M1Maths

The Maths Curriculum and Career Paths

A bit of a whinge

Australia doesn't do as well as politicians would like in maths achievement as measured by international tests. The answer to that tends to be to cram more into the curriculum in the belief that, if its there, students will learn it.

Of course, this isn't true. The more that's stuffed into the curriculum, the more students will get behind, fail tests, decide they don't like maths, then give up on serious efforts to learn it.

Sure, some students who are very capable, very motivated and very supported will achieve well. But most won't be so lucky.

Another unjustified belief amongst curriculum developers is that all students are equally capable of learning maths. This is so clearly not true. Some students find maths natural and pick it up easily (either because of the way their brains are wired, or because of their earlier experiences, or both) while others struggle, even though they might work harder at it than many 'bright but lazy' students who continually do better than them.

Students come from different cultural background, some where achievent is highly valued and where much time and effort is put into ensuring success, others where doing well at maths is considered to be less important than the daily struggle to survive, to fit in socially and so on. In the same way, some students are brought up with the expectation of an illustrious well-paying career, while others aspire to the dole and various pensions.

All in all, different students come to school with very different abilities, motivations and aspirations and not all are likey to learn as much maths as others or even need to learn as much maths as others.

Much of what's in the Years 1-10 syllabus in most systems is not relevant to most people's lives or careers. Everyone is expected to solve quadratic equations, but few will really master it and even fewer will ever need the skill later in life.

The system is well suited to the high achievers with lofty aspirations, but is not ideal for many of our students. The problem is that the lack of success with stuff they don't need tends to knock students' enthusiasm and without enthusiasm, little is achieved. They learn significantly less than they would if they were taught stuff at an appropriate level.

When working at a local high school many years ago, I was given a year 10 class which contained all the kids who had failed maths all the way through to Year 9. Of course, they were not only unmotivated, but many were also oppositional to being taught.

The head of maths told me not to worry about the curriculum, but to do something that would help them. We started with adding 2-digit numbers and things like finding a quarter of 12. We moved on to percentages, estimating and measuring things like the floor area of the classroom, interpreting simple graphs and so on.

Meanwhile, kids in the other classes were not managing to solve simultaneous equations by elimination and the like. If my class worked well during the week, the last period was a games lesson - maths games. They worked well. They enjoyed working because they were succeeding. At the end of the year, some said they had learnt more maths that year than in all their previous high-school years combined.

Unfortunatley though, this kind of appropriate teaching and learning is not common, The Australian National Curriculum requires all students in years 9 and 10 to be taught to solve simultaneous and quadratic equations. And the unfortunate thing for students is that they fail maths if they can't do those things.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Australian states implemented syllabuses with an outcomes approach. This meant that students worked at one level until they had mastered it and then moved on to the next level. The trouble was that the methods proposed for assessing when student were ready were so cumbersome that teachers were often overwhelmed. For that reason, the approach went out of favour. The M1Maths materials were originally developed with this sort of approach in mind, and can still be used that way.

Of course, for student who aspire to careers like engineering, medicine, astronomy, meteorology, economics and so on, the higher levels of maths are necessary. M1Maths covers the Australian Maths Methods syllabus which includes calculus and prepares students for any university course.

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