Having fun with numbers

THE EDITOR, Madam:

When I read a recent Gleaner Letter of the Day about making mathematics fun, I couldn’t help but confirm a theory I formed years ago about how societies themselves, as groups, like individuals, develop at different rates along a continuum of progressive steps.

When I moved away from big-city life, where I’d had a decade of big-city adventures, to a small-town life, where I’d have rather been in any case, I noticed that the social scene as well as the development of the businesses and industries, even the administration of school systems, all seemed to be moving along at a different pace than what I had seen in the big city and its suburbs.

When I came from a small-town school system, after a decade of teaching at a middle school, to live and work at a public high school on the north coast of Jamaica, though the two systems existed in the same time period in western culture and had access to the same content and educational approaches, they were not in the least similar in overall development.

Even within the same district where I taught, I soon came to realize that few schools had developed as much as the one I had been a part of. And it was obvious as well, to at least some of the older educators there, that the school had progressed to a different level of sophistication and success.

‘TEAMS, GAMES, AND TOURNAMENTS’

When I read this letter about teaching maths, it reminded me of a push here in the mid- to late eighties in local school districts to adopt a fun approach to mathematics. A programme called ‘Teams, Games, and Tournaments’ was being sold to the local district and, through its coercive style, foisted on unsuspecting schools; even what were the few previously successful teachers’ classrooms.

The lesson here is that the programme soon proved no more successful than the ‘un-fun’ way of teaching maths; and only a few years and another set of school board members later, it was gone and forgotten.

Today, the district’s maths effort has moved on to much of what you see as controversial in the news about education – outside, there is the ongoing conflict between public and private educational efforts, and within the systems are the intrusive elements that seem to be bring more and more antisocial elements into the content of school programmes.

The truth may well be that in some cases, we might not want to make something that isn’t ‘fun’ into something that is. On the other hand, we are no doubt in different times and places, and moving at different rates of development. Maybe it’s now time young Jamaican maths students see their teachers having fun, at least for a while.

Though history often teaches us that some things are better left the way they are, there’s no sense ignoring the visitors. One day the ship may sail in; another day it will sail out. The pier remains, at least until the next bad storm; so much for educational reform.

ED MCCOY