I know the education system is broken and beyond repair. The socialist treasonists running it keep saying otherwise. Schools are doing well, teachers are teaching brilliantly, and our kids come out educated beyond peer. All complete lies of course. An article in the Australian today (subscriber only) provides some real data that proves what the socialists have done to education is criminal.
By the end of primary school, about half of students struggle to follow directions on a simple road map, half fail to correctly identify a group of prime numbers and one-quarter are unable to identify half a litre in millilitres.
An analysis of the correctly answered questions in national literacy and numeracy tests reveals students at the beginning of high school have gaps in their understanding of fundamental mathematical concepts and struggle to apply basic skills particularly in calculating time, money, using maps, calendars, thermometers and scales.
Asked to calculate the monthly cost of a special offer given the total cost for a year, only one in four students answered correctly even when able to use a calculator. More than half, 55 per cent of students, were unable to calculate the annual cost of a grocery bill when given the monthly spend, while more than half could not identify the arrival time for a journey when given how long it took.
The analysis is based on the questions correctly answered by NSW students in Year 7 tests for NAPLAN (National Assessment Program — Literacy and Numeracy), that the state government provides parents as part of their child’s NAPLAN report.
Maths teacher Vei Li Soo retired to South Australia’s Clare Valley in 2009 after teaching for more than 20 years in Singapore, which has one of the world’s best performing school systems, and said the approach to teaching maths was very different.
Ms Soo, who now works at Balaklava High School with students struggling in maths, said the focus in Singapore was more on teaching the underlying concept rather than the mechanics of how to answer the question. “My philosophy is not about teaching students how to do the maths, it’s about teaching them concepts,” she said.
Steve Dinham, president of the Australian College of Educators, said primary teachers often lacked confidence and competence in maths, and when students moved into high school, a large proportion were taught by non-specialist maths teachers. “The cycle needs to be broken,” he said.
Training specialist maths teachers for primary schools, as recommended in a recent government review, would help address the problem. Melbourne University, where Professor Dinham is based, was introducing maths as a speciality in its program.
The real solution is to stop giving priority to socialisation, stop usurping the role of parents, and teach the basics. Most reading here know that is the solution, but the destruction has been going on for too long now for it to be anything but deliberate. Can’t have kids thinking in “concepts”. They’d then wake up to what a poisonous destructive concept socialism was and stop voting for jerkoffs like Bill Shorten, Barack Obama, John Key, Andrew Little, David Cameron and the like.
TrueblueNZ 