An interesting counterpoint to the educational traditionalists – some data which suggests that the relative educational performance of Australian school students is going up:
In a nutshell, this table, from a Brookings institute report on the state of American education, compares how students in each of the twelve countries did on three different mathematics tests, the first dating from 1964, the last in 2009. On the first test in 1964, Australia’s students performed well below the average. In the last test in 2009, Australia was above the average for the twelve countries present in all three studies (indeed Australia’s students rank highly globally, as you can read at length at the OECD’s PISA project’s site).
In addition to well-justified concerns about the validity of each individual study – comparing three such studies is fraught with danger.
But, hey, it’s at least as rigorous as Kevin Donnelly your average talkback caller whinging about slipping standards in our schools.
Hat tip Kevin Drum.
The obvious traditionalist explanation for these figures is that Australian education hasn’t improved – it’s just that Australia’s education standards have declined less since 1964 than those of comparable countries.
The problem that I have with the Gillard Government’s obsession with education and health is that this is pre-emminent baove all other issue. Where I am greatfull that my children have a higher educational standard than my own, it grieves me that they will feel their premature demise even more accutely as they burn, drown, starve, or are crushed by the the impacts of climate change.
Some will argue that our better educated offspring will find a solution to climate change, when the reality is that they will better understand the cause of their disasterous predicament and be able to accurately pinpoint the time in the past when the opportunity to prevent runaway Global Warming was lost.
In short our priorities are horrendously out of order.
Robert, it’s really not fair to take away the whingers’ toys like this. Give them a rattle or something to chew on.
Considering also that Australian schools now educate vast numbers of children who were systematically excluded and considered ‘ineducable’ in 1964 (you know, on account of being Aboriginal, or born overseas, or poor, or slow, or disabled, or badly-behaved, or over 15, or from the wrong church…)
…it’s quite remarkable, really.
As it happens, I was fruitlessly Googling around last night trying to find an online explanation of the micro-climatic fog in Crafers, the Brigadoon of the Adelaide Hills, and stumbled on a discussion forum called Poms in Adelaide, on which one bloke says this (posted Dec 2010) about the local school he first sent his kids to:
As an employer I can say that the standards of spelling, even with spellcheck, and grammar, have fallen dramatically.
I was fortunate to have chosen to learn German in school, where the German teacher taught us English Grammar in order to learn German Grammar. I was also fortunate to join the Army where I was taught to write.
Their is a child in my son’s Kindy (3-4 yr old) who has an assessed reading age of 10. And that’s without the help of the education system.
@Razor, there are always going to be hyperlexic kids. However, alongside the precocious reading ability comes a raft of less obvious cognitive challenges, and thank goodness these days those are likely to be recognised, formally assessed and taken into account for a well-rounded education, instead of just assuming that a scintillating vocabulary means that everything else is just tickety-boo.
Not sure what you mean by ‘even with’, Razor — in my experience (some time ago now) as a university teacher, students who’d come through the ‘Spelling and grammar are evilly right-wing, just Be Creative’ school of primary and high school teaching merely reinforced their pugnacious indifference to spelling and grammar by believing (as they constantly assured me) that the computer would fix it for them.
I agree that learning a second language dramatically improves one’s understanding and use of one’s first, though. Something with a different alphabet as well is even better.
@6
“There”, not “their”.
Razor’s comment at 6 is deliberately ironic, surely.
BBB
Nerd question. Was the same mathematics test applied in both 1964 and 2007?
Otherwise, the argument that the test measures absolute changes is questionable.
Katz @11,
I imagine not, as the average score in 1964 was 23. In 2007 it was 500.
That would be a remarkable improvement, I think.
@7 – Yes, tht is why the kid is in kindy – professional advice to keep the child within age cohort for social development etc.
@9/10 – Heh! Wasn’t actually intentional (speed typing at work) but in the circumstances hoist on my own . . .
Once upon a time in a previous life I used to collect quotes and reports and articles and the like that said ‘Back in my day …” and “As an employer I know that kids carnt spel anymoor …” and so on.
Then I would present then to the whingers and show them that the era that was being complained about was the era that they were educated.
Course I’d tell them that after they had enthusiastically agreed that things are worse now [whenever] than they used to be [when they were educated].
Never made any difference, facts are irrelevant, its a belief thing, impervious to reality.
But, hey, it’s at least as rigorous as Kevin Donnelly your average talkback caller whinging about slipping standards in our schools.
