Those of us in the trade have long known that the quality of maths education in NZ was in decline, before it became news headlines and a political issue. So years ago, a Charity I help run started awarding prizes for Maths teachers. Good Maths teachers have a big range of employment opportunities outside teaching - making the salaries they receive in schools often unattractive. The least we could do was offer them Best Maths Teacher Prizes. In 2017 we gave our inaugural Kalman Teacher Excellence Prize to Subash Chandar at Ormiston Junior College in South East Auckland. Today he features on the front page the NZ Herald:
"By day, Subash Chandar is in the classroom, teaching maths to Year 7 to 10 pupils at Ormiston Junior College. By night, he switches on his computer, logs into his YouTube channel infinityplusone and goes live for some of his 52,000 subscribers, tuning in as Chandar K. He solves maths problems, goes over NCEA curriculums & talks viewers through previous exams. Another 8,000 follow him on Instagram; 4,000 on TikTok. This time of year is particularly busy, with thousands of Kiwi teens across the country preparing for end-of-year NCEA exams".
In addition to winning our Kalman Charity Prize in 2017, another private Charity, this time Australia based, gave him their National Excellence in Education Award in 2019. Now we're helping fund the South & West Auckland Maths Challenge (SAMC). Josephina Tamatoa and Katalina Ma are the brainchilds behind it. They say "The ‘trends in international mathematics & science study’ (TIMSS) scores for Aotearoa paint a bleak picture. This initiative gives students opportunity & fosters belief in their potential as mathematicians. The success of SAMC and the follow up success of Māori & Pacific students in Mathex regionally is a prime example of what happens when you instill confidence in communities".
But its not for private charities to sustain all of these activities - the Nats, ACT & NZ First better reward maths teachers way more, or there wont be any left. Some Best Maths Teacher Prizes & the "South Auckland Maths Challenge" aren't enough to turn it around, by a long way.
Professor Robert MacCulloch holds the Matthew S. Abel Chair of Macroeconomics at Auckland University. He has previously worked at the Reserve Bank, Oxford University, and the London School of Economics. He runs the blog Down to Earth Kiwi from where this article was sourced.
2 comments:
If the kids increasingly take easier options like kapa haka and art, of corse we should expect our maths standards to fall.
We as a family have been , I consider, perhaps educational reformers having challenged schools on failing to teach the basics. My husband as a teacher left teaching when he felt like a charity as a secondary maths , computing and physics teacher. He immediately found a job with twice the pay.
He left teaching also because of the ideological climate of Progressivism now dominant in schools. This ideology meant no rote learning of tables or algorithms and primary students arriving at secondary unable to do even the most basic arithmetic. Also the vile child-centered educational idea which produces unruly , hard to manage classes of students.
Cognitive science and neuro science , recently, both show clearly our methods in schools are disastrous not just in maths but overall. The new school maths workbooks are on sale in shops and hopefully this will reverse some of the trends in destructive Progressivism .
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