How maths lessons have changed over the years...

[lala]

Nah, Mids has just been getting older and more curmudgeonly. In about five years, he'll be Jonren.

[Deleted]

Do tell us again lala how everything is just peachy, since you seem to be the only lefty here.
I love to hear you regale us all with your stories of sugar plum fairies skipping through the socialist heather and heath.

[lala]

What socialist heather and heath? If you think there is any of that in Britain, you're silly enough to believe in those fairies. There's nothing socialist about New Labour, that's for sure. The fact that New Labour's aping of conservative education policies hasn't completely destroyed the system is a testament to the resilience and heroic efforts of the teachers in it.

Incidentally, could you stop using the term 'peachy' - its rather childish. here's a link to a thesaurus which should furnish you with some synonyms: thesaurus.reference.com/browse/peachy

[feral]

Incidentally, could you stop using the term 'peachy' - its rather childish. - lala doesn't approve

[lala]

Means the same thing, doesn't it?

[jonren]

The wide range of ages on The Weakest Link, provides a clue to changed educational standards in,for example, the answers of the under forties to simple arithmetic questions.
eg What is six times four, ninety-seven minus twenty-five. Pathetic!

Very funny until you think of a doctor or nurse working out various multiple doses of medication. Last year a misplaced decimal point resulted in a child having ten times the prescibed amount of a powerful drug resulting in death. This was on national news and in most newspapers. Remember?

[jonren]

"Nah, Mids has just been getting older and more curmudgeonly. In about five years, he'll be Jonren." - - - - -lala.

Wqw! mentioned in despatches again. Now that is peachy.

[ricklinc]

Fcuking Hell. Is it rag week for LaLa. I don't recall him sounding this raped before. He typed some actual venom. Handbaggy and girly but real anger.

Labour have been very socialist in raising taxes, wasting the money on pointless crap, increasing pointless bureaucracy, fiddling with society, etc. Trying to get bankers and stockbrokers to pay for it all was just the method of their madness. The jobsworth stupidity in the NHS and the castration of the police force in dealing with street crime were very socialist.

And I enjoyed the opening post. I hadn't read that before but it seems to cover labour and their glorious reaign of error quite well.

[puffin]

The Opening post is actually a load of rubbish, and not clever enough or near enough to the truth to be successful satire, but the thread is very funny indeed for the reader. I find it so anyway.

[watchman]

Aug 13, 2009 2:19:02 GMT @kubik8 said:

Aug 12, 2009 23:13:39 GMT watchman said:

I read it as more of an attack on the steady dumbing down of maths teaching (under Labour and Tories alike) since 1970...

Just out of interest Watchman, what direct experience do you have of this? I ask because my daughter starts school in September, and having had a tour of the place, the standard of tuition I found to be very impressive. Also have a nephew and niece at Primary school and again, very impressed. Their comprehension of mathematics is certainly much higher than would have been expected back in the 70's, when I was their age.

No direct experience of teaching classes, unlike Puffin, but I do have the direct experience of taking O levels in the early 80s, seeing how much harder the past papers from the 60s and 70s were - and how pathetically easy the GCSE questions were in subsequent years. Also the direct experience of going to uni after a few years in the world of work and the economics department already having to give remedial maths classes to bring the new intake of undergraduates up to speed (whereas my ability was good enough not to need them).

A few more facts on grade inflation:

The Royal Society of Chemistry has said that teenagers who, when faced with today’s examination papers, get 35% of the answers correct would have got only 15% correct if they were dealing with equivalent papers from the 1960s.

British Council researchers have pointed out that candidates who would get a C when sitting an A-level examination in Hong Kong get an A here.

Peter Timms of the University of Durham has shown that a student who achieved an E in A-level maths in 1998 would have achieved a B in 2004.

Duncan Lawson from the University of Coventry has shown that students entering university in 2001 with a B at maths A-level displayed a level of knowledge that 10 years earlier would have been displayed by a student with a grade N, or fail. Indeed, students who failed the maths A-level in 1991 performed better overall in tests of mathematical competence than those who secured a B pass in 2001.

Two other academics, Jonathan Ramsay and John Corner, analysed maths papers from the 1960s to the present day. They found topics that used to be set for 16-year-olds in the old CSE exams cropping up in A-level papers.

