Teaching arithmatic

Having managed a generation of wet behind the ears graduates with ham-fisted handwriting, a tenuous grasp of the elements of english as a tool for communication - spelling, grammar, syntax tying together a rich and varied vocabulary, I was reasonably well prepared for the manifold inadequacies of the English education system to which I was exposed from the moment my now eight year old daughter entered it.

Our children are being introduced to computers and encouraged to use a keyboard from their first days in the classroom and will never develop handwriting skills. Our children are being taught 'how to think' without being provided with facts with which to grapple. History is taught in random isolated chunks - ancient Egypt is followed by pre-Norman anglo-saxon England which is followed by classical Rome.

One year the children do weekly spelling tests, the next year spelling doesn't matter.

No one can or will tell me how they're teaching arithmatic or provide me with material with which to support what is being done in the classroom so I am left to do my own thing. (I aced matric Pure and Applied and did a heavy component of econometrics and related mathemetics in my BSc - so I'd like to think that my credentials in the matter of primary school arithmetic could go unquestioned).

I inevitably fall back on what I know. I teach her addition by stacking the numbers to be added one under the other. I take the same approach to subtraction, multiplication and division. Initially I meet resistance from B who complains that this isn't how it is being done at school. Then the penny drops; adding units, creating tens, carrying forward, adding tens, creating hundreds, carrying forward and so on and so on. Adding long numbers together is no longer a challenge. We make progress.

Buried at the bottom of page 5 is news of a review of the way arithmetic (known these days as numeracy) is taught. The headline, which really says it all, is "Maths teaching to go back to old methods".

Primary schools are to abandon modern methods of teaching maths in favour of a return to more old-fashioned approaches. The decision comes only six years after the new methods were imposed on schools by the Government. Critics say that it signals a return to the "dark ages" of children performing calculations in neat vertical rows without understanding what they are doing.

...

Consultation on the proposed update of the framework ends on June 2.

Am I cheered by this news? No. I'm fucking furious! I was a victim during my first year and a half of school of the Cuisenaire initiative, but then we went to Queensland where belatedly I was introduced to arithmatic. By the time we returned to Victoria Cuisenaire had been discredited and abandoned.

My daughter's entire school career has been under the shadow of this now-discredited and shortly to be abandoned method, so as I said I'm fucking furious. But I'm looking forward to the next parent-teacher night.