Problem with maths - maths teachers

I suggested in my last post that algebra does more harm than good in teaching maths but there's another factor at work - maths teachers.

1. Maths needs to be enlivened by better than average teaching.

2. Maths teachers tend to be weak on social and communications skills.

3. Good mathematicians tend to do things other than teaching.

'Maths is boring' is the usual summation by kids at school. It's also the experience of most of us who went to school.

Maths graduates and specialists tend not to be great communicators, and if a subject that is admittedly as dry as maths is to be taught well should we consider using people who are high on communications skills and moderate on maths.

On top of this the subject can be enlivened by the use of good e-learning. Look at the success of Nintendo's Brain training - mostly simple arithmetic. people actually pay £100 for a console then £20 upwards for this simple piece of software that related maths to your life (brain age) - and its fun. The MyMaths site and Bitesize are also pretty good, better than much teaching I'm sure. Yet how much of this stuff is even known by teachers, never mind used.

Numeracy - counts for little

Is all this fuss around numeracy really warranted? I met a trainer in a government department who had to put his staff through a Level 2 numeracy test. He was surprised to find that many failed - as he regards them as good at their jobs.
The claim is that 13.5 million people are 'stressed out' by their poor numeracy. But when did you last hear anyone tell you that they're 'totally stressed about my algebra skills'. The second claim is that 15.1 million have poor numeracy skills (equivalent of G or below at GCSE). This made me think.
Is it right that the standard here is the Maths GCSE. I have known lots of happy, successful people who handle money and numbers and bets who have no GCSE in Maths.

Numbers
While I accept that much of the 'number' content in the national Curriculum is sound, even here, knowing about prime numbers, square and cube roots etc seems remotely useful.

Shape and space
OK, working out the area of a rectangle I get - we all have to buy carpets and paint etc. But trigonometry? The volume of a sphere? Vectors? Transformations? It's mostly useless, except for a small minority of people.

Handling data
Some of this is useful but not all. Have you ever seen a stem or leaf table? Simple probability is fine - but calculating mutually exclusive events? It's over-engineered.

Algebra
This is where it all goes wrong. Here's a quote from Roger Schank who looked into the dodgy history of why algebra became so embedded in curricula, "I'm a math major and a computer science professor, and algebra has never come up in my life, maybe it has in yours." I'd argue that little or nothing in algebra is useful for the vast majority of people in work. In fact it is so conceptually difficult and of such little practical use that most of us who master it forget it soon after we've passed the exam. When was the last time you used a simultaneous linear or quadratic equation?

Algebra is bad for our kids
Even worse, could algebra be damaging our kids approach t maths? I suspect that algebra is the single most damaging cause of poor numeracy. As soon as kids face this useless challenge they are turned off the subject. It kills any interest in maths stone dead. They instinctively kow that it's useless knowledge.

What counts can't always be counted
In truth we need a simple standard in the 'real world' application of maths that is free from the Maths GCSE. Simple mastery of arithemetic, calculating areas, percentages and reading graphs would do. We need to produce adults who love to learn, not adults who avoid all learning because it reminds them of the horrors of school and algebra.

Talent management - rum business

I think we need an import ban on flaky HR ideas from the US. Talent Management is the latest HR bandwagons. Once the 'Leadership Training' bandwagon had run its course, its wheels stuck in the deep mud of fashionable indifference, HR had to find another rickety old vehicle to justify increasing scepticism about their usefulness.

Talent Management (really just Leadership in new clothes) is yet another reason for senior managers to spend oodles of cash on themselves . And don't think for one moment that this is an inclusive, company-wide scheme that involves ALL employees. It's really a filtering process for joining the Executive Club. Never trust those guys you see turn up to meetings, or at the airport, with their little Platinum, Gold or Silver 'Exec Club' tags hanging conspicuously on the outside of their combination-lock briefcases. They're in the same camp as those who wear mobiles on their belts or blazers with flat gold buttons on the cuffs.

If Talent Management really was meritocratic, then boards would advertise openly for members (they don't - in the UK it's mostly word-of mouth) and there would be transparency from top to bottom in recruitment, rewards and promotion. The city and UK senior management is full of old duffers, still wearing their broad diagonally striped school ties (I personally think this smacks of public school pederasty).

If Talent Management does have a role it would be to clear out people who are stuck in jobs they saw as temporary when they joined, and to move people on in terms of aspirations. All too often it's about keeping and not losing people. I like the LearnDirect idea of an independent Advice service advertised on TV that makes people think about their aspirations.

Complaince killing training

Attended an small but excellent think-tank meeting on the future of learning in Government. It was sobering to hear how training departments are now so swamped by compliance training that little else is being done. We're so busy obsessing about the potential of employees to sexually harass, racially abuse, be biased on gender, discriminate on disability and negative on age, that they've little time to learn anything else.

