Over Half Of Adults Are Poor At "Maths"

Would you openly advertise that you couldn't read or write? Very few will. But people will openly admit to not being able to do "maths". A report by a new group called National Numeracy claims that just under half of adults have the numeracy skills expected of an 11 year old and only about a fifth of adults are capable of gaining a C grade at GCSE.

The body is unfortunately fronted by Carol Vorderman who is not only awful but also knows absolutely nothing about education beyond her personal experience as a student. The report does have a point though, and is absolutely correct when it says that being poor at maths is a "badge of honour" and a "British disease". Celebrities are cited, even named and shamed as openly admitting to being awful at maths, usually followed by a laugh on a chat show. I invited our local MP into school recently and he even asked why we we bothered with algebra, which is like asking why you need bricks to build a house, which is encouraging!

Once again the kicking of the teaching profession begins - all students should be enthused when it comes to mathematics, despite clear and obvious parental/family influence to hate the subject. The government has repeatedly said in the recent past that they would like all students to continue with mathematics until the age of 18, for no other reason than other countries do it. I want an ipad2 because loads of my friends have one, but it won't make me any more efficient as a person, in fact it may well lead me to neglect other areas of my life. Totally pointless.

Maths teachers are under-qualified and lack the knowledge to enthuse and stretch their students, apparently. The desire of both government and National Numeracy is to get the top graduates, those with first class or upper second class degree to become teachers. Good luck with that - quality mathematicians are few and far between and will almost certainly be offered (and accept) jobs that pay far more than that of a teacher, and could well be less stressful. Those who do end up teaching (it sounds worryingly like the bum deal, doesn't it?) are perfectly well qualified to stretch the students and make the subject accessible. Politicians are dreaming if they think that teaching is currently a desirable profession.

The problem is that the politicians (people who talk about stuff, but actually do very little) are targetting the wrong people. Those they need to target are the pupils, their families and their attitude towards maths rather than the teachers and the curriculum. The curriculum is essentially fine, although the questions could be more geared to real-life situations i.e a little more relevent. The problem is that many children refuse to even attempt the work despite the best efforts of their teachers, and this behaviour is condoned by all the parents of those children who immediately say at parents evening that they can't help because they are rubbish at the subject. Giving up in maths is seen as acceptable to everyone but a teacher.

My "solution":
Educate the parents as well as the children. I already teach an after-school course for parents at our school, but funding is limited and take up is relatively low. It needs to become an embarrassment to be poor at maths and those who should be getting the snide comments should be those who are poor mathematically rather than those who are good at the subject as currently happens. No-one wants to be embarrassed, so people need to be embarrassed when they have insufficient skills in the subject - it should force them to improve. Enough of the covering in cotton wool, these people need to know the truth.

There is another point to be made: I think that what the politicians mean is "numeracy" rather than "maths". Maths involves pretty complex stuff that you wouldn't necesarily expect most people to understand or use outside of the classroom, although you'd be surprised at the uses of some mathematics. Numeracy is a necessity for people to function efficiently in the real world - stuff like percentages and fractions of a numbers, estimation. No wonder so many people get into horrible debt (including some mathematicians!) if they don't understand the interest they pay (percentages) and how much they're spending (estimation). I had a conversation with a class with whom I was teaching linear graphs, when one child asked what they were used for. I suggested a profession as an example amongst many, to which a few said "Oh, I don't want to do anything like that, so I don't need to learn this".

When anyone asks me when they are going to use this in later life, I now have a standard reply, which is: "During your GCSE exam, which will lead you on to a job decent job, assuming that you get a decent grade".

Still, it's all their teachers' fault, not a dreadful national attitude towards the subject.

It's fine to be innumerate

I’m a maths teacher at a secondary school in England, and have been for over 10 years. Every parents evening you can guarantee that at least one parent will start with the line “I’m useless at maths, so there’s no point my child asking me for help with their homework”.

Why is it that people are quite happy to admit to being innumerate?

I’m sure that these same parents don’t walk up to their child’s English teacher and say “I can’t read or write, so there’s no point my child asking for help with their essay”. It’s funny how the two subjects, of equal importance on the curriculum and in life, are thought off as polar opposites when it comes to admitting talent or lack thereof.

It’s a constant battle for the maths practitioner as many offspring learn attitudes towards things from their parents. My mother is not a big fan of parsnips, so I assumed that I wouldn’t like them either. It wasn’t until I’d moved out and I thought I’d experiment with the popular root vegetable that I realised that actually, I rather like them. This may seem a frivolous comparison, but if a child is told that someone they respect hated mathematics, then that child will also have a poor attitude towards the subject, and the battle is lost before it’s even begun.

Maths is a taboo subject, perceived to be really difficult, but as I have often said to both students and parents, most mathematics is just like an assembly line, where at each stage a small part of the solution is added, until finally one ends up with the whole solution.

Everyone knows the curriculum, it is available on government websites and pamphlets, probably every school website, and if you still can’t find it, your maths teacher should be able to lay their hands on a copy fairly easily. You can guarantee that most of the curriculum will end up on the exam paper, and let’s face it, the questions are always essentially the same with the numbers changed around a bit.

I believe that essay subjects are far more difficult for the following reason: the student has to develop a theory and argue that theory coherently in a piece of writing, using relevant passages from the text they are writing about and convincing the reader that what they are arguing is, in fact, the case. That is a far harder skill to master than anything a student would do in high school maths lessons.

The skill in succeeding at mathematics is not achieving a correct answer, it’s choosing the correct process by which you can arrive at the correct answer. If pigeons can be trained to perform a process and be rewarded, then surely humans can do the same, with their reward being the correct answer and a good grade in mathematics.

It should therefore be far more embarrassing to admit that you are no go good at mathematics than it is to admit to being poor at English. Shouldn’t it?