Last week, her call for Britain to stop testing young children on their ability to recite times tables – because it causes “crippling fear” and “puts them off maths” – prompted a backlash from fellow academics who believe the opposite.
“Research has pinpointed the onset of ‘maths anxiety’ around the age of eight,” she explains, “when they start doing times tables tests. They are all about speed and memory. If someone isn’t fast at doing them, they get the idea they aren’t good at maths and they lose confidence.”
That in its turn sends them on to secondary school with a view that “maths isn’t for them”.
Yup. Five decades later, I still recall the paralysing fear and lifelong hatred of numbers. Rote learning is not a panacea. What works for some is an anathema for others. It was only as an adult that I started to see patterns in numbers and to be able to apply them in real life. Had I not been subjected to the dreadful rote learning system, it might have happened decades earlier.
Jo Boaler is right. Her critics are wrong. Those fellow academics who believe the opposite, might just want to try putting themselves in the shoes of a terrified eight-year old who, crippled by that fear, is unable to articulate beyond “two times two equals four”. I never got beyond the two-times table and still cannot recite them. I can, however, work numbers out using patterns.
Later in life I discovered that those patterns work for me. While I cannot recite the tables, I can quickly work out basic arithmetic by applying the patterns and relationships. It would have helped if the school system had the wit, intelligence and basic understanding of how people learn and to use it when I was eight years old. Yet still, there are idiots who insist that rote learning be forced upon children in a one-size-fits-all model of learning.
But it was not, she regrets, supported by the Department for Education. Government policy appears to be going in the other direction. It plans to make schools ensure that, by the age of eight, children have memorised their times tables up to 12.
That is because the government is populated by morons.
Charlie Stripp, director of the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics, told the publication: “It is not the learning of times tables that is causing anxiety but rather it is lack of times table knowledge. It should be an educational entitlement that all children are helped to learn their times tables.”
Bollocks. My anxiety was caused precisely because I was expected to learn and memorise something by rote. Stripp is an idiot.
Yet it seems that Prof Boaler’s voice is one with great appeal for those struggling with maths.
Because, unlike idiots such as Stripp, she gets it. “It” being that different people have different learning attributes. It’s a simple enough concept, yet one the teaching establishment persistently ignores. And this is not confined to children, I see it in adult education as well. Just don’t get me started on Network Rail’s current fetish for the dreadful E-Learning claptrap, which, again, is a one-size-fits-all and as a result fits very few.
I agree with you wholeheartedly – you cannot bully children (or adults for that matter) into learning. I remember the self-defeating hysteria that my difficulties with this method engendered – sneered at by teachers, yelled at by my mother and the endless pointless extra-mural ‘coaching’. Completely wrecked my experience of school in general. Loathed maths ever since. Government should leave kids alone.
I recall being pretty rubbish at learning times tables but have no recollection of being stressed about it either. Maybe our teachers had a bit more sympathy for the kids who struggled with rote learning. Decades later I do find that the bits that did stick are quite useful when doing mental arithmetic, whether it was worth the time involved is questionable.
My involvement with karate lead me to doing a multiple choice exam to qualify as a competition referee. In order to pass this exam you needed to have a pretty comprehensive knowledge of the WUKO rule book. My solution to this was to dictate the entire rule book onto an audio cassette and then listen to it over and over in the car. Before long I could recite the whole thing from memory. I’m not sure what this proves other than that it worked for me. There was of course the issue of motivation, I was doing it voluntarily and I really wanted to pass. Yes, of course I did.
Interesting. I’m no fan of ‘rote learning’, although it was the established system when I was at school. I was never particularly good at the ‘rote stuff’ and suffered accordingly. Also, I was a very lazy bugger. When I was 14 we had a library class when it was essential that you knew your alphabet. I was the only pupil in the class that didn’t know it and was shamed mercilessly; I learned the alphabet very quickly. Motivation works, whatever the underlying cause may be. The school system failed me- but to be fair, I was an intractable student. I suppose I was a late bloomer. In my early 20s I appreciated the value of a good education. Strangely enough, when I applied myself I excelled. In your face, Miss Turner. She avowed I would never amount to anything. With three degrees and professional qualifications under my belt, I earn a good living as a senior professional. Although it is fair to say, it was a close run thing.
I disagree.
Recitation is a useful tool for most children. They learn to recite many things, nursery rhymes, advertising jingles, songs, the alphabet, the times tables, hymns, prayers, poetry, spelling, and kerb drill. (Also bugger, fart, and sundry other stuff they weren’t supposed to be learning.)
Most of them get along pretty well with it at school, just as they did in the nursery.
