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In an ideal world, the instruction across these millions of teachers would be smoothly joined up, but we all know that this is far from the case. Many parents are at odds with the maths their children bring home from school (“that’s not how we did it in my day”). Worse, there are many homes that are anti-maths. Negative messages from parents who tell children that they were always hopeless at maths themselves (and “it hasn’t done them any harm”) undermine much of what school teachers are trying to achieve.
It would be nice to think that at least within schools the message and the pathways are more coherent, but again this does not seem to be reality. One way in which maths teaching often fails to join up is between primary and secondary maths. This is because when a child moves from Year 6 to Year 7, the nature of the maths teacher and the school environment that s/he is exposed to changes completely.
Primary teachers typically do not go into teaching because of a love of maths, and it is relatively rare for a primary teacher to have taken maths beyond GCSE. Does this matter? Yes, if that teacher’s only exposure to the subject has been confined to the rigidity of the curriculum. If you have never seen beyond your own village, how can you inspire a child with stories from far horizons, however  enthusiastic you are? |
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Joined-Up Teachers
The 2008 Keele conference was a great success. It was wonderful to see the venue packed with teachers from primary and secondary mingling together in such a buzzing atmosphere. Not only was the conference booked to capacity, but for the first time in several years there was a waiting list. This sort of joining up to create a mathematical community is vitally important, and it made the Keele conference very different from many others I have been to.
And yet, although attendance was just shy of 400, my thoughts turned to the maths teachers who weren’t there. How many maths teachers are there in Britain? It’s an interesting little exercise in estimation. It also requires a definition of what a maths teacher is. Do you only include those teachers whose sole responsibility is teaching maths? There are perhaps 30 000 of them. What about primary teachers? Most of them have to teach maths for several hours a week. If they are included, then the number of maths teachers enters the hundreds of thousands. This can be taken further. Where does a child learn maths? At school, but also at home. Indeed, many children probably learn at least as much maths out of school as in – from parents and from grandparents. Not all of this instruction is necessarily as good as we’d like it to be, but there is no escaping that, in a sense, the number of maths teachers is in the tens of millions. |
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