How did it come to this? The training is not evaluated, and when large academic studies are done, they show no, or counterproductive, effects (Dobbins, Harvard). Yet, HR departments are compliant in this conspiracy. They willingly deliver bucket-loads of this stuff. Why? because it's easy. The driver is NOT learning or people development, it's 'fear'. It's a crude attempt to reduce risk by delivering crude courses, measured only by bums on seats, that do nothing more than protect organisations against their employees.

It's boring, people don't like it and it doesn't work. How bad can it get before we stop this madness?

Blackpool

Gave two talks on skills/education at the Conservative Party Conference (not my natural habitat). Not surprised that all parties have finally dumped Blackpool as a venue - it's the armpit of Britain, all fast food, barn-sized drinking parlours and dilapidated B&Bs.

Two-brains Willetts
First talk was with David Willetts, Shadow Minister for Innovation, Universities and Skills, around Leitch. The bottom line is that business and education/training have been drifting apart for years. Business wants quick solutions that meet their needs and don't have much time for the vast array of qualifications and agencies in the market. They're desperate for a system that's quicker, simpler and with less entities. More is less. Education and training, on the other hand, is obsessed with qualifications and the creation of entities. They're like two sides shouting at each other with megaphones across a vast chasm.

Back to school with Michael Gove
I had a spat with Michael Gove mid-afternoon. His example of how children need more maths/science was, and I quote, "In order to understand how electrons orbit around the nucleus children need to understand the Copernican system of planets rotating around stars". I urged him to get another example, as "the quantum positioning of electrons has nothing to do with the Copernican gravitational model". He was none too pleased and did a lot of finger wagging. He's all discipline, standards and back to basics. By the way Michael check the spelling on your home page - it's awful

Final talk
The final session was excellent. There was a great talk on the 'myth' of science/engineering graduates. John Hayes, the Shadow Minister for Skills was sound on the need for a proper careers and advice service but it was John Morton, CEO of the ETB that astonished us with some raw stats. We produce 17000 engineers a year and the number has been stable for 15 years. 50% of these never go near engineering as the starting salary is pretty low (barely keeping up with inflation). The failure is in the FE sector, where we don't produce enough trained technicians. In the last 3 years these trainees have dropped by 26%. He saw the problems as lying elsewhere in our lack of innovation, entrepreneurship and our failure to celebrate success.

Online lectures big HIT on iTUNES

MIT’s Professor Lewin has proves a smash hit with his online physics lectures. “It sounds arrogant, I know, but it’s better to see a first class lecture on video than a mediocre one in the flesh”.

Use the FREE stuff because it’s better. This is a simple solution to a massive problem. Students are already voting with their fingers and dumping their third-rate, real, local lectures for first-rate, online, global lectures. The same can apply to most standard teaching and training lectures.

The traditional model is to have poor lectures which are never recorded. The very idea of not giving students a second bite of the cherry is absurd. If you were a journalist or novelist, you wouldn’t dream of standing up and only giving people one chance to hear your work. Publishing has been around since the 15^th century, it’s about time teaching and training caught up.

Professor pans 'learning style' teaching

Despite the complete lack of scientific evidence for learning styles it seems to have gathered force through recent efforts on 'personalised' learning. This is suicidal. The whole education and training world continues to present itself as half-baked and gullible on theory.

I presented the Coffield research on learning styles at a coaching conference recently and received an abusive email from Peter Honey (who was in the audience). After an exchange of emails on the scientific evidence on learning styles he went strangely silent. He did admit, however, that there was no scientific evidence to back up his theory - the famous Honey and Mumford model.

Here's another serious, qualified and sensible voice in the telegraph attacking their use in schools and training.

Wiimotes and training

It was bound to happen. The Wii controller, the Wiimote, is now being used in training simulations. There’s no doubt that this is a breakthrough technology where the input device fits the user, not the interface. Wired magazine has reported on projects in power plants, medical devices, pest-control and driving simulations. Some of these projects are placed in Second Life, others use Google Maps and Google Earth. In the driving simulation they use real accident blackspots to teach safe driving.

Simulations have been around for a long time. The difference now is that they are possible for a fraction of the price as games technology and games authoring software (Caspian learning) has plummeted. What the Wiimote gives you is hands-on manipulation and experience.

Frumpy netiquette

Journalist Stuart Jeffries visciously attacked the young today, calling them ‘illiterate slobs’ and ‘sub-articulate chimps’ in The Guardian. Why? Just because they don’t capitalise, tend to shorten words, and use emoticons in emails and messenger! What a daft old bugger.

