Education Policy and Teacher Conferences

An intelligent child participating in class, yesterday.

The second week of the Easter Holidays is conference season for the three main teachers’ unions. This year, the INTO meets in Belfast, the TUI assemble in Cork and the ASTI meet in Killarney of the lakes.

Your faithful correspondent’s crystal ball can predict the coverage of the difference conferences right now and save everybody a lot of gas. The biggest single topic will be money, of course. There will be stories about school divestment, all focusing on the urgency of the thing and none trying to figure out how two sides who want something to happen can’t make something happen.

And there will be earnest thought pieces about the need for greater emphasis on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) subjects in both secondary and primary schools. STEM advocacy is so popular now that it wouldn’t surprise your correspondent if the only thing stopping some advocate form suggesting STEM subjects be taught in the womb is the fear of raising a hare in the matter of the Eighth Amendment, and we’ll get plenty of that in days to come, thank you very much.

All of these motions will be discussed by mostly earnest people who have an interest in their profession and are trying to make it better. But there is an elephant in the room that is seldom discussed, and that was only drawn to your correspondent’s attention over the weekend.

While browsing in the top floor of Hodges Figgis bookstore on Dublin’s Dawson Street, your faithful quillsman got talking to a maths teacher, who was in there because, he told me, he likes to stay on his game and ensure he has fresh questions with which to challenge his students.

We got talking about maths in general, and the nature of the subject. I half-expected a jeremiad against Project Maths, a recent initiative of the Department that is roundly despised by any maths teachers of my own acquaintance, but no. This man told me that the single biggest problem that he sees in his classes is that the poor standard of verbal reasoning among the children means that some of them struggle to understand the question itself, to say nothing of being able to answer the thing.

Stephen Leacock wrote a much-loved essay called A, B, and C: The Human Element in Mathematics, in which he speculated about the real lives of those mysterious characters who appear in maths questions – A can dig a hole at twice the speed of B, who himself digs holes at half the speed of C. If C digs three holes an hour, how long does it take A to dig five holes?

A glance at current Leaving Cert papers suggests that these sorts of problems are all over the shop, as part of making maths more “relevant.” But what it’s actually doing is making maths harder, because the child doesn’t have the skills to read the question. It seems nobody was paying attention to that one.

It’s very hard to get to the truth of these things. Teachers can feel a little paranoid about people always having a go at them, and journalists find divestment so much more box-office than dull educational theorizing. But if this anecdotal evidence is generally reflective of the current state of affairs, this is a time bomb that can fracture the state even further when it blows.

It seems the notion of the homework-less school is more and more in fashion at the present time. And that’s fine, for those who realise that, while one agrees with it at supper in Sandymount, one has been reading to Meadhbh and Conchobar since they were toddlers and making damn sure they were literate before they even got to school.

But what about the kids whose parents don’t read, and aren’t literary, or well-educated, or even educated at all? The State education system is meant to provide a safety net for them, so that they are given the one and only shot at escaping a poverty trap – education. But the State is failing badly in this remit and politicians who claim to represent the disadvantaged and marginalized in society are too busy making jackasses of themselves time and time again over water charges and other nonsense rather than trying to do something, anything, useful for once in their careers.

Class doesn’t matter. This isn’t the 19th century anymore. Education is what separates haves and have-nots now, and it is legitimate to wonder who is shouting for the have-nots when it comes to education. Not one damn person from what I can see.

Enjoy the teachers’ conferences. I am not looking forward to the 1,500 word think-piece in tomorrow’s Irish Times drawing a shrewd parallel between the divestment delay and the Tuam babies cover-up, but I am grateful that I would be able to read it if I wanted to. There isn’t a day that goes by that I’m not grateful for that ability, and my heart breaks for those who will never get the opportunity to learn as I learned. God help them.

FOCAL SCOIR: One hour and forty minutes, of course.

Coding in National Schools Isn't a Good Idea

See, kids? Coding is fun!

The Minister for Education, Richard Bruton, has written to the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment to request that the NCCA consider the teaching of coding in national schools. This is a bad idea, for three reasons.

The Basis of Coding is Already on the Curriculum
The basis of coding is already on the curriculum. It is called “maths.” Maths and coding go hand-in-hand. If you can do one, you can do the other. Both work on the notion of orderly thinking. If this, then that. It is possible for a talented coder to have been poor at maths in school but that coder’s mind for maths will have clicked just when the coding clicked for him or her. The two are intertwined like Maguire and Patterson.

