Standard behaviour. If you can't get the staff reduce and simplify the curriculum so it can be taught by people who have little idea about the subject ; also big sufferers are Science (totally emasculated & trivial boring experiments too often) and ICT (powerpoint & media presentations).

ICT being the worst - when I started I was the *only* teacher I knew qualified to teach the subject in the whole county. When I first went for job interviews I was the only candidate except once (the other candidate was on my course).

Maths "education" is illiterate. I had to point out to my daughters primary school teacher that having a number line turning at right angles at zero gave exactly the *wrong* concept about Maths and was worse than not having it at all. (I did think about suggesting she put an i after every number but this would be lost on her).

The way my daughter has been taught to do subtraction is something like : draw the two numbers at either end of the line, smallest first. Then work your way back to easy end points and add them all up with arrows going to the in between points with numbers above them.

So to do 325 - 244 she would do.

325 -> 320 => 5
320 -> 300 => 20
300 -> 250 => 50
250 -> 244 => 6

Answer = 5 + 20 + 50 + 6 = 81

A teacher might say that the old method of subtraction (borrowing) was not understood by most people ; this is true, but I don't think they understand this either, they just apply it.

Teaching if Mathematical basics is appalling ; the children do not understand Hundreds, Tens and Units. They know how to manipulate them but they don't know what they *mean*.

Posted by: Paul at June 28, 2005 10:44 AM

A fall from 46,500 to 30,800, thats makes twenty percent doesn't it???

A free market would value Maths teachers at much more than the current system.

Posted by: EU Serf at June 28, 2005 05:04 PM

Oh dear James, I knew that things were bad, but not this bad. What puzzles me now is what can be done to change things?
As of today, many members of the public believe all the spin from the politicians and the educational elite. The message is, “Things have never been better”, and with more of their children going to university every year who can blame the people falling for these lies. What’s worse, they may go on believing it almost indefinitely. Who today has any notion of the academic standards in Oxford or Cambridge in the 1950’s? Who will have any notion of today’s standards in a few generations time?
I presume that schools and universities will just continue dummying down year after year into the future. When we no longer have any serious research being done at universities, and no home grown scientists, technologists or mathematicians undertaking R & D in industry will anybody care then? Why should they? I’m sure the message will be that it is cheaper to import qualified workers from abroad, or to outsource from India or China.
Could the Tories, as a future government, come to the rescue? Perhaps, but this state of affairs started a generation ago and has continued under Labour and Conservative.

All that I can suggest is that those few who are both intelligent enough to reach high levels of academic achievement, and are lucky enough to get the necessary education should look after themselves and their families. Stay in the UK if they can get a satisfactory career, or emigrate if not.

Maybe I’ll think of something more palatable later.

Posted by: John East at June 28, 2005 08:05 PM

Things have never been worse. The standard of exams is laughable ; it beggars belief anyone can think schoolchildren are twice as good as they were 20 years ago on average. Half as good, maybe.

No one will come to the rescue. It's like pensions ; no-one wants to deal with the problem, it's better to shove it under the carpet, or introduce A******* levels. Which 3 years later are given to anyone who can put an X on a piece of paper.

It's not exclusive to Maths, though it is worse in perceived "difficult" subjects.

Bizarrely, the subjects the less bright children could do have been made harder ; Woodwork, Needlework and Cookery have become D&T and Food Tech. Lots of writing, little actual practical skill.

The dumbing down in ICT is laughable (presentations, feedback, Powerpoint and surveys) which probably explains why modern ICT systems are so badly done ; no-one can actually write a line of code anymore.

The flaw seems to be the dimwit Government's concept that because graduates earn more than non-graduates, if we have lots more graduates then everyone will earn more money. This is so stupid it beggars belief.

Posted by: Paul at June 29, 2005 02:59 AM

Having just finished my A level maths course this week, all this naysaying reminds me of the football cliche, "you can only beat whats put in front of you." Don't blame young people for falling standards blame the boards.

One reason for the decline in maths, chemistry etc. Is that these exams are so much harder than the likes of psychology, politics even economics. So the only way to address the problem is to drive up the difficulty accross the board, or else we'll end up with more qualified child psychologists than children.

Posted by: Oli at June 29, 2005 08:31 PM

No-one blames those taking the exams, the boards and Government pressure to up the exam results is the major reason.

