Can You Count Great Maths Teachers on One Hand?

Problem with maths - maths teachers

I suggested in my last post that algebra does more harm than good in teaching maths but there's another factor at work - maths teachers.

1. Maths needs to be enlivened by better than average teaching.
2. Maths teachers tend to be weak on social and communications skills.
3. Good mathematicians tend to do things other than teaching.

'Maths is boring' is the usual summation by kids at school. It's also the experience of most of us who went to school.

Maths graduates and specialists tend not to be great communicators, and if a subject that is admittedly as dry as maths is to be taught well should we consider using people who are high on communications skills and moderate on maths.

On top of this the subject can be enlivened by the use of good e-learning. Look at the success of Nintendo's Brain training - mostly simple arithmetic. people actually pay £100 for a console then £20 upwards for this simple piece of software that related maths to your life (brain age) - and its fun. The MyMaths site and Bitesize are also pretty good, better than much teaching I'm sure. Yet how much of this stuff is even known by teachers, never mind used.
posted by Donald Clark at 8:12 AM 0 comments
Saturday, October 13, 2007

Numeracy - counts for little
Is all this fuss around numeracy really warranted? I met a trainer in a government department who had to put his staff through a Level 2 numeracy test. He was surprised to find that many failed - as he regards them as good at their jobs.The claim is that 13.5 million people are 'stressed out' by their poor numeracy.

But when did you last hear anyone tell you that they're 'totally stressed about my algebra skills'. The second claim is that 15.1 million have poor numeracy skills (equivalent of G or below at GCSE). This made me think.Is it right that the standard here is the Maths GCSE. I have known lots of happy, successful people who handle money and numbers and bets who have no GCSE in Maths.

Numbers - While I accept that much of the 'number' content in the national Curriculum is sound, even here, knowing about prime numbers, square and cube roots etc seems remotely useful.
Shape and space - OK, working out the area of a rectangle I get - we all have to buy carpets and paint etc. But trigonometry? The volume of a sphere? Vectors? Transformations? It's mostly useless, except for a small minority of people.

Handling data - Some of this is useful but not all. Have you ever seen a stem or leaf table? Simple probability is fine - but calculating mutually exclusive events? It's over-engineered.

Algebra - This is where it all goes wrong. Here's a quote from Roger Schank who looked into the dodgy history of why algebra became so embedded in curricula, "I'm a math major and a computer science professor, and algebra has never come up in my life, maybe it has in yours." I'd argue that little or nothing in algebra is useful for the vast majority of people in work. In fact it is so conceptually difficult and of such little practical use that most of us who master it forget it soon after we've passed the exam.

When was the last time you used a simultaneous linear or quadratic equation?

Algebra is bad for our kids - Even worse, could algebra be damaging our kids approach to maths? I suspect that algebra is the single most damaging cause of poor numeracy. As soon as kids face this useless challenge they are turned off the subject. It kills any interest in maths stone dead. They instinctively know that it's useless knowledge.

What counts can't always be countedIn truth we need a simple standard in the 'real world' application of maths that is free from the Maths GCSE. Simple mastery of arithemetic, calculating areas, percentages and reading graphs would do. We need to produce adults who love to learn, not adults who avoid all learning because it reminds them of the horrors of school and algebra.

Donald Clark