1 We all need mathematical ideas in everything we do.
2 Western schools are failing to reach enough pupils.
For details, and hopefully suggestions, we must wait for the publication by Springer in Heidelberg of his latest book. Luckily it is not as technical as his major works.
Meanwhile I would offer a short list of non-peer-reviewed causes, in no particular order. Some will offend, some will be debated. I currently believe all to be substantially correct. Good maths teachers will disagree from their own experience, but that will be because they use strategies to starve each effect of energy.
Early maths teachers in homes do so because they know maths will enhance career prospects. Untutored themselves, they put pressure on the young child before it wants to learn. And they teach in the way that worked or not for them. Which may not be how the child learns best or at all. So the child learns to cope with the pressure, not to enjoy the maths.
Most junior school maths teachers are lovely people but teaching a subject whose higher levels were always closed to them. So they teach say tables well, but know nothing of operators or series or axioms or calculus or Godel’s theorem, say. And pass on this ignorance as valuable omniscience.
School maths teachers are paid much less than they could earn as say actuaries or accountants, let alone book keepers. Who in the West would teach Maths happily long term? Ideals turn rapidly to cynicism under relative penury, especially when one’s own offspring fail to see what gives the parent joy in career. Teachers’ kids are too often today’s cobblers’ kids.
The status of a maths teacher within the school community is high. Except for why is this guy working for peanuts, or what bung is s/he getting? Hubris damages some; others struggle to maintain the image, at the expense of their pupil-facing commitment.
Maths is often/usually taught by people at or near the limit of their mathematical ability. How you deal with a question can display your natural fear – and with normal teenagers, invite attack at your weakest points.
Few school maths teachers do any original research or other creative maths work. They are likely to start each topic with déjà vu.
Most inservice training for teachers is in method not substance, by people very good at masking their own limits to adults. These masking techniques are transparent to pupils.
Academic mathematicians are not often psychologically equipped to enthuse teenagers. Which causes stress and hurt in the adult, stress and rebellion in the pupil.
University dons are not often briefed to instill qualities needed for future classroom success in their undergraduate students. Nor are they familiar with schools today, or how fast the pupils are changing. The coup de grace is that those who have done serious maths, just as musicians hunched over their fiddles for decades develop physical and mental heart diseases, accumulate mental invertedness. Not conditions that attract the red blooded young.
The intellectual disciplines of a mathematical PhD are far from the rough and tumble intellectual structures of childhood today. Even in the academically excellent private schools of Britain.
Few parents doubt the importance of maths to a child’s career. What passes on is the concern, but without interest or enthusiasm.
Many, maybe most, parents fear maths from their own formative experiences of it:
‘Never mind about the bad maths lessons’, they say, ‘I couldn’t do it either.’
Many perhaps most, of our successful maths teachers are drill-sergeants. Parades deter creativity and enjoyment.
Teenagers do not find the joy of their maths worth discussing in private time.
Class teaching offers little privacy, beyond homework.
Bullying is endemic in maths lessons, from being across the range from top and bottom of class, to playground and email persecution of swots. One cause of this bullying is the stress surrounding the subject, which makes us seek release in pushing against convention. Fear is a double edged sword, both bully and bullied at risk. And fear never solved an equation, let alone derived one.
Class teaching offers little privacy, beyond homework.
The above is not intended as rant or whinge, but as prelude to a search for solutions.
Good teachers somehow generate enjoyment. We can all achieve wonders if we enjoy the process. An analysis perhaps from OFSTED of the chemistry of excellent lessons would be useful.
For many of the problems, simplistic solutions and palliatives are not enough. Flooding our schools with teach-firsters might well work but looks too expensive.
Home schooling is attractive for the intellectual rich with good social lives.
It may be that a partial cure is possible for many learners in a networked world with goodwill from the global community of mathematicians.