Not exactly a high watermark, Robert. What is your opinion on current standards of numeracy?
Who are you to judge, Razor? Your own spelling or grammar are hardly up to scratch.
It may be the same test graded with a different methodology.
In this vein an unfortunate fate befell a famous author fond of big words who intended to use the word “formication” in a dramatic sequence in one of his fancy novels, but misspelled it “fornication”. The spell checker didn’t pick it up, nobody at the publishing house picked it up, and the passage was rendered risible by the error.
Looking at countries which had their last TIMSS result in 2007 and comparing to 2009, you get what look like significant changes — e.g. England and Scotland swap places, going 6th to 10th and 11th to 7th respectively. A change like that over two years makes the whole exercise look doubtful to me. As you say Robert, fraught with danger.
It’s unfortunate that education is a field where it is very hard to measure output, meaning you don’t really know what value you are getting for your money.
Was it John Banville, Paul N?
@16 – Patricia, when I post I am normally multi-tasking and typing, poorly, at speed. I don’t always have the time to proof read. Unlike when I am writing something for work or study.
If you can find any post where I have had a shot at someone for the spelling and grammar of their post on this or any other site then I’ll eat my hat because, knowing how poor mine can be, I don’t have a go at others about theirs.
Well in my yoof there are 42 faces in my Grade 2 class photo, I have lost the Grade 1 photo. There was a shortage of classrooms so I got into school the third year mum tried. I did combined Prep/Grade 1 in 12 months like most of the class. I can remember someone in Grade 1 always vomited at assemblies in term 1.
Many of my contemporaries started school without speaking English, and the experience of not being able to ask to go to the toilet goaded them into being the top English students at university.
Maths instruction in high school was so abysmal that I would never send my kids to the same school. There were no textbooks and teachers had to use their own resources, our class never got a qualified maths teacher. Today’s kids have maths textbooks so they hopefully are better taught.
However if you rose through the system to get a university degree, you got a job. Some students had their tuition fees paid, were paid a living allowance, were guaranteed employment for 3 years upon graduation, got upto 7 years parental leave and a generous superannuation system that encouraged them to retire at 54 years 11 months.
Razor, your comment was that spelling standards had fallen dramatically. Therefore, people who pointed out your own poor spelling weren’t merely being gratuitous.
I went to Primary School in the late ’60s and ’70s in Canberra. I have a memory of maths stuff being printed on the back of old copies of Hansard. All you had to do was turn the sheet over and politicians were abusing each other. I b;ame this for my subsequent innumeract.
BTW – I wonder what the explanation is for Israel’s plummet from the top to the bottom of the table.
whoops: “Blame this for my subsequent innumeracy”.
My illiteracy is all my own work.
Helen – I believe (i before e except after c) it was a grammar issue, also.
Education is certainly friendlier than when I was a kid. Watching my daighter go through primary has been an eye-opener: Schools dont seem to sponsor disaffection like they used to – with positive learning outcomes.
In essence, theyre no longer rotten boroughs of unaccountable corproal punishments and chalk n talk boredom.
Im not the sligthest bit surprised to see outcoems have improved.
Whwenver you hear anyone railing against teachers and the public school system, its normally someone without the slightest clue what theyre talking about – file under “useless babble from right wing shitstains”.
Speaking of which, here’s another worthless idiot: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/media/shock-jock-chris-smith-slammed-over-asylum-death-quiz/story-e6frg996-1226009084881?from=public_rss
In fairness to Mr Donnelly (who actually was a reasonable enough English teacher in the days I was his student) surely most his complaints have been about educational standards in English rather than mathematics. Interestingly he not long ago claimed to have changed his mind regarding the value of standardised tests such as that mentioned in this article – perhaps because they’ve failed to back up his contention that educational standards are falling?
i before e except after c
feign, reign, seizure, leisure, reindeer, weight, meiosis, sheik, pleistocene …
There is a limit to how far a Grade 3 education can get you, even in the army.
What the hell happened to Israel? From top of the league to bottom.
There have been a lot of changes in how ‘marking’ and assessments are made- few institutions these days risk failing students – too much chance of litigation ( and it makes the institution look bad as a supplier of paid for qualifications ).
Friend is involved in training nursing students, in the area of pharmacology, students that do not understand the significance of the exact placement of decimal points are worryingly common.
Generaly syntax is poorly understood , terms like – ‘it’ ‘this’ ‘before and after’ are often poorly understood . As for problems like the misplacement of commas resulting in serious misunderstandings , do not ask.
