If youse reckon kids are getting worser at English, they ain’t much gooder at maths, neither. New Zealand students’ English, maths and science results have been steadily falling for decades.
But don’t bother sending them to Jacinda’s school for kids that can’t read good and want to do other things good too, if you want to them to get betterer at book-learnin’.
Some primary school teachers are modifying their teaching patterns due to “maths anxiety”, new research has found.
Which seems to mean, in plain English, that they’re avoiding teaching maths at all.
“If something new was added to the timetable – maybe Harold the Giraffe and the truck came along to do Life Ed – then they would shift maths to that time so that maths was the subject that was dropped that day,” Julie Whyte said.
Some teachers would schedule less time for maths or only focus on numbers and statistics and ignore algebra or geometry.
If they can’t skive off completely, stick to the easy stuff.
The research found teachers came up with strategies to try to manage their maths anxiety, including limiting the level of their teaching to junior classes where maths was considered not too hard
But even the most basic stuff is apparently beyond some of them.
A study from Julie Whyte, a teacher educator in the Bachelor of Teaching (Primary) programme, found in her study some primary maths school teachers are struggling to do basic equations as they suffer from maths anxiety that stems from when they were students […]
“One participant wasn’t able to work out the basics of 7 plus what equals 10. A teacher in a professional development environment couldn’t work out that 7 plus 3 equals 10,” Whyte said.
Perhaps they should ask, “If you have one bucket that contains 2 gallons and another bucket that contains 7 gallons, how many buckets do you have?”
The anticipation of teaching maths also caused anxiety.
Well, it should certainly cause anxiety for parents who are expecting their children to learn basic maths from well-educated professionals.
The research comes as the Government earlier this year announced a strategy to tackle declining literacy and numeracy rates in children.
Newshub
Forget the children — it sounds like they need a strategy to tackle declining standards in some of their teachers.
I mean, I can understand people being “maths anxious”. I never picked up calculus properly in high school, because the teacher breezed through it with the smart kids and ignored the rest of us sitting there, lost and dumbfounded. That always bothered me.
So, as an adult, I decided to teach myself: in my own time, I found online resources and started working through them. In the end, I had to go back to algebra, because maths is a bit like a game of Kerplunk! I found the whole thing fascinating and absorbing, like solving a puzzle.
And I’m not even a teacher.