A team of mathematicians led by Professor John Marks also studied GCSE and O-level maths papers over time, from 1951, 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000 and 2006, covering periods of both Labour and Conservative rule. They found: “It is now possible to achieve a grade C in GCSE mathematics having almost no conceptual knowledge of mathematics. This is due in part to the simplicity of the questions and the decline of algebra, geometry and proof within the papers.”

P.S. re the quality of the joke itself, it does appear to be quite blatantly an American joke that's been rather clumsily contextualised for the UK. We don't exactly have a huge logging industry for one thing - and some of those Littlejohnesque digs towards the end do cheapen the whole thing. But I found the gradual dumbing down of the maths question - and that bit about writing about how the animals would feel - quite funny.

[puffin]

I think the points about a level of dumbing down in some subjects at GCSE level and above may have some validity, and it's certainly true that there has been a shift in emphasis in the way that some types of questions are presented.
The question on the OP is a primary school level one though, and standards in Maths at that level have definitely not slipped in recent years.
If the Americans are asking questions like that in exams for older children then their standards must be truly abysmal.

[watchman]

Aug 13, 2009 13:20:33 GMT puffin said:

If the Americans are asking questions like that in exams for older children then their standards must be truly abysmal.

I don't think it was intended to be a literal description of questions that would be found on a US high school student's paper, Puffin.

Having said that, the standard of US schools nationally is very poor, even worse than Britain's.

This does matter because other countries aren't standing still - the Asian countries in particular are storming ahead. It's frightening how much harder this Chinese question is than a question being set by a "respected British university" (unnamed):

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6589301.stm

[puffin]

That question was set for 1st years students at an English university?

Good grief! I was teaching Pythagoras to the top group of 11 year olds in Primary school 20 years ago.

What happened to secondary education in the last few years? That's apalling.

[ricklinc]

I did the English one in my head. The Chinese one would require a pencil and some time. I haven't done anything like the Chinese one since college when I did engineering maths. It's looking like the Chinese are going to be turning out the better engineers and scientists. Although I already knew that British university engineering has been dumbed down to the point where the coursework involves sliding coloured beads along a string and some finger-painting. Ok, that's an unfair exaggeration. There's some PIC programming that's quite fun.

Say education three times and look sincere. That should sort out those Chinese brainiacs.

[watchman]

To be fair to the English university, that was probably a question set on some kind of refresher course for mature entrants who had spent many years outside education or something like that. But even so, it's scary how much harder that question for pre-entry Chinese students was.

I think much of this monologue by the late George Carlin about the situation in America (this was recorded before the credit crunch hit) applies equally well to Britain, sadly:

www.videoplayer.hu/videos/play/266429

(warning: Carlin does use a few naughty words)

[lala]

Education prepares people for the world they will live in as adults. The proles have no need of mathematical ability, historical knowledge, or appreciateion of art and literature. So they are no longer encouraged, except for the children of the rich and powerful, who will in turn become rich and powerful. In fact, educating the proles is contrary to the needs of the oligarchy, as it leads to them questioning their place in the world, instead of tilling the land, working dow 't mine and dying in wars, or whatever their masters have required of them. When egalitarianism has been encouraged, as it was in Britain from the 20s to the 60s, it has always lead to to discomfort for the Powers That Be. So the current trend, is away from egalitarianism and towards social Darwinism - you get a sh*t education because you're thick, your thick because you had a sh*t education. You had a sh*t education, so your children will be thick. So they will get a sh*t education. Because that's all you'll need to operate a scanner at Tescos and whittle away your life watching overpaid nancy boys running about a field kicking a ball.

[watchman]

Aug 13, 2009 22:22:19 GMT lala said:

In fact, educating the proles is contrary to the needs of the oligarchy, as it leads to them questioning their place in the world, instead of tilling the land, working dow 't mine and dying in wars, or whatever their masters have required of them.

That was pretty much Carlin's point in the video in the link above, lala. The people who really run the world don't want a workforce that's capable of critical thinking, they want obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to operate the machinery and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept the increasingly shittier jobs, worsening conditions, the end of overtime and the pension that vanishes the minute you try to collect it.

[lala]

As long as media plays its part ... the Squealergrpah, the Daily Squeal, Squawx News ... telling everyone things are OKAY!! or things are DISASTEROUS!! according to which side of the bed Rupert Murdoch got out on ...

[kubik8]

you get a sh*t education because you're thick, your thick because you had a sh*t education

Why are you being deliberately obtuse?

[puffin]

If keeping the workers obedient and subservient was the aim of poor education then China wouldn't be desperately raising their education standards as fast as they are able.