Monty,
You’ve just listed everything I *cannot* remember, no matter how hard I try. I’m astonishingly bad at memorising words and numbers. On the other hand, I have an almost eidetic recall of melody.
I can remember some elements if they have a particular rhythm or cadence, such as “six sixes are thirty-six”, and the like, but I’d have to work out 5 x 6 in my head. It can actually take me as long as five minutes to perform even basic arithmetic as it takes almost that long just to nail numbers down in my short-term memory and stop the buggers dancing about.
As our esteemed host points out, one size does NOT fit all. Especially in education, which is still more of an art than a science. Our education systems are still fundamentally built around Victorian learning methods. TV has existed for over 70 years now, so why is the Open University still the only example of self-guided learning today? Even that’s been around since the late 1960s!
Johnny Ball taught me far more about maths and physics than my school ever did. TV and multimedia have a huge potential in education, but this would mean a truly radical overhaul of education systems around the world. You need to take all the textbooks on the subject, burn them, and start over almost from scratch. I don’t see any government doing this any time soon, given the strength and power of teaching unions. You can barely sack a crap teacher now; imagine the furore if someone dared to suggest that our education system itself is unfit for purpose?
*
As for e-Learning: most of it is just glorified flash cards and multiple-choice questions. Putting these on a computer does not change their nature, nor does it leverage the technology in any way other than as a substitute for paper.
A better example of how e-Learning can work well can be seen in the language learning industry, with the likes Duolingo and Babbel. That requires an actual understanding of how different people learn, as well as programming skills.
And that is the problem, right there…
Dire doesn’t even begin to describe what we have to work with. I usually end up giving extra tuition to make up for its failings. As do my colleagues.
“Most” is not the same as “all”. “Most” means there is a significant minority for whom this method does not work. I have painful personal experience of this and consequently the system failed me.
Also, rote is a lazy and inefficient teaching method as it fails to address understanding and learning without understanding is only half the picture.
I don’t use it as a learning tool when teaching precisely because it is so flawed.
Agreed.
My teachers never once explained to me *why* trigonometry might come in useful. A brief discussion about land surveying and how triangulation is used to measure distances and fix locations would have been enough for the former.
The human brain is all about connecting pieces of information together and looking for patterns; without context, the information — in my case at least — exists in an isolated limbo and fades away very quickly.
Another problem with the present system is that it concentrates on facts rather than concepts and *tools*. We are a tool-using species, yet our pre-university education is almost entirely built around the bizarre notion that using a hammer to bang in a nail is somehow cheating and that we should be bashing it in with our foreheads or fists instead.
Why the hell do I need to learn long division or algebra when I have a perfectly good computer in my damned *pocket* that can do it far more accurately and quickly than any human? It’s certainly a lot quicker at it than I am!
(“But what if a nuclear bomb wipes out all electronics!?” If civilisation has fallen that far, I suspect surds and matrix manipulation will be the least of my worries! Besides, printed books tend not to suffer much from electro-magnetic pulses.)
To this day, I still can’t do long division, let alone basic algebra. And, outside of the exam hall, I’ve never needed to.
Ultimately, the key to learning isn’t knowing facts and figures, but *knowing where to look them up*. (I.e. critical thinking, and how to avoid using Wikipedia as a primary source.) And we can’t even get that right.
Also, before anyone suggests that computers are somehow a “new” technology or tool, allow me to point out that that’s balderdash. Personal computers first appeared in the late 1970s. That’s around 40 years ago now; roughly the same age as the microwave oven and before the invention of Channel 4 and “Countdown”.
Which emphasises the need to get rid of a one-size-fits-all State education or compulsory education.
If kids don’t want to learn/won’t learn, forcing them into learning factories will not work.
If we must pay for education out of public subscription, then there is no reason the State should supply it.
Private enterprise in a free market ‘voucher style’ system can offer choice and a range that can better suit individual learning abilities or desires.
It is time we started hanging those who believe in planned outcomes and that they should be the planners, and those who insist ‘every child is a blank slate’.
I was taught tables and phonetic reading (1950s) and it worked fine for me and as far as I could see, or remember, most others in the class.
There would have been one or two who lagged behind the others. There always are. I was fine with reading – I could read fluently before I got to school. English language was something I excelled at, but arithmetic, no, because the teaching was appalling. See my discussion above with Sean regarding understanding. If you understand “why” then you are on the way to learning.
I once met someone years later who had given up on teaching who asked me if I was good with maps. When I told her that I was, she said that I would be good at maths, but had simply not been taught how to do it properly.
This.