THE LUNACY OF MATHS EDUCATION

As stated elsewhere Maths was my best subject at school by a long way, from the first day I grasped new concepts quicker than most others. In fact it was the one thing at primary school I was most known for. Typically I would score 90 - 100% on every test and piece of work I ever did. However I was constantly criticized by the teachers because I either didn’t show in detail how I worked the problems out or because I used the “wrong method”. I became increasingly frustrated when I was the only person in the class who had got more than 95% correct yet was given more criticism than someone else who had scored only 75%. Things came to a head in the final year of primary school when the teacher Mrs Irneson refused to even mark a piece of work I had done. She gave me 0 out of 20 put a red pen line through the lot and wrote “use correct method” in big letters at the side. I was inspired to write this after hearing a similar story from someone down the pub. Growing up he helped out in his dads betting shop and this was a big help improving his maths. As a result he learned Mathematical concepts like fractions years before they were taught to him at school. However at school he was constantly given a hard time off the teachers for using the “wrong method” even though he was the only one in the class scoring 100% correct. Despite being gifted he became so frustrated with this and the education system as a whole that he dropped out of school aged 15. Imagine 2 people out in the real world such as working in my factory, person one has a 95% success rate with problem solving (and making the company more money), person two has a 75% success rate. Who’s the boss going to promote ? is the boss going to care that person two has a detailed account of how they attempted to solve the problems when they got 25% wrong ? Absolutely not!!!! When I sat my G.C.S.Es and A-Levels in later education it was drummed into us the importance of showing our working out on the exam papers. A typical maths exam question would consist of a problem to solve like the one above. To get the final answer involves making several individual calculations. If a mistake is made on any of these calculations then the final answer will obviously be wrong. However marks will be awarded for the parts of the calculation that were correct. In the example above there could be 10 marks available in total, a person who made the mistake of putting 16.70 instead of 16.90 in the first part but got the rest of the question correct could be awarded 8 or 9 marks. Real life however does not work like this, at the time of writing I sometimes have to use maths to work out problems at work. The only thing I’m judged on is if I get the answer correct and that’s it. If the answers wrong who cares if I have a piece of paper showing how I attempted to work it out or if 90% of my reasoning was correct........it’s still wrong!!!!!! At school there are some almost unbelievable scenarios that could result from the above problem. Imagine two students who sit an exam with a 75% pass level that consists of questions such as the one above. Student A - Gets 70% of the final answers correct but shows little or no working out on their exam paper, scores 70% and fails the exam. Student B - Makes a minor mistake (such as putting 16.70 instead of 16.90 in the example above) on every single question. Shows a detailed account of how they worked out each problem but get every single final answer wrong. As the penalty for this is so small they accumulate a score of 80% and still pass the exam. THE LUNACY OF MATHS EDUCATION