What’s wrong with the equation?
Monday, February 15th, 2010I’m sat watching Dispatches on Channel 4 looking at the difference a good teacher can make on young peoples understanding of maths. They tested 150 primary school teachers and discovered that the standard was inadequate with only one teacher getting every question right. The average score was 45% begging the question, how can they therefore be teaching numeracy if they don’t have the basic knowledge themselves. “I don’t think you can teach maths if you can’t do it either” .
And then the question of SATs was raised, is it fair to put our children under the pressure of SATs or the staff so much so that it interferes with the teaching of basic skills?
Have we become so obsessed with turning our teachers into social workers and generic repositories of limited amounts of information on such a vast scale of *everything* that it turns out the value of everything is *nothing*?
In 2009 more than one in five children left primary school having failed to grasp the basic maths skills required by the national curriculum. In a two-part special, ‘Kids dont count’ Dispatches asks why and how are we failing Britain’s children when it comes to maths.
You can take the maths test here http://www.channel4.com/programmes/dispatches/articles/maths-quiz
