Six and Two Fours

Oh I also watched some of the Dispatches programme last week which basically said that your child has no chance of learning to do sums because their teacher probably can't even add up. The latest official Guru (why do these people always look a bit odd?) was on hand to wave his arms around and make learning fun.

What scared me was the attitude of the young Primary school teachers. They all shrugged their shoulders and came out with something along the lines of:

"I struggled with Maths at school because it wasn't taught very well and the teacher wasn't very nice to me etc..." Rather than:

"Yes I really must make an effort to learn how to do basic maths because err... I'm being paid to teach it"

It's always easier to be a victim than sit down with a book. I'm not saying that you need to be Isaac Newton to teach Primary school maths, but the results of the simple test at the end of this article are very worrying. No wonder ever increasing numbers of children start Secondary school without any grounding in the basics. I'd like to see what the results of a similar English test would be.

Still, I always feel that we concentrate too much on the negatives: rather than worrying about the 64% of teachers who can't do sums, let's celebrate the 46% who can.