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( 3 / 172 )Well done, Blair government, for
A minister of education with independence, ability, classroom experience, teeth and funding (Adonis in the upper house)
Teach first program, top rate teacher stream
Specialiost schools so kids can shine
Quality PE
Reading hour
Classroom assistance and learning support teachers
Extension schools for family INSEP
Trying ASBOs as means to education
Sensible computer trials
Executive heads with outreach
No-blame school management changes
A BBC that can promote good practice, largely through Nick Baker’s trustable team
Supporting an exam system creaking under opposing needs
Coping well with our national nonsense of have versus have-not education and attitudes
Caring about all schools
With any luck, these trials will develop into national initiatives and more important, pupil, parent and teacher morale.
And yes, I have ignored/omitted a lot both ways. Please list some, especially those that need fixing.
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( 3 / 157 )Met recently a couple of self-opined failures: people about to die who questioned they had got it right for their kids.
Not sure they are right: some of the kids had got it wrong in ways yes, but their own grandkids' kids were still tabulas rasas. The question to ask is are the new parents questioning and passing on the answers?
We early boomers used spock, common sense where available, and the liberalism of the bleeding heart. With small enough genetic damage for the kids to evade most fallout, except the in utero smokers and drinkers. Then just before 1950 ppb DDT slid into the womb. The molecule looks like our sex hormones, which work in ppt quantities. Oops. Also continuous TV slid into our minds, giving bytesize attractive diversions from any serious thought. About that time schools became hell, as respect for teacher waned. The rich could escape to private schools. Untermunchkins had only the playground.
Curiously, as freakonomics has it, legalised abortion in the black US brought a rise in parenting quality and a drop in the crime rate. Texan commercial pressures which like millions in jail would reverse the law. A right wing supreme court suits a slave society. With luck, the bench will have read both Darwin and the Bible.
We have a capacity for improvement: not the enforced evolution of China’s birth policy, or the genocides of dictators, or the bipartisan non-politics with which capitalism mocks democracy. Being optimistic (Our parents had just defeated all the dragons of fascism) we know it can be done again, this time by working on the victims of socialism via its education. All we need is the first class graduates currently drifting witlessly into loyally servicing the city.
None of this is new, of course, but it is zest for the home schoolers, which includes all parents.
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( 3 / 145 )From the 1918 ‘Peace’ of Versailles to the 1992 ‘Peace’ of Paris, we experimented with capitalism, fascism and communism. Only one survives, and that is rent with its own bitter fruits. In philosophy, we started with the iron in the soul of nihilism and its anarchy, then logical positivism and post-modernism. All now seen as flawed and discredited. Religion is widely seen as palliative and preservative, rather than as binding and driving, except by the dedicated and by fanatics. Where it fills the aching void in the young left by lack of adventure or oppression by the unjust, it is a useful crutch to manipulators. Current religion has thus far had little to say on the slaveries around and in us, perhaps because the freedom argument frees too many from attendance and observance, or more likely because the real rulers of the planet – our old friends, Vidal’s interlocking network of family trusts and their bean-counters – use Aunt Sallie’s as distractive sideshows when needed. Protectivism.
These circular arguments, and their equivalents in ethics, social psychology, education, medicine etc may be just useful labels. More likely, I hope, is that they will yield ground to predictive evolution, where perhaps we can nudge progress and limit disaster within the constraints of the laws of unintended consequences, human frailty, and cold but lucrative physical science.
In this I follow Soros’ Open Society ideals. And suspect that internetworking will bring them about, hopefully faster than our democracies have to date.
PS with hindsight, I was a little unkind to European socialism, but would have included it in the list of partial failures. Asian and African socialisms are still young and very vulnerable to hijack, except perhaps Botswana, and the southern Americas have poverty zones that offer little hope as yet. Would it were otherwise.
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( 3 / 149 )Freedom delivery
starts with the young, heart-driven, radical socialist. Ends with the much older hard-nosed capitalist realising that the only way to keep his/her grandchildren on side is to offer education, adventure, and justice to all young but especially the disaffected. Who will be the majority when China's one-child-per ..
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