Reverse ageism
This is reverse ageism or ‘youngism’. These online media have more in common with conversation than letters. Jeffries, a journalist, is simply hankering after the world he knows best – communication on paper. Users of new media don’t see email as letters-on-screen. It’s more like speech than writing, full of hesitations, asides, jokes - the sharper and snappier the better. Have you ever heard of someone stopping a conversation in mid-sentence saying, ‘Sorry, you misses an apostrophe there, it should have been a plural possessive with the apostrophe after the ‘s’?

Frumpy netiquette
Jeffries belongs to the frumpy, Lynn Truss school of literacy etiquette and quotes all sorts of etiquette and netiquette maniacs. The Truss book was devoured by those who think that, not knowing the twenty different ways to use a comma means having lost your moral compass. Older people tend to want to cling on to quaint ways in digital communication. They’d like us to stick doggedly to Dear Mr X…Yours sincerely/faithfully… (Is there anything less faithful or sincere than these terms?). He quotes one bizarre netiquette advisor who recommends ending emails with, ‘At your service…’ and ‘Virtually…’. One is stupidly servile, the other ridiculous.

Texting
Young people often prefer texts to speech on mobiles, not just because it’s cheaper, but because it’s better and shorter, more like dialogue, and more fun. They don’t shorten the words because they’re lazy or want to annoy their parents, it’s just easier to type in, and read at the other end on a small screen. It has nothing to do with standards of literacy.

One could argue that it indirectly promotes illiteracy. In fact, research from the University of Nottingham has shown that good texters have high levels of literacy. The most fervent texters turned out, surprisingly, to have the highest scores on traditional literacy tests. It is thought that it supports a deep phonetic understanding of the structure of language, essential for good literacy and spelling.

Messenger
You’ve really got to use this medium to get a feel for its unique form of dialogue. You’ll soon find yourself abandoning correct spelling, transposed letters in words due to poor keyboard skills and ditching punctuation and capitalisation. It’s the communication that counts. We don’t punctuate and capitalise in speech and similarly in messenger.

An added dimension in messenger, is the ability to link to images, sound and video, and other web sites, while conversing. This can enrich a conversation in a way that is impossible when you are not online. It’s a hybrid of online and offline communication where the sum of the parts can be greater than the whole.

Emoticons
Emoticons, in particular, drive older people crazy. Yet, in messenger, and in email, they can add some fun, even nuance, to the message. They work better in messenger, as it really is a form of conversation, not written communication. I suspect it’s because the middle England is uncomfortable with expressions of emotional intimacy that they react so badly to what is seen by young people as a blatant bit of fun.

Letters are mostly bills or junk
When I come back from holiday, I have to wade through ankle deep junk mail. This is what the world of letters has descended to, envelopes designed to trick and con you into opening them (disguised as official communication), crass design and promises of non-existent prizes. Letter writing is now the art of older, marketing people selling to other older people, the only group still hanging onto the joys of opening an envelope. My kids never open junk mail. Only older people look at this stuff.

Even worse, letter writing has become synonymous with polite extortion through bills and bad news. Utilities companies and banks will send incredibly polite letters correctly headed with appropriate warm greetings and sign offs, while they rip into you with excessive charges and penalties. They’ll mug you, albeit with high quality prose.

Renaissance of writing
Never in history have so many young people written so much to so many on a daily basis, almost obsessively communicating through written language. The fact that it doesn’t conform to some outdated, linguistic idea of language, frozen in time (always your time) is not the point. They understand the fluidity of language, are fully expressive and live in the context of bountiful, online, social networks we older people can barely imagine.

When I was young I barely wrote a word that wasn’t formal homework or the occasional letter to a penpal, which took weeks, both sides giving up through sheer boredom. We have gone from formal and occasional to informal and hourly communication in the space of a generation. More power to their texting elbows.

Language changes, shifts, expands its vocabulary, drops its dead wood and develops through new dialects. We should celebrate this diversity, not squeeze the life out of it by making it conform to some home counties, Trussed-up idea of etiquette. Resistance, even that most fascistic form the French Resistance (Academie Francaise) who have tried, in vain, to fossilise and protect language, is futile. Language lives, breathes and progresses.

Baby-boomers reflect
We baby-boomers ought to reflect on our propensity to blame the young for a drop in standards. We’re the people who have trashed the planet, treating it like a playground and dumping ground, not them. They’ve got it sussed. Why destroy the planet for the sake of having paper conversations? Get online and help save the planet rather than complaining in wasteful newsprint about something you don’t understand.

Left brain Right brain - a myth

Deliberately misleading
An excellent post from Clive Shepherd points to an article on neuroscientific myths and their detrimental effect on education and training. The one that has always disturbed me is the deliberately misleading ‘left-right brain’ theory. It has been used to support endless tracts telling us that we should liberate ourselves from too much left-brain ‘logical’ thinking and enjoy the fruits of our liberated, right-brained creativity.