Sadly, we teach maths the same way we do most other things – arseways. OECD studies regularly show that Irish standards of literacy and numeracy are consistently poor. The Irish Times reported at the start of the year that Ireland ranked 18th of 23 countries in literacy, and 21st out of 23 in numeracy, among 16- to 19- year-olds. It also reported “about one in five university graduates can manage basic literacy and numeracy tasks – such as understanding the instructions on a bottle of aspirin – but struggle with more complex tasks.” University students.

These are terrifying figures. The OECD reports can be behind the curve timewise, and advocates of Project Maths will claim that once that initiative kicks in the results will go right up. Unfortunately, anecdotal evidence suggests that the Project Maths course simply adds another layer of confusion to a subject that is intimidating to begin with. It’s a grim prospect.

One Size Doesn’t Fit All
The only way a minister could dream of better publicity than talking about this strange thing, ‘coding,’ would be if he or she were to announce that the DoE were bringing in some specialists from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry as consultants to discuss adding transfiguration, charms and potions to the curriculum. Coder is the astronaut job of our times, the job that is done by pioneers who create the future.

But reader, a job market where the jobs are made up entirely of coders – or astronauts, or witches and wizards, for that matter – is not exactly ready to survive in the choppy seas of Ireland’s open economy. How many coders do we need per head of population? Probably not as many as we need nurses, or doctors, or teachers, or shopkeepers, or a thousand and one other jobs that are just as relevant if not quite as buzzy.

Short-Term Populism is the Curse of Irish Politics
Why, then, with a need for diverse skills in an open economy, with basic literacy and numeracy red-letter issues in education, to say nothing of dealing with eternally bolshy teachers’ unions and getting teachers trained as coders, did the Minister write this letter to the NCCA? It is impossible to look into another man’s heart but the politician’s eternal quest for good publicity is a reasonable assumption.

Twenty-five years ago, gay marriage was a taboo subject. Now, Irish politicians are tearing the backs of each other trying to photographed having a pint in the Pantibar. Is this because a wave of social liberalism has swept through Leinster House? Or is it because every politician knows this is guaranteed good, criticism-free publicity and you can’t have too much of that?

The success of the coder dojo, a movement that introduces children to coding at an early age, has been mentioned as a reason for coding to be introduced at a more general level in primary schools. But a certain amount of – delicious irony! – what statisticians call “response bias” is at work there. The children who are doing well at coder dojos are the children who would do well at pretty much any academic subject, and who enjoy the priceless support of a home environment that encourages that sort of endeavour. The OECD stats suggest that such an environment is sadly atypical of the nation’s children in general.

But what difference do facts about literacy and numeracy gaps, diverse talents in a diverse economy or response bias make to a politician who wants to get in the papers? None at all. He or she is certainly due for claps on the back the next time he or she is out on the town, because politicians typically socialise with people who send their children to coder dojos, and ballet, and hockey, and the Gaeltacht. These people are also those who write for and edit newspapers, so it’s winner all round. And when the thing grinds to a halt, what odds? It'll be some other minister’s problem by then.

The ESRI and the True Nature of Education

First published in the Western People on Monday.

The Economic and Social Research Institute, the ESRI, have published a report about the Leaving Cert. The report, titled “Leaving School in Ireland: A Longitudinal Study of Post-School Transitions”, is a sequel to the Institute’s 2011 hit, “From Leaving Certificate to Leaving School: A Longitudinal Study of Sixth Year Students.”

This year’s report is shorter than the 2011 version – it is seventy-four thousand words long, five thousand shorter than before. One would like to think it’s shorter become some editor, with his cigarette, eyeshade and blue pencil, returned the first draft to the authors with instructions to “punch it up a little bit,” but hope may be in vain.

As may be any hopes of the authors that anyone would read their reports. Seventy thousand words qualifies as novel-length – who on earth is going to plough through all that, and why? A look at what appeared in the press last week would suggest that not only does the ESRI’s Leaving Cert Report tell us nothing we don’t already know, it is based on some painfully naïve suppositions about how the great world turns around.