What the hell happened to Israel?
Israel aint what it used to be.
Actually, Sam at #29, that rule is about the long ‘e’ vowel sound; it doesn’t apply to other words.
Lefty E at #27, I’m hoping you don’t mean me, there. The whole ‘Never mind spelling and grammar, Be Creative’ thing really did dominate a whole generation’s primary and secondary education, or at least those I taught at Melb U, who described it to me at some length over a period of years, and many of whom really were only semi-literate despite their expensive educations and obvious intelligence, which was a bit of a major handicap in the English department. Perhaps there was a particularly virulent strain of ‘Be Creative’ in Victoria, made worse by the fact that it was often politicised, which made about as much sense to me as telling people they mustn’t sing in tune or keep the beat because that was authoritarian and therefore right wing. Or something. Sorry, but it was bollocks then and it’s still bollocks.
One explanation is as follows:” Israel has enjoyed strong economic growth over the last decade, but the benefits of this are being distributed unevenly. Poverty rates are higher than in any OECD country, which reflects the deep social and economic divides in Israeli society. On one side, there is the general Jewish population with poverty and employment rates similar to those of OECD countries. On the other, there are Arabs and ultra-Orthodox Jews, or Haredim, who have large families, poor educational outcomes and low employment rates. As a result, just over half of Arab and Haredi families live in poverty. Almost half of all children entering primary school in Israel come from one of these two groups…” http://www.oecd.org/els/israel2010
It ain’t aint, Sam!
PC@32,
“Actually, Sam at #29, that rule is about the long ‘e’ vowel sound; it doesn’t apply to other words.”
I think you just made that up. And, in any case, that rule doesn’t work iether.
PC 32
seizure, seignorage, codeine …
A similar situation existed in public education in Queensland during the seventies and eighties, Pavlov’s Cat. Grammar instruction came to a screeching halt in 1974. My sister, 8 years my senior, received a far better English education and often corrects me. I have a bit of trouble with vowel substitution and the middle of words just disappearing when I am tired, but the lack of formal instruction didn’t help.
Nope. But Sam’s got some good examples in the next comment. English is a bitch of a language.
TigTog (on 7):
Thanks for that Hyperlexia link.
Challenges? Ther biggest challenge comes from ther parents of a dumb-bunnies who refuse to accept the reality that their little darling is as thick as a brick …. and who then strive to dumb down every other kid who is unfortunate enough to come within reach. They are spoilers.
On way to improve the overall standard of education is to thwart these spoilers. Reward the parents of any talented kid who learn how to hide or disguise their kid’s talent in public but who encourage the kid to learn and to experiment and to be curious only inside the safety of their own home – and only when their formal schooling is done, allow them to go out into the big bad world and let their talent shine. Too late to stifle them; to late to jam them into convenient boxes; too late to dumb them down.
A sort of guerrilla learning, if you like.
Kids today, they got it too easy. Why, when I was a boy, I had to walk 15 miles to school through 18 feet of snow and a driving blizzard, chased by starving wolves and hobos after my lunch, which was only a withered apple, and when I got home I had homework assignments where the instructions were five closely-typed pages of abstruse prose and arcane formulas for the transmutation of lead into gold (which was the only way to pay the tuition costs) and my parents would beat me if it wasn’t done before supper and after chopping an armload of kindling and milking the cats and mucking out the dogs’ kennels . . . .
@39 – My question to the Principal of my children’s school is that while the gifted and special needs children are being focussed on what is being done to ensure that the silent majority in the middle are achieving to the best of their ability?
@40
Looxury …
@ PC – when I went through high school the idea was that we all soaked it up like sponges. More like sieves I think. My yr 8 English teacher locked the door and taught us what a noun, verb and adjective were. We never got as far as split infinitives. I still think they sound painful but have no idea what they really are. At least I was able to teach my husband what a noun was, many years later.
@43 – classic example, “to go” vs. “to boldly go”.
In any case you don’t need to know about split infinitives because the idea that there’s anything wrong with them has been thoroughly discredited. It was all a product of mad Victorian grammarians, who had too much classical education and not enough sense, trying to make English obey the laws of Latin.
The first time I ever tried to get a journal article published, after a lot of grief and fuss from one of the referees, I was told that it had finally been passed as fit to publish but that there was a list of typos and a number of split infinitives. The editorial contact told me I didn’t have to bother with the latter but I replied that I was willing to obediently unsplit any number of infinitives if it meant I could be published.
