On Apr 19, 5:58*pm, "Arfa Daily" wrote:
"Gareth Magennis" wrote in message


A guy that comes into one of our food joints is an exam marker. The missus
got talking to him about the state of education, and a couple of days later,
he brought in a GCSE level maths paper for 15 year olds. They apparently had
90 minutes to complete this paper, and were allowed to use a calculator. I
was able to finish it, in my head, in about 20 minutes. I think that I would
have been able to do the same at age 10, back in the days when we were
taught properly 40 odd years ago. The maths papers that we took back then at
age 15, were way, way above the level of this Mickey Mouse paper. The
standard even appears to have taken a nose dive since my own kids were that
age 10 years or so ago.

Last week, we had the 9 year old daughter of one of our relations staying
with us. She asked if she could borrow my wife's laptop, to do her maths
homework. Intrigued, we let her. She basically logged onto a website that
presented her with questions, and spaces to fill in the answers. When she is
finished, the program marks it and sends the result to her teacher. With
this lack of interaction between teacher and pupil, its no wonder that
education in the UK has fallen to the level that it is now. I always
considered myself a fairly average student, but I kid you not, I am now the
equivalent of a university professor to the kids ...

Has it declined like this in the U.S. also ?


US math performance was no great shakes to begin with -- look at any
league table of industrialized countries* over the years. The problem
starts in the primary grades, and to my mind is caused by a
fundamental mismatch: the sort of person who is drawn to spend their
day with young children seldom is drawn to spend their day doing math
problems. In fact most appear to fear and hate math. If your teacher
has no ability for teaching math, then you are unlikely to learn it on
your own.(And, unlike with language skills, which can be developed
outside the classroom through leisure activities such as reading for
pleasure, or by chatting or discussing current events; the random
student is unlikely to relax by doing some math problems.)

In fact, here computer assisted math instruction may save the day.
Instructional materials could include animations and live videos.
Exercises can adjust how difficult they are based on how each student
performs on them -- if the student misses too many midrange ones, the
computer could drop down to an easier level and so on. Finding out
what level each student operates comfortably at, and building from
there, should eliminate the panic of non-understanding.

* When I started at the university, I was amazed how far ahead the
foreign students were in math. Even people from countries like Peru
and Turkey.