The teaching of mathematics in the US and U.K is alleged to be in a huge crisis. So much so that the British Chancellor of the Exchequer announced that he wanted compulsory maths taught in State schools up to the age of 18. Maths is the subject that the illuminati use to judge the excellence of teaching, and they have pronounced the US and UK particularly hopeless.
And yet one has to look at not just how a subject is taught, but what is being taught. A YouGov survey in England found that about a third of those surveyed had no idea how to calculate a mode, a median or a “line of best fit”, or the area of a circle. Well, this reader knows (or thinks he knows) what a median is and how to calculate the area of a circle. But he’s never heard of a mode (except in music) and apparently “line of best fit” has something to do with regression analysis, but he has no idea what it is.
I am in my third quarter of a century and have never needed any of the above, never learned statistics and never needed them. I taught myself book-keeping and how you produce profit and loss figures. And that, after the invention of the pocket calculator, was all I have needed, except for being able to add, subtract and divide in my head.
So why do we beat ourselves up comparing ourselves with the (dire) learn-by-rote Chinese system? If our system is so bad why, when we visited MIT in Cambridge, MA did we notice that practically every student we encountered was Asian? Somebody clearly has a high opinion of what is taught there. Why do rich Chinese send their teenage children to British boarding schools if maths is so badly taught and is the be-all-and-end-all?
What we should be focusing on is comprehension of a passage in English, the ability to explain its meaning lucidly and, in turn, to speak and write using correct grammar and with a wide vocabulary. Then we can communicate. Kids should know the basics of mathematics but be very well versed in their language. There are other things they should also know, but reading, writing, comprehension and persuasive language has to be top, not mathematics.
Just in Case you ever need to know:-
Mean =the average score
Median= the middle score
Mode= the score that occurs most often
(Posted for Jane Dean)
P.S I don’t think I will ever need to know, actually, but readers probably might.
I don’t think we have anything to lose from a population good at both language and mathematics skills. For me its not a zero sum situation: the success of countries like Finland and Canada show that you can easily excel at both. I think it would also be nice to improve foreign language learning in the US and UK. Allow students the option to choose additional classes in a foreign language. For me, two German lessons a week and some homework simply wasn’t enough time.