I noticed that my sibling 5 years younger never learnt to precis. This was an exercise in summarising a piece of text that was read out. This skill has been invaluable for taking lecture notes, minutes of meetings and analysing complex system requirements. Also useful for French dictation when you wrote what you heard then reviewed carefully to impose the right grammar on the piece. My dictation was better than oral French, they swallow their endings worse than we do.
There’s a lot to be said for having spelling, basic grammar and mental arithmetic thrashed into you – it never did me any harm …
/twitching
Take this test.
http://www.snopes.com/language/document/1895exam.asp
And this ‘history’ of ‘change’ in education.
http://scied.unl.edu/pages/preser/sec/articles/sabertooth.html
@28 Wizofaus cheers and it’s good to hear from someone who was educated by ‘Mr’ (as he was back then, pre-doctorate) Donnelly that he was a good classroom teacher — I’m not at all surprised about that — he clearly has the drive, energy and passion of a good teacher to remain engaged with education issues long after the classroom days are over — but sadly when it comes to commentary, critique and debate, he’s just another partisan noisemaker apparatchik, with a very low signal to noise ratio.
Razor, good to hear you learned about your first language through another language — and the army. Actually, the best-resourced and most diverse language school in the country is not at a university (sorry peeps!) — it’s The Australian Defence Force School of Languages.
There are still sadists in teaching. Although caning and flogging are out of vogue the [creepy] teacher can manage classes using fine line in pyschological erosion of self confidence and self esteem. It’s harder to detect the modern sadists, they don’t leave welt marks on their victims, but their damage lasts longer.
I think a naughty kid needs a smack, not a flogging, when reasoning isn’t working and their behaviour needs to change.
Not only are Australian education standards higher than they were in 1964 but the majority of students are expected to attempt tertiary education. Its not uncommon of student children aged 25 to still be living at home.
In 1964 most kids left school at age 14 to work in factories.
Kids who wanted to work in an office or a shop sat their intermediate exam at the end of Year 10. Girls would go off to commercial college to learn typing and secretarial studies.
Ambitious kids who wanted to work in a bank sat for their Leaving exam at the end of year 11.
Academic kids who wanted to go to university completed year 12, about 5% of the age cohort.
The average age of marriage was 21 or 22 after 7 years in the workforce. With limited access to reliable contraception accidents were common and babies appeared within 2 years of marriage. Unmarried mothers gave their babies up for adoption.
I’m afraid Razor @5 & 6 has fallen victim to a species of what was known in publishing circles as ‘Muphry’s Law’ (yes Muphry), first identified by John Bangsund of the Society of Editors (Vic) who noted: “if you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written”. We have probably all fallen foul of Muphry at some stage, and I think it is better to embrace and enjoy the experience . There is a bit more on Muphry’s Law at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry's_law
Shingle, I take it that getting that particular link wrong was…deliberate!?
Here’s an interesting article about the Finnish education system.
The biggest factor effecting education outcomes seems to me to be the social context of the actors (both teachers and students.)
I remember being part of the first yr10 in NSW to not do matrices in maths. Wow, as it turned out, linear algebra turned out being more useful than calculus. Graph theory might also be something worth teaching in secondary school.
But talk about the content of the education system probably misses the main point, for me at least, that a good social context is a prerequisite for a successful school “career.”
There’s this as well. An RSA film, “Changing Education Paradigms.”
Oh no sorry Mercurious @ 54 – don’t know what happened – excuse glitch – but this does seem to add weight to the mysterious Muphry phenomenon. There are other entries on John Bangsund and Muphry’s Law on the web who enjoy such things. He used to write something called ‘Threepenny Planet’.
billie says:
February 21, 2011 at 1:20 pm
Well in my yoof there are 42 faces in my Grade 2 class photo
Only 42? Looxury. I’ve just checked my 1961 class with 51 faces. How many were absent on that day?
systematically excluded and considered ‘ineducable’ in 1964 (you know, on account of being Aboriginal, or born overseas, or poor, or slow, or disabled, or badly-behaved, or over 15, or from the wrong church…)
Not excluded in my part of Western Sydney (queue derogatory remark about Westies from Lefty E)
It’s all gone to hell since they stopped teaching falconry and the use of the two-handed broadsword.
I vaguely remember reading somewhere (I really hope this is true) that one of the earliest extant specimens of writing is like a clay tablet from ancient Sumer or something that reads, “I greatly fear that the art of writing is now much in decline…”
j_p_z,
That was certainly Pliny the Elder’s view as well. One wonders what Pliny the Younger thought about his dad’s perspective on the younger generation.
