Oh, and anyone who wanted to see applied maths in action, should have been watching the darts last night.
If you start needing 107, go for treble-19 and get the single, what’s your next dart if you want to leave either 40 or 32? You have one second, and likely don’t have A-level maths.
We do not have a 'fuck Maths' attitude. We have a balanced one, which accepts the fact that people have different skill sets and brain wiring. I happen to be good at English but I wouldn't be so fucking stupid, downright wicked, as to impose that on everyone else until it was drilled into them. I wouldn't want a brilliant mathematician to have to work their way through Chaucer until they're 18. Or someone with the gift of languages. Post-16 is an opportunity to begin specialising. We're not for the most part an IB country, we have Advanced levels which are actually a bloody good set of qualifications.
(Snip)
Whilst I have some sympathy with the above, we do have a massive problem with functional illiteracy and innumeracy in this country. Anyone who is functionally illiterate and/or innumerate is at a big disadvantage in life, and has been let down by the schools system, themselves and their parents.
If studying up to 18 means things like getting core skills into those left behind, then I'm all for it.
And there is definitely a "fuck Maths" attitude out there. It seems to be perfectly socially acceptable to admit being innumerate and it gets laughed off.
Oh dear, I risk as an educationalist getting drawn into this which I'd really rather avoid. Partly because I don't enjoy discussing education with people who are not actually in it.
Generally speaking education does not equip pupils for the world. I constantly read, especially from the reactionary Right, moaning about mobile phones in schools but THIS IS THE MODERN WORLD!!!! Not teaching with technology is as antediluvian as making pupils write with quills. Or write with pens. Or even write at all. I mean, I'm an English teacher but why do we still make pupils write exams with pens? Whoever uses a pen in real life? Seriously: it's GONE. We use keypads and phones. We even sign things electronically now or with face recognition or iris scanning.
As for school curriculum IT, it's an absolute joke.
Okay, so I'm being provocative but really, truly, education does NOT fit people for actual life. Especially, I might add, the commercial world.
Making all pupils do maths until 18 is a pathetic response to a real, deep-seated, problem.
Oh ... and if you've never watched this then you REALLY should:
We do not have a 'fuck Maths' attitude. We have a balanced one, which accepts the fact that people have different skill sets and brain wiring. I happen to be good at English but I wouldn't be so fucking stupid, downright wicked, as to impose that on everyone else until it was drilled into them. I wouldn't want a brilliant mathematician to have to work their way through Chaucer until they're 18. Or someone with the gift of languages. Post-16 is an opportunity to begin specialising. We're not for the most part an IB country, we have Advanced levels which are actually a bloody good set of qualifications.
It's more of the same tired ideologically driven tory crap.
They need booting out of office ASAP.
To meet the needs of today's workplace English, Maths, IT and a foreign language should be studied to 18 in my view, even if not at A level standard by most students
Cram all that in, and inevitably you end up diluting A Levels, which in my view is the worst possible thing you could do.
Also English - do you mean Lit? Can't see the point of an MCP* like me reading more Shakespeare. If language, then what more is to be learnt after getting an A* at GCSE?
*Maths, Chemistry, Physics
Most European students study their own language, Maths, a Science, a foreign language and IT etc until 18. The French have the Bacc for example.
English language and grammar should certainly be studied until 18 if Maths is. Not just for those who are retaking GCSES in them to get a pass but at a more advanced level for those who passed first time
On maths, I think there's some lack of knowledge about the current situation.
1. GCSE maths (resit) is already compulsory for all students who at age 16 have not achieved a 'pass' (grade C/4) and are continuing in education or training. This is a condition of funding for all further education courses, and has been for many years. So those who 'failed' GCSE have to continue to 18. So, a level 2 beauty therapy student who failed GCSE maths must resit it. Same for English, incidentally.