Mathematics under the Microscope

And this news from BBC is even more depressing:

English teachers who went to school when grammar was not on the curriculum struggle to teach it, research shows.

A review of international studies on the effective teaching of complex writing says there is a need to improve the teachers’ own skills.

The work was done by Exeter University for the Department for Children, Schools and Families in England. [...]

The study concludes: “For English teachers, who themselves attended schools when grammar was not part of the English curriculum, there is a significant issue of lack of assurance in grammatical subject knowledge, leading to difficulties in addressing grammar meaningfully in the writing classroom.

“In particular, effective teaching requires a secure understanding not simply of grammatical terminology, but of applied linguistics and an awareness of the ways in which grammatical constructions are used in different texts for different communicative purposes.” [...]

Another study described a “significant knowledge gap” in terms of teachers’ pedagogical knowledge.

One piece of research on the linguistic subject knowledge that teachers and trainee teachers bring to their teaching of writing found “a persistent theme in teachers’ attitudes to grammar is hostility to anything that makes formal structure the central object of study”.

What can I say? Grammar is an expression of the intrinsic logic of language. Non-teaching or poor teaching of grammar directly affects students’ capacity of logical, and, therefore, mathematical thinking. “Teachers’ [...] hostility to anything that makes formal structure the central object of study” is hostility to logic. It is a seed of future math phobia in students.

From BBC: The shortage of qualified maths teachers in England and Wales is to worsen.

Stephen Jones’ column in The Times Educational Supplement of 9 May 2008 (not placed yet on the newspaper’s website) caught my eye:

“Why do we have to study this?” It’s the question that every teacher must have heard 100 times over. [...] The objection this time round was to the study of poetry as part pf an English course. As the student had actually signed up for an access course in social care, I suppose some might think that she had a point.

So far so good. Stephen Jones starts to giving an excellent answer:

It’s certainly not the subject for those who see life purely in terms of white and black. If shades of grey are too painful to contemplate, then poetry is not for you.

Instead of stopping at that powerful point, Jones then descends into a quasi-poetic rubbish too banal to quote. In my humble opinion, the answer is very simple: learning and analysing poetry calibrates a student’s scale of grey between white and black — and maybe not only shadows of grey, but perhaps also all hues and  colours of rainbow. Poetry is about subtle variations of meaning, emotional charge, colour of a word printed in black on white; an ability to detect these variations is a very essential skill for life.

For a future social worker, ability to read the true meaning of the phrase “I am OK, thank you” is a very essential skill. An instinctive, innate, “emotional literacy” perhaps suffices for a face-to-face interaction (dogs are quite good at that — and without studying poetry). However, detection of the emotional state of a writer of a letter (and even worse, an  e-mail) requires  a certain cultural conditioning.

Unfortunately, poetry suffers at school because it is a classical example of teaching critirea. Interestingly, the same teaching of critirea that Bichenkov talks about in his article (still not translated, sorry).