Language of numbers

THE lead story, “National Grade 12 maths meltdown” ( Cape Times, July 29) asks why so many pupils opt for maths literacy instead of mathematics, and why so many schools – that do offer mathematics – have no pupils at all that elect to take that subject. I believe I know the answer.

I have coached mathematics to struggling pupils for many years, after school and paid by their parents.

In my experience, problems initially presented as something such as “He’s struggling with Grade 11 maths” boil down, in a large majority of cases, to a need for remedial arithmetic. I have even heard the same from university lecturers of engineering.

The problem can be as basic as pupils, who are happy to rely on their calculators to tell them that 3×6 = 18, are stumped when presented with 18 and asked to make that into 3×6 or 2×9.

There also occurs such problems as not realising that familiarity with the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 is helpful when called upon to deal with the numbers -1, -2, -3, -4, -5, so 2-3 can be impossibly much harder than 3-2 (which, in turn, leads to problems with debit and credit when studying accountancy).

Similarly, the widely feared “story problems” of mathematics – where a situation is described in language and the pupil’s task includes rendering the description into mathematical form – frequently resolves to a need for remedial English. This occurs even in schools with first-language tuition and is worse among second-language pupils.

A colleague reports a Grade 1 class of second-language pupils that was unable to identify the largest of a group of numbers, all less than 10, much less sort them from smallest to largest.

She attributed this to their inability to cope with second-language teaching.

Such learners are crippled forever. Is it any wonder that, in later years, they shield themselves from such demands as proving the formula for the roots of a quadratic equation or recognising when to employ the theorem of Pythagoras?

My experience is that the strongest factor in a successful school mathematics career is an adequate facility in the language of instruction.

One might even make the case for deferring mathematics instruction until this is achieved.