Listening to every generation ever since you would get the idea that we have been on a steep downwards slope ever since. It is a wonder any of us even know what these strange markings are on this keyboard.
PeterTB and how many kids in your class slipped through the cracks and failed to learn because the teacher had another 51 kids to manage.
My hat is off them, especially the grade 3 teacher who spent time one-on-one teaching arithmetic to the slow boy. She used to tell tales of the British Raj for the last 15 or 30 minutes of the day if we were good, more arithmetic if we were bad. I bet she hated days we were naughty.
However today’s classrooms have a maximum of 24 pupils, and kids expect and get one on one attention.
” his dad’s perspective on the younger generation.”
Actually the ‘elder’ was his uncle.
#62. — ah true, good catch!
“…tam diligenter libros avunculi mei lectitas…”
Let’s see these modern kids remember something as useless as THAT when they’re old and decrepit! Naaaw, too busy learning useful and relevant stuff, the little candy-asses, not enough time memorizing the lyrics to “Ogre Battle”!
In HS it can be 30 in ‘non-technical’ subjects. I have two classes of 28.
This is a personal beef of mine, but this kind of logic really shits me (Billie above):
It’s as if when someone’s beating you they’re not also using psychological abuse. Yes, yes, psych abuse is bad, but do you really believe that someone who bullies, beats and physically intimidates a person isn’t also using psychological abuse? One always comes with the other, not vice versa.
Being beaten by bullies is worse than being psychologically abused by bullies. Because physically abusive bullies are also psychologically abusive.
Tigtog, it is quite possible that the 4yo with a reading age of 10 is gifted rather than hyperlexic. IIUC a hyperlexic child doesn’t really understand what he’s reading; only Razor can tell us if this is a likely diagnosis.
I couldn’t read before I started school, but when I was about 6.5 my reading age was somewhere over 13yo. I can still remember the assessment. I’ve always been an excellent speller and am very doubtful about spelling standards declining, Razor. I have been correcting teachers’ spelling since 1980, and greengrocers’ shops have always contained misspelt signs. The existence of Apostrophe Man in the SMH for many years also suggests that ‘our day’ and ‘their day’ were pretty much the same.
SG needn’t worry, teachers can’t touch children. It’s a moot point whether they can physically separate brawling kids. Children can assault their fellow students severely enough for their victim to be hospitalised or suffer life changing injuries but no charges will be laid eg compass stab in the eye
I’m also wondering if these results show the effects of the emphasis on literacy and numeracy of the past 10-15 years, and are at the expense of vitally important other subjects such as music education and languages.
I read recently that the countries with top results – Finland, South Korea etc – have 100% of teachers who were in the top 25%, academically, of school leavers, whereas the U.S. for example had only 25% of teachers who came from the top school leavers. I think that over the last 30 years or so the standard here has dropped a lot – teaching has one of the lowest entry scores.
That said, one reason for better teaching could be that the kind of Catholic school I went to doesn’t exist anymore. Kids these days aren’t ‘taught’ by old nuns and brothers who were never trained teachers.
Billie @52: You say:
I finished school in 1960 (NSW) At that point almost everyone who left would have finished at least 3 years of high school and would have been at least 15.
When I was at school the assumption was that most of us would do our calcs by hand without a calculator and most of us would have to to be able to spell because spellcheck was over thirty years away. Under these circumstances it made more sense to put time into sums and spelling compared with our modern world. At the same time we didn't learn the maths required to massage vast amounts of data.
What really counts is how well the system of the day is preparing students for the world they are going to be living in – not the world my generation have had to live in.
Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine says that the Right complain about how badly schools are educating youth today as part of their campaign to lower the regard in which government services are held. When you believe education is poor then its easier to break the power of teacher unions, leading to reductions in pay and conditions.
I agree with John D that our schools have to educate students for the world they will face tomorrow not the world of the past 50 years. I summarised how education has improved. However I was trying to make the point that raising school retention rates also reduces unemployment because students must stay at school to age 17 unless they have a job or apprenticeship lined. [I think that's one truancy law that won't be policed]
My teacher friends inform me that there are some teenagers who aren’t good at school work, don’t want to be at school, spend their time disrupting the class, noisily and sometimes violently. For these youngsters being in a classroom feels like babysitting and reinforces their inability to do school work. Many of these kids would be better off in apprenticeships working under adult supervision learning a technical skill – although there was a spate of horrible bullying incidents with apprentices in court a few years ago. The apprenticeship system has a 48% completion rate and training apprentices is the responsibility of sole tradesman not the large corporations they sub contract too.
