Specialist Maths Teachers coming
Tue, 10/18/2016 - 12:00am
Minister of Education Ronald Jones acknowledges that there is a challenge with the teaching of Mathematics within schools.
To remedy this, he revealed that his Ministry will be revisiting the concept of Specialist Mathematics Teachers.
He shared this with principals and mathematics teachers gathered for the launch of the Caribbean Teacher’s Series (CTS) Mathematics: Revision Guide from the Teacher’s Desk for Secondary Schools, held at the University of the West Indies Cave Hill Campus, yesterday.
“We have a problem with Mathematics in Barbados. We do have a problem with Mathematics teaching in schools, starting from our primary schools,” he indicated.
“In the Ministry we started to look at Specialist Maths Teachers. It has been tried before, but it didn’t last. So we are revisiting that concept again of subject specialists, particularly in the area of maths as well as reading in primary schools,” the Minister further noted.
“I have seen in the last eight years the move from 67 per cent to 86 per cent of our primary school students scoring 40 and above in English. I have not seen that in Mathematics. One of the best years I have seen was in 2001, when 71 per cent of the students writing the Barbados Secondary School Entrance Examination scored 40 and above. Since then, there has been systematic dip… sometimes you have a little up,” Jones pointed out.
Orville Lynch, Human Resource Development Specialist at the Ministry of Labour and a teacher for 40 years, said there are some mathematics teachers within the primary schools who do not fully understand that subject.
“You can’t have people teaching maths who don’t understand it,” he stressed.
“Maths is not just about working out formulas. Maths is an exploration; it’s like a puzzle… Someone who likes to explore, who can find different ways to solve a problem, is the type of person you want,” Jones pointed out.
With students not grasping concepts or having a love for Mathematics at the primary and secondary levels, Lynch, a teacher of 16 years at the Cave Hill Campus, told those gathered, “Come here any Saturday morning and you will find hundreds of students paying to do maths lessons, who should have gone through the school system, that should have prepared them at least for the fundamentals of Maths coming to the University… That is my concern; I am speaking as a teacher.
“The students I come across in the business class have little understanding of mathematics, and they leave here with a Management Degree, and their knowledge of maths is extremely weak for people who want to be in business… Don’t ever talk to them about Financial Management, looking at the finances of a business – they are lost, they don’t want to see that exam paper. Therefore, what we do in that class is make a financial management question compulsory in the exam. They want to be a businessperson and can’t deal with cash flow… can’t understand your books – then you can’t be a businessperson.” (TL)