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No best answer has yet been selected by Drusilla. Once a best answer has been selected, it will be shown here.
For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.I agree that many people will never need Maths (as opposed to arithmatic) but it's absolutely essential for Science and Technology so it needs to be taught to support these subjects.
There is an exception to this - statistics. We are bombarded by these every day and without a grasp of statistics you're going to be hard pushed to see when they are meaningful, without that how do you make a decision.
Say you're a local government minister in charge of education (but you didn't do maths). The average student in your area gets 5 GCSEs. Is that a problem? Should you ask what the standard deviation is? Would that help? Was that average a mean or a median average ?
Hell just make a decision based on gut feeling!
If you want to ditch something from the curriculum ditch RE - if parents want their children to learn superstitious ritual let them teach it themselves!
I wish I was!
The alarmingly high degree of scientific and mathematical illiteracy (sic) means that this is all to often what happens.
From what I'm seeing with my kids the maths that's being taught up to GCSE is predominantly real world maths like statistics, graphs, problem solving etc. although there is a certain amount of other stuff.
Personally I think a bit of formal logic should be taught so that the next time a politician says "If you're not with me you're against me" everybody would turn around and say "You know that's a false dichotomy don't you?"
The debt issue is another good point. If education is supposed to be a preparation for life, do you think Maths lessons should concentrate more on interest rates, APR's and the overall cost of debts and mortgages.?
Unfortunately, I only have my own knowledge of Maths teaching from my GCSE's in the 80's and I rarely saw the relevence to my own life. My 9 year old hates Maths, while my 6 year old views it as puzzle fun, neither of which fills me with hope for their futures in this subject.
I think Drusilla has a good point. Maths should concentrate on things that will affect people once they are out in the real world. Its a fat load of good knowing how to work out the angles in a triangle if you then go an get stiched up whilst getting a loan, mortgage etc.
Maybe seperate lessons on life skills would be a good idea where you can be taught about pensions, insurance, hpi schemes etc.
I think the reason maths is such a strong subject on the curriculum is because unlike more humanity based subjects, you either study math or you don't study math. If you miss a literacy lesson, you can still practice literacy skills in ANY of the other subject lessons. If you miss tech or even science at primary levels, you can easily make it up. However with math if you don't do any math lessons for a week with bakery and every day math aside, where exactly would you make it up? A good grounding is needed in math for every child to ensure that if they want to major in math they can, they all have the opportunity. However, if a child has had a chequered literacy past, but wants to major in Eng Lit, then they probably will be ok to do so provided they can read and I say that as An eng lit teacher.
Also, it is way more that the four basic operators that we use day to day, we use ratios like Billy-O and also simultaneous equations are used without you even realising it I suspect, yet if I sat you down and told you to work a page of ratios or a page of equations, you might be someone who would freak out. This freaking out is a result of math being pushed to the one or two periods a week inside a classroom yesteryear, instead of pushing it to the front of a curriculum where it can be met head on and embraced by more students and where the fear of math can be put to bed.
Id also like to add that I have used trig before now to work out areas and shapes and stuff, algebra gets used by us all weekly, if not daily, percentages are another thing that we are all regularly manipulating, it's not just the four operators. The only thing that really get me puzzled out, and its probably due to me being absent or something when they were taught is fractions, in particularly multiplying and dividing esp top heavy fractions. I understnad the whole thing, but I do have to stop and think and get together my LCDs. A mental block I guess.
I do recognise Math for the beauty that it does have and the orderliness and the agreeable symetry that is nearly always present, even though my subject majors are English Lit, and Art History. Particularly during rennaissance times, math was deemed as an actual art and the works of several enlightenment artists contain mathematical conepts as part of their formular for beauty.....Just look at the mona lisa. Like all subjects, it will be what you make it, and you can either look for ways to love math, or you can hate it and be afraid of it.....
Although not strictly mathematical, merely logical, I'm also quite partial to a bit of jolly SuDoku.......I wish I had been taught math and science the way my kids are learning it instead of the way in which it was taught when I was a taschool......
:-)
i strongly agree with mimififi. i'm doing gcse maths at the moment (at school- i'm 16) and it really does have an impact on your other subjects- espeacially the sciences. maths has to be taught to support these subjects. all the things that are said above about some maths not being useful might be true but what if the child goes on to be an architect or similar? its much harder to pick up the necessary skills when you're 17 or 18 than if you're taught basic trigonometry etc age 13 or 14. also, i dont know about other schools, but we have been taught a little about interest rates etc and you learn more about that if you do economics or maths at a/as level. obviously not everyone will do these subjects but this stuff is taught. for as level i will be doing english lit history and french, so although i dont need maths i think you do benefit a lot from it. i'll also be doing chemistry and its absolutely essential to have maths. i know some of you will be saying well kids can get into that if they want but if maths isn't taught fully in the first place they won't have the oppurtunity to take it further. also, you need more maths skills in everyday life than adding, subtracting and the like, as mimififi said.