The ESRI report tells us that social class is a major factor in whether or not a child goes to university, a revelation equal in shock to hearing that night follows day or water is wet.

Some years ago, possibly as many as twenty, Fintan O’Toole wrote a genuinely magnificent column in the Irish Times about the nature of social class. He considered two children, both born on the same day, and rolled dice at each pivotal stage in their development to see what their luck would be like in life.

At birth, the middle class kid rolled a six and the working class kid rolled a one. By the time the kids were in school the gap was of the order of 24-4 or 30-6 and will never be bridged. That’s how the world turns, and has done for as long as humanity has recorded its own history.

The ESRI report does address the problem of students learning off answers for the Leaving Cert, but not quite in the way you might expect. Should the State make an effort to make the foremost exam in the State less predictable than clockwork and taxes?

Why, sure they could do that but the ESRI would be much happier if “discussion could usefully focus on the potential role of project work and team work within senior cycle in equipping young people with the kinds of skills they need for lifelong learning and the labour market.”

This is the sort of stuff we have to listen to all the time about education. Forget all those fuddy-duddy notions about learning stuff you didn’t know. Project work and teamwork are very much where it’s at.

Reading these sorts of theories, you would be forgiven for wondering if some of the theorists have ever worked on a project or in a team, because the chief thing you learn from working on a project or in a team is that Hell is other people.

Projects aren’t collaborative efforts. The majority of people on a project aren’t pushed. They’ll do enough to keep the boss off their backs but after that, well, life is for living, not projects, as far as they’re concerned.

One person on the project will do more than half the work, for different reasons – enthusiasm, natural leadership, fear, whatever. But as sure as God made little green apples there will also be at least one person on the project who won’t do a tap, not even under threat of violence. He or she has figured out that the leader and/or the others will crumble and cover for him rather than shop him to the bosses. And that sort of Machiavellianism is not a lesson that we should be teaching our children.

The other thing you have to wonder about these educational theorists is if they ever met a child. They seem to have a very vague idea of how children operate. The theorists will tell you that, rather than hammering home times tables and handing out mountains of homework, if you just open the child’s minds to the wonders of mathematics, they’ll light up like tiny stars on every point of the co-ordinated plane.

The theorists tell you that people shiver and break out in hives at the very mention of the world “maths” because the teachers are teaching it badly. The theorists may be assured that if the maths teachers knew a better way to teach maths they would do, for the same reason they walk into the classroom, rather than hop.

The current vogue in teaching maths seems determined to make what was once straightforward complex, for no apparent reason. Its proponents say it’s because it encourages the children. But being confused isn’t the same as thinking, a fundamental point the theorists seem to miss.

The US equivalent of our Project Maths is called the Common Core. One of the Common Core support materials outlines an old school maths question – “If 3(y-1)=8, what is y?” – and goes on to say it’s no good because “this question is an example of solving equations as a series of mechanical steps.”

How is that a bad thing? All maths is built on one single sentence, written by Euclid of Alexandria, three or four hundred years before the birth of Christ. “A point is that of which there is no part” is the sentence with which Euclid opens his book, The Elements. Euclid took the smallest thing there is, a thing can cannot be broken into smaller parts, and built a whole mathematical world on it, in a series of mechanical steps.

Reader, if it was good enough for Euclid, it’s good enough for you. If you got your Leaving Cert results last week, congratulations and the best of luck to you. If you’re facing into the Leaving next year, there is one little-known and under-exploited trick that will stand to you. Keep doing your homework. Everything falls into place after that.

Harder Than Chinese Algebra

The Daily Telegraph has a story this morning about how a gap is yawning in mathematical standards between Great Britain and China. And 1916 or no, as it goes across the water, so it goes here. I’ve been assured that the current Leaving Cert Honours Maths paper is now considerably easier than the hellspawn that was delivered to Honours Maths students in that year of grace 1989, for instance, when your humble correspondent was in the van, trying to interpret the runes of the algebra question on the much feared Paper I.

The Telegraph, however, does more than just give out and tut-tut, the way we as a society do; no, it’s offering a marvellous prize of £500, sponsored by the Royal Society of Chemistry, to anyone that can solve the above three questions concerning a square prism ABCD. The closing date is Friday, April 27, and you can enter via the Royal Society’s website or its postal address as above. Best of luck!






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