In some schools in Australia the pupils will really only need enough education to fill in Centrelink forms unless we reverse the trend of shipping jobs overseas. Like Blundstone saying how dinky-di they are, Hobart factory closed 2 years ago.
@Tigtog #7. I assume my mother was totally bored in the wheatbelt of WA, because she taught us to read well before starting school, so that my sister and I read every book in the place (up to year 7) in grade one. We didn’t have any of the problems you link to, but there was nothing else for us to do. We had to sit there and basically do nothing while the rest struggled with cat and mat. We had to copy out books to keep us busy. I still remember having to copy the ladybird book of ocean liners for no reason. We were also given excess books from the library to read. I was given a book called “From Serf to Citizen” in grade one that I really should try to find again.
John D @69,
“most of us would have to to be able to spell because spellcheck was over thirty years away”
That is a funny anachronism (if that is the right word). I can imagine your teachers saying: “you’d better learn your spelling, because it is going to be another 30 years before spellchecking computers are invented.
Joe @ 55
“Graph theory might also be something worth teaching in secondary school.”
At primary school I reckon. It really disappoints and disheartens me to see all of the boring maths (times tables, geometry etc) being taught at primary school, but none of the interesting maths (graph theory, probability theory, topology etc). No wonder everybody hates maths at school.
(NB For non-mathematicians: graph theory is not about drawing “graphs” of the x-axis, y-axis type. Look it up.)
I went through something of the same myself. Not as advanced as you must have been with that early reading, but probably because of that other bane of education, overcrowded classes in the early post-war years. I think our classes ran from about 50 to 65. The problem there, alluded to by Billie is that the minorities at each end of the spectrum – the elite and the special needs – miss out somewhat. One could make a reasonable speculation that the improved performances over the decades have a lot to do with the smaller class sizes.
There are social problems with being an elite, which Worst of Perth probably encountered as I did. Aside from the boredom in class, I felt a need not to feel too ‘abnormal’ compared with the rest. I couldn’t honestly dumb down but I could loaf a bit and work at being fairly humble (Uriah was right on that). But it probably ruined my high school years because I’d become too used to coasting and there was a need to actually work by then.
Consequently, I was a very late maturer. I learnt a bit about people on the way -so it wasn’t wasted.
I & U @ 73, the problem with your suggestion is that, without a firm grasp of what you call “the boring maths”, it’s impossible to really understand anything more advanced. (Just for a start, Euclidean geometry is probably the first encounter any of us have with a formal system.)
Ernie Tuck (former professor of applied maths at Adelaide uni) once said that there are two ways to teach mathematics (and it generalises, btw): the Gothic cathedral model (a towering, elegant structure built on firm foundations) and the Calcutta model (a bunch of disconnected hovels). I’m afraid leaving out multiplication tables, geometry, etc, leads to the Calcutta model.
But DI (nr), more people live, love and do the real and messy business of life in Calcutta than they do in gothic cathedrals (lovely as they are). We shouldn’t let the idea that beauty is better than truth rule our thinking- especially in regard to something like mathematics.
DI(NR),
Yes, the gothic cathedral model is how maths is taught now. 7 years of digging foundations at primary school, 6 years of pouring concrete at high school. It is not until uni that you start to see the spires and buttresses taking shape. Not many kids have the patience to wait that long.
I&U @72: Unfortunately my teachers weren’t seers so they matched their teaching to what they thought i would have to face.
The problem I have with the table that prompted this post was that it is all about testing tangibles. The things that really effect our ability to deal with a changing world and unpredictable changes are hard to test things like ability to learn new things, solve new problems, deal with new concepts etc. I have never used most of the tangibles I learned in my engineering degree despite spending a lot of time working as a technical engineer. What the time at university really did was build up my intellectual muscle and my ability to learn new things etc. The time spent arguing with those smarties from other faculties was probably more important than the formal learning.
Don, yes. I read a book a night, but only claimed one per week, to sort of fit in in later school.
Am now helping my own boy in year one, but they have to learn a ridiculous script that is sort of vaguely based on handwriting but isn’t. I don’t know why they have to learn this ridiculous letterform that no one uses. The p’s look like n’s for some reason.