Get back to teaching arithmetic

RE: EQAO

The ongoing struggle in the EQAO mathematics tests have many well-known problems (at least by teachers). The recent articles in the Spectator brought many of them forward. The most ridiculous was that ESL students just recently entering our school system don’t understand, and their resulting mark of zero impacts the average, and badly if the neighbourhood school has a significant number of these students. But a bigger problem that somehow seems to be ignored by the ministry, if no one else, is that students don’t know arithmetic. We seniors amaze young people by being able to do relatively simple multiplying or dividing in our heads, no calculators needed. Why did the education system feel that simple arithmetic was something students no longer need to do? If they have the basics of arithmetic, wouldn’t so-called “mathematics” be easier to grasp? I guess I am showing my age when I think of mathematics as algebra, geometry, trigonometry or calculus, not what the EQAO calls mathematics. Dennis Martin, Binbrook