EDITORIAL - Teaching maths the wrong way

The well-respected educator, Dr Claude Packer, has called for a revolution in the teaching of mathematics in Jamaica, a subject with which Jamaicans students have long struggled.

The noted educator, who is president of the venerable Mico University College, which, in its former life, was one of the premier teacher-training institutions, chided his colleagues for spending more time imparting lower-level algorithms than problem-solving techniques.

Long before Dr Packer's speech, many persons within and without the school system have been trying to understand why Jamaican students continue to do poorly in mathematics and experience difficulty in mastering mathematical concepts.

But Dr Packer added another dimension to the discussion. He suggested that the mathematics problems being experienced by Jamaican students are rooted in the country's colonial past.

He told his colleagues at a Montego Bay seminar recently: "At the end of slavery in Jamaica, nobody expected Third World people to create, think and innovate ... so basically, a curriculum was designed for us to be hewers of wood and drawers of water. We were to compute only - going to work on the farms - so we had to learn to add and multiply ... . We were being taught low-level mathematics, and this has been happening for centuries, and it is still happening."

The looming question is this: Why haven't educators like Dr Packer become engaged in an exercise to diagnose student strengths and weaknesses and inform curriculum decision-making over these many years? Why has it taken so long to develop effective methods of teaching mathematical skills and concepts? Should teacher-training institutions share blame for this gap in teacher development?

Don't blame slavery

It is convenient to blame slavery for many things. However, that excuse becomes a bit worn when examined against present-day realities.

Dr Packer stated that every activity has a mathematical base and suggested a correlation between people's dislike for the subject and the way it is imparted. He said teaching low-level algorithms stifles the creative thought processes of students, which sometimes leads them into deviant behaviour, including boys resorting to the gun as a means of creative expression.

He observed that the problem is further compounded by the fact that mathematics textbooks prepared in the United States and England for the teaching of mathematics have been "foisted upon" Jamaican students, who have failed to embrace the concepts contained in those texts.

And who is to blame for that? Why haven't the great mathematics teachers got together to create suitable instructional literature for our schools that will address our own cultural realities?

We agree wholeheartedly that the best-equipped teachers will make a difference in the teaching of mathematics. Teachers should be undergoing professional development to bolster their skills to teach mathematics and other specialist subjects, and they should be given incentives to work with the weakest students.

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