Psychology or phrenology?
Are you right (creative) or left (logical) brained? In fact, you’re both. The right/left brain myth resulted from split-brain research in the 60s, now largely rejected. People and their brains can no longer be characterised or caricatured as right and left brainers. This is now seen as a primitive form of simplistic labelling, or phrenology.

Neurology, through scanning, shows a very different, and complex, picture. Research now sees the distinction between the two hemispheres as being very subtle. Every mental faculty seems to be shared across the brain, with complementary contributions. It is the combination, not separation, that matters. The mutually exclusive model has all but disappeared from the literature.

Right brain good, left brain bad
False analogical leaps were made from simple linguistic tests and surgical experiments to strict dichotomies between reason and creativity, linear and holistic, eastern and western thought – left and right brain. Unfortunately the left-brain, right-brain model still flourishes in populist self-help and pop-psychology books, courses and products. The line taken is often one of the dominant, left, rational brain censoring the poor, artistic, creative right side, to the detriment of the person and society.

Just as star signs belong to astrology, not astronomy, split-brain theories belong to phrenology, not psychology.

MINDBLOWING - WATCH THIS!

Want to see the future?
Watch this. Mindblowing demo. Just watch - you get it immediately.

Regarded as the technology talk of the year at TED. The first demo is fantastic, then comes the 3D image of Notre Dame Cathedral taken from ordinary Flickr images. Also astonishing. The implications are that socially created data can be used to create something even greater. Masses of hyperlinks are used to create deeper meaning - amazing.

ARG! TV infected by web

Heroes
The BBC have bought US TV hit Heroes and in one episode there's a three second clip with a 0800 number on a business card. Phone the number and you’re sucked into an Alternate Reality game (ARG). ARGs are like treasure hunts, where a phone call leads to a TXT message which leads to a website and so on. They go back to the movie AI, and have become part of the viral marketing movement. And don’t think they’re small beer, Halo 2’s ‘ilovebees’ had nearly 2 million players. Pirates of The Caribbean and Dead Man’s Chest also have ARGs. They extend the storyline of the film or TV programme and are likely to become serious extensions to many future films and TV programmes.

Heroes 360
An automated answering service directed viewers who called Primatech to apply for a job. Applicants received emails from other employees that, along with text messages, sent them to Web-based puzzles. Once solved, these revealed background details about Mr. Benett's decision to turn against his employer.

LonelyGirl15
Viewers of the online series are asked directly by the show's characters to aid in puzzle-based tasks. (They can also pick up on subtler clues within each episode.) Players who assist the cast are acknowledged on the show; those who publicly reveal clues and answers sometimes end up aiding the show's villains.

The Lost Experience
During the final episodes of season two, Lost creators ran ads for the Hanso Foundation. Viewers who called the onscreen number were routed to a Web site to find a possible Hanso conspiracy. Those who solved the puzzle learned the origin of the Dharma Initiative and other secrets (no, we're not going to reveal them).

Puzzles and productivity

Casual gaming The mass market, family or casual gaming market delivered through MSN Games, WorldWinner, Pogo and Yahoo Games is often ignored when discussed by the Serious games crowd, but it may be just as interesting in the long term than full blown immersive games. This whole market is widening out to include immersive (such as Caspian Learning), casual, puzzles, gambling, PC and console.

Puzzles reduce stress, increase focus, improve productivity
34% of 500 people polled by puzzle game provider Worldwinner said they play during working hours and 52% of these play periodically across the day. Bad news surely? Maybe not:

72% thought it reduced workplace stress
76% thought that it improved their productivity
80% felt they ‘feel better focused’

Of the games played, more than 60% of workers who play games during their day use brain teasers, including puzzle and strategy games. “When I need a break during the workday, I often turn to online skill games to recharge my brain,” stated WorldWinner player Jeff R. “I’ve found that taking a few minutes and challenging myself with a word game, puzzle or card game can really boost my productivity; I return to work with a fresh perspective and improved creativity. Playing games also gets me revved up before starting a big project – especially when I win.”

Casual gamers mainstream
Casual gaming is mainstream and tends to reflect a more general demographic. The mass market, family or casual gaming market has many more adults and women. Specifically, 61 percent of players are over the age of 35, 35 percent are over 45, and almost 9 percent are over 55.

MSN Games has a high proportion of female gamers, and is constantly adding content to appeal to a wide variety of audiences. Specifically, 2 of 3 players on MSN Zone and RealArcade are women, 55% of Pogo players are women and 70% of AOL game players are women (publicly quoted statistics). Published data supports the core demographic to be 60% females, ages 24-54. It's known that females tend to like puzzle games, which comprise a lot of the "casual" game market. Why older people and women? They are less intimidating, short, less violent, easy to learn (you don’t need a manual), low cost barrier to entry; free trials, and a different form of marketing.