As the results of the Leaving Cert are released today, once again, we're hearing about "poor performance in Maths.." This has been going on now, for a number of years, and there is much wringing of hands and many meetings of task forces and working groups, to try and find out why. However, in the view of this humble scribe, the answer is painfully simple. Performance in Maths has tanked, because (a) it's not taught properly, and (b) our kids are trying to learn Maths, with no understanding of how to think in figures.
Although I was never a 'A' student (I usually got a good 'B') I loved Maths at school. However, my performance, if I trace it back, generally depended on the teacher I had in a particular year. For my 'Inter Cert', we had Byrnesy. He was a cranky, irascible, pernickity, nitpicking type of teacher, and at that stage of our young lives, we hated him - but he got the best out of us. Personally, for my first crack at the Leaving, I then had a teacher (whom I won't name here), who had a Masters, extra diplomas and what have you - but just could NOT impart the stuff, to a guy like me, who COULD do it .. but needed to be shown, and shown clearly what to do.
I got a 'D' in Honours at my first Leaving. When I repeated, I was put into Byrnesys first ever Honours Leaving class. Out of 32 of us, he got 9 'A's, 15 'B's and only two in the class didn't get the honour. That's what you call a teacher. Maths is about understanding what you are doing, but more importantly WHY you are doing it. It's not a foreign language with intricate grammar, or a 'discussion' subject, like History, where two different accounts of an event, give two different theories. Maths is an absolute. There is one answer to one question. Two and two are four. Five times six are thirty. Always. It never changes. Never will. Byrnesy drilled that into us, over and over and over again. He applied it to everything - Trigonometry, Calculus, Algebra, Geometry - and it worked. I did also have a grind class on a Saturday morning, where I learned exactly the same thing, but without the great teaching I got from Liam Byrne, I would never have gotten the result I did.
However, it's not just about the teaching at Senior level. My daughter is 13. Like her mother, she doesn't like Maths, and I accept that. However, she's a very clever kid, with a great brain, and should (I think) be well able to pick up on the absolutes of Maths. However, since she was about ten, Jemma has a calculator.
Hello?
A calculator?
When I was about eleven, we had a teacher, who came into the class three mornings a week, and told us to open a blank page. He would rattle off
"15 .. plus 7... multiplied by 3 .. divided by 6 .. multiplied by 4. Write down your answer as a percentage of 880... THIRTY SECONDS, STARTING NOW.."
If you got it right, he would let you off Maths homework for the following weekend.
We were learning SUMS.
All those years later, whether I was doing Geometry, Trigonometry problems, Calculus, or simply looking for the volume of water I could fit in a swimming pool with a slanted floor, I realised that I was still doing SUMS, and the ability to calculate figures in my head or on a scrap of paper, that I'd learned as a child, was worth diamonds.
My daughter and her peers don't do 'Sums' .. they have a calculator to do it for them. It's not the same. 'Sums' teach you to think with figures. Looking up tables for a 'Log', a 'Sin', a 'CoS' or a 'Tan', and working out it's multiples, etc, did the same. Jemma doesn't know what a Log Book is.. and I fear that, down the line, it will restrict her ability to wrestle with the more complicated 'Sums' of Leaving Cert Maths.
If we are to improve performance in Maths, we've got to go back to doing our Sums..
Lose the calculators... and get out the jotters...
Simple.
It won't solve everything, but it'll certainly help...
(and by the way, the answer to the 'sum' above, is 5)...