I also don't think children are any less "core intelligent" than they ever were ; they aren't more intelligent or hard working either though, and the teaching hasn't improved either.

Posted by: Paul at June 30, 2005 08:16 AM

I agree with the "core intelligence" point, but I read The Welfare state we're in and although for the most part it was excellent the bits about youth culture (particularly the bit where the author said kids frequently wore base ball caps back to front, which I'm aware was seen as uncool in the 1980's!) All in all I think there is a degree of snobbery aimed at todays youth, we aren't all hoody wearing monsters who rape and pillage our way across the land filming it all on our nokia mobile phones.

Posted by: Oli at June 30, 2005 02:43 PM

I would like to thank Paul for explaining how subtraction is taught these days. We work with parents and children every day after school, and not one of them has ever been able to explain this, or even demonstrate it. For our part, we do find that the concept of borrowing is not all that difficult to teach--yet we do have to warn pupil and parent that the kind of maths we teach will not be of much use in coping with school and GCSEs.

Thumbing through an old Heineman (20 yrs?) GCSE maths guide today, it was nice to see simple algebra taught lucidly. But even back then they couldn't resist doing things the hard way. Instead of finding percentages by conversion to a decimal and multiplying, they converted it to a fraction and multiplied it. This said, when I inspected East Anglia's top comprehensives in 1999, only one pupil I encountered understood that finding a percentage was a simple multiplicative function. All the rest were either clueless, or they 'estimated'--then the latest thing in maths teaching.

If Paul would be so kind as to explain how pupils are taught to add and multiply these days, I would be most obliged.

Posted by: tom burkard at June 30, 2005 03:06 PM

Oli,
I was tempted to reply to your first post, but after your second post I just cannot resist.

I always avoid discussing my views concerning education with those who are currently, or have recently been through the system. Expressing such negative opinions about modern education can be very cruel to those who cannot be blamed for being born 18 years ago. From the point of view of any student who has worked very hard and passed examinations it must be extremely frustrating, and make you very angry, to hear boring old farts like me saying, “Things were better years ago, and everything has now gone to pot”, but I still maintain this belief.
My comments were mainly aimed at those students who previously might have gained apprenticeships, other training, or even an unskilled job to which they would have been suited. Fortunately, we still have intelligent students who succeed even though the system is not how I think it should be. Having read your posts I suspect that you fall into this category.

Oh yes, with regards to your second post. I regularly wear a baseball cap back to front when I’m on holiday, to protect the back of my neck from sunburn. I will probably be banned from shopping centres from now on, but what the heck.

Posted by: John East at July 1, 2005 12:54 AM

I do not know how addition is taught ; it appears not to be in any systematic way. Multiplication (I presume you mean long multiplication) appears not to have been taught though she has done some tables work. (My daughter is in Year 6 btw)

I came across it because of some homework Liz had been given, I saw these wierd line and arrow diagrams and was thinking - what the hell is this ???? I could see what they were doing, but it's horrendous. It might be useful as an illustrative concept of what subtraction actually is - but as a way to do the sums, no.

I think the point of the "hard way" may be to avoid recipe maths, which I see all the time with my daughter (My son is an intuitive mathematician like me). This is the idea that you teach someone how to solve a problem, but not why it solves that problem and how to solve similar but different problems. So maths becomes a sequence of recipes and you pick the one that applies to the problem. They don't "understand maths".

Nor do the teachers, hence me being stared at like I'm nuts because I point out that turning a right angle in the number line at 0 is wrong - it gives a totally WRONG message - that numbers

Problem is that no-one puts it together. What are you doing if you "borrow 1" - actually you are not borrowing anything, you are refactoring the number.

If 243 = 2 x 100 + 4 x 10 + 3 x 1 (basic HTU stuff) then all you are doing is rewriting it as 1 x 100 + 14 x 10 + 3 x 1

But most people don't understand this ; I did this once with my A-Level Comp Sci class - none of them could figure out what they were doing, and they were bright ; that's why pupils can't figure out your percentages. Give them a question that fits the recipe, fine. Ask them what it means or rewrite the question differently, and they can't do it.

Ah hoodies, the day the ban at Bluewater was announced, the four of us went out. Everyone except me had something that was a hoodie ;-)

Posted by: Paul at July 1, 2005 12:00 PM