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Cool Maths?

Sep 10, 2012 Editorial

One of the central themes in modern education debates across the globe, and we are no exception here in Guyana, is how to motivate pupils. How do we make learning Maths, English, Science or History an interesting, enjoyable, and rewarding experience for pupils?
Nowadays, it is widely believed that if we fail to convince pupils that studying a particular subject is both relevant to their personal experience and enjoyable they will never learn it properly.
The school experience is not only supposed to be relevant, but must be ‘enjoyable”. This is supposed to make the children more receptive to soaking up ‘learning’. ‘
As we all know from our abysmal results at the last CSEC, one of the subjects that most worries educationalists and policy makers, is mathematics. Being the most abstract subject in the curriculum, maths is almost universally considered a “hard” subject, which is difficult to make relevant to pupils’ lives.
Mathematics is too often seen as difficult or boring and that we have a curriculum that all too often fails to excite and motivate learners. Some believe that the children’s reaction is not as passive as ‘boring’ but they actually find maths ‘terrifying’ since their non-comprehension might convince them that they are “dumb”.
Our Ministry of Education (MoE), reacting to the crisis in the Maths (and English) results, had introduced a ‘pilot school’ program to remedy the situation. Text books, calculators, past exam papers and doubling the number of periods dedicated to maths constituted the core of the maths component.
The apparent philosophy underlying the program was that rectifying maths was just a matter of some extra ‘swotting’. In a majority of the ‘pilot schools’ the results were significantly positive. There have been calls to expand the program to all schools, even though some have complained that the methodology is nothing more than ‘teaching to the test”.
Up north, another response to the math crisis has found favour: to make maths ‘exciting’, to ‘jazz up’ the teaching practice. The lessons must have ‘pace’, presumably like stand-up comedy, in order to ensure the full attention of the students.
So we have teachers dressing up the subject with all sorts of allusions and even role playing – of popular youth heroes – so as to ‘stimulate’ the attention’ of the students. With our penchant for imitating such sources, we might soon see local maths teachers dressing up as Iron Man and teaching quadratic equations using the latter’s curved flight swoops and he fights the ‘bad guys”.
This ‘cool” approach is evident in several of the canned maths programs we have imported for our Education TV.  While there has been some criticism of this ‘hyped up ‘ approach it has only gone as far as calling for some ‘balance’? But why should we strike a balance between engaging the learners and learning maths? It seems that we can only sell learning in an underhand way, as something else.
We should be more honest and tell children what they already know: that maths has very little to do with fashion, football and the Olympics; that chemistry has nothing to do with Harry Potter. The real problem, then, is not that modern pupils are in any way different from previous generations.
The problem is the era these children have been born into. Adults no longer believe that education is a worthwhile thing in its own right. It must always be made ‘relevant’.
They have so little faith in pupils that they believe that children are now incapable of grasping abstract concepts, never mind developing a love of books. Schoolchildren will never learn to love abstract subjects like maths if teachers are afraid to challenge them.
Learning necessarily involves hard work and individual effort.  Teachers are unlikely to convince children that learning a school subject is worth the effort if we believe so little in our discipline and in our pupils’ intelligence. Our MoE should simply insist that math Teachers are qualified to teach and show up in their class rooms.

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