Stick to math basics
Alberta Education Minister David Eggen should do the math to find out why elementary school kids are slipping in their grasp of arithmetic. He’d find out that much of it adds up to a need for the return to basics.
In the past five years, there has been a 20-per-cent decline in the number of children who got a mark of 80 per cent or better on the provincial achievement exam. Meanwhile, more than one-third of Grade 9 students can’t muster a score of even 50 per cent on the exam, a figure that is up two percentage points over last year.
Thankfully, Eggen isn’t denying the obvious or engaging in spin, as previous ministers have done, spouting hyperbole about how Alberta has a world-class education system, while refusing to address the problem directly. Instead, Eggen admits that Alberta children aren’t alone in their sliding math scores — the decline is trending across North America.
The solution is a return to instilling the basics in kids. That doesn’t mean that they are left to their own devices to try to figure out how all this works, which is the premise behind the current discovery math curriculum. It means teachers taking charge again and using oldfashioned flash cards, of the type that taught millions of kids in previous generations such things as the times tables.
For too long, memorization has been considered a dirty word in education. It’s considered a stifling way to learn, one that smothers a child’s creativity. Except that math isn’t about creativity — and some basic things just have to be memorized, such as what four times eight equals.
If children don’t have the basic skills, and if these skills don’t become second nature to the child, such that he or she can immediately reply “32” when asked the above math question, then there is no foundation on which to build more advanced math knowledge.
“The fundamentals of mathematics need to be there and be almost reflexive. We are looking for ways by which we can emphasize that and that focus in classrooms,” Eggen says. Well, flash cards would be a start. So would worksheets full of exercises in addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.
Children cannot teach themselves math. Nor can they be left to “discover” mathematics principles on their own. There will be few Euclids among them. Asking them to discover those principles is like asking them to invent the wheel. The principles are known; they must be taught to the children.
There’s a reason such things as the time tables are called the basics. It’s because they’re essential to all learning that comes afterward. Time to get back to them.