Some Interesting Statistics Regarding Teaching Maths. (August 16, 2005)

    The Sydney Morning Herald's Linda Doherty has been nosing around to find out what's rotten in the state of teaching mathematics in Australia's public schools and has returned with some interesting findings and observations, but do they really matter, and if so where does the buck stop?

Illustration: SMH Graphics

Before moving right along perhaps its worth mentioning that the majority of Ms Doherty's examples have little to do with mathematics outside the restricted area of arithmetic, i.e. "the branch of mathematics that treats of the properties and relationships of real numbers and of computations with them involving chiefly addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division," which is unfortunate because that's what $3.49 calculators do and while essential and very useful for dealing with the tax man and the corner shop it's not really all that exciting. It's when you move into geometries, and algebras, statistics and probabilities just for starters that the fun begins, ask Einstein, it was coming in contact with what to him was brand new maths that allowed his discovery of General Relativity. That's exciting stuff. (But see the figure for some examples from Ms Doherty's  article).

Agreed you gotta crawl before you walk and walk before you run but when Doherty opens with, "Up to 40 per cent of high school maths classes are taught by teachers with no training in the subject", and she points out that "only four of 31 Australian universities require trainee teachers to have studied mathematics to year 12 level and more than half do not require any senior school mathematics" matters look a bit grim. (our emphases)

And she continues, "That is hardly surprising as teachers spend little time at university actually learning maths. Instead, trainee teachers are being instructed - in the words of universities - in how to teach 'the social, cultural and political contexts' of mathematics or to think mathematically 'from socially inclusive and critical perspectives'", whatever the hell that's suppose to mean.

The director of the International Centre of Excellence for Education in Mathematics, Garth Gaudry, had some strong comments to make to Doherty concerning the matter.

An extremely high proportion of the very small number of courses containing the words 'mathematics' or 'mathematics education' … don't delve into mathematics at all. They're about sociological theory, or pop psychology about theories of learning and the child as a learner.

And we're told, "Students are encouraged to understand concepts before they practise their number sense."

They must be kidding. Teachers with no or minimal training in mathematics are gonna teach concepts of mathematics?

Ed Lewis, a mathematics education lecturer at the Australian Catholic University told Doherty, that the challenge is for universities to develop better mathematicians through teacher education courses while Garth Gaudry told her "he believes universities need to set the bar as high for school teachers as it should be for the students they will teach". Which would be rather like giving them one eye so that they can lead the blind, let alone instil enthusiasm for mathematics and the hard sciences.

Finally, the director of the International Centre of Excellence for Education in Mathematics in masterly understatement observed,  "Many of the people pressed into teaching [mathematics] in the junior years come from other subject areas and, therefore, have an inadequate training and mastery of mathematics. This is a very serious problem and it must be addressed. Time is rapidly running out."

Ahh, it can't be all that serious; otherwise the Minister for Education, Science and Training would devote more time addressing the problem instead of vigorously massaging as a first priority his conduit toward deputy leadership above all else.