow teachers in the math department. She couldn't believe that anyone could reach adulthood with so little knowledge of math, let alone a college graduate -- and to have these people, who were UNUSUALLY ignorant of math, being math teachers? It drove her nuts.

She asked me once to describe what calculus was. I said I sucked at calculus and had never gotten better than a C at it, but, well, in general, it was something kinda like taking a formula that would draw a curve, and coming up with a second formula that either told you how steep the curve was at every place on the curve, which was differentiation, or would tell you, if you filled up the area under the curve, how much space that was, and that was integration.

She said that I was pretty close to correct, and that meant that I knew more calculus than the calculus teacher at her school.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Oh -- and I'm NOT a college graduate.

[dadi.livejournal.com]

I totally agree. I always was envious that in school, people with dyslexia got special treatment and their language dis-abilities were taken into account during tests, while nothing like that was applied to what now is known as dyscalculia but back then was simply called laziness or stupidity. Only with the most dreadful acrobatics I was able to finish high school, as for us it WAS mandatory until the 12th class. I still have nightmares about math lessons and tests.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Dyscalculia, eh? I didn't know there was a word for it.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Maths is not arithmetic. Maths is not about numbers, it's about patterns.

Just because maths is taught badly in a lot of schools doesn't mean it shouldn't be taught at all, it just means that maths teaching should be done better!!

I have absolutely no "aptitude" for maths (whatever that means), yet I hit lucky, had amazing teachers at secondary school and passed A-level at the second attempt with a grade C. If I can do A-level maths, anyone can. Seriously.

Sorry, but you hit a hot button there.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

If someone had explained that to me at an early stage of my school career I might have prospered- as it was...

[veronikos.livejournal.com]

I'm with heleninwales. Erm...metaphorically speaking. I started teaching my kids geometric patterns very early on, showing them how the universe is constructed out of only 7 shapes, and then a limited amount of combinations of those shapes. I have a lovely drawing from my son Noah, when he was 3 or 4 years old, showing the 5 elemental shapes and their colors. When they were a little older, I taught them how the 7 root shapes are governed by the 7 planets. And from there, we went on to planetary rulership, and more complex shape combinations. Each number is really like a fascinating friend, each with his or her own characteristics.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Now that sounds really fascinating.

I wish I'd had you as my maths teacher....

[ideealisme.livejournal.com]

I earn my living programming and I'm mediocre at maths.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I've got by in life, counting on my fingers, but there are situations I try to avoid. I could never have worked in a shop, for instance. Ask me to give change and I panic.

[algabal.livejournal.com]

Same here. I'm a programmer, so people presume that I must be mathematically and scientifically inclined, but I'm really quite illiterate in these areas.

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

Calculators, like slide rules and log tables, still require those using them to have a basic grasp of maths. That said, if schools have failed to install that by the age of 16, I doubt a further two years of compulsory education will serve much purpose.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

By 16 a person will have gathered the basics of maths- or not, as the case may be. Those who want to do advanced maths will do it anyway, those who don't will go on struggling in misery.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Doesn't that really depend on what "teaching math" (I'm American, so I get to use the singular) means?

I mean, the term "math" covers a HUGE range of things, many of which are highly useful for anybody. Basic arithmetic is useful, even if you tend to have a calculator. The REALLY useful thing to be taught in math is what I like to think of as "bullshit detection" -- people throw numbers around which, on a moment's thought, are clearly just plain wrong. If someone says that, for instance, sixty thousand people a year are killed in satanic rituals -- and, yes, people DO say that -- you have to have a gut feeling for "is that number bullshit or not?"

And math education can help that.

In the United States, a conservative candidate for President is saying that we should be grateful to the super-wealthy, because they pay 60% of the taxes in the United States.

Proper math, and for that matter, science, education would teach people to wonder what the context was -- okay, they pay 60% of the taxes . . . but they have 80% of the money. So that's actually LESS than what would seem to be fair. . .

If math education means training people to understand numbers well enough to be informed and active citizens, then it is absolutely useful.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I don't know how maths is taught these days, but in my day it was taught in the abstract- with very little suggestion that it could be a skill for living. The same went for most other subjects.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

If I recall correctly, mathematicians are happier and live longer than most other professions. In a better world, I would have been a mathematician myself. The course I took in number theory and finite probability was about as much fun as I've had with my clothes on. Euclidean geometry makes me almost as happy.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I can believe it. I wish I could understand and enjoy maths- but I don't and can't. My brain just isn't wired up that way.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

Ironically, I had a hell of a time memorizing multiplication tables and nearly failed my first course in algebra.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

Just stumbled upon this:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110808152428.htm

[daisytells.livejournal.com]

I flunked high school Algebra. Years passed and I went on to college, where two semesters of math were required for any kind of degree. After a lot of hard work on my own, I got an "A". Needless to say I was overjoyed, because I had believed all my life that I was completely disabled in mathematics. I guess it was just a question of readiness. I did not continue with math beyond the required course.

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

I've worked in a so called quantitative discipline for 25 years and a litle elementary algebra was worthwhile or calculating molar concentrations and the like, and the concepts of differential calculus e.g. acceleration is the rate of change of speed over time... other than that most of what I learned at O level has been completely useless. Going on to age 18 would have been a total waste of time. What might have been useful is sone logical thinking around the use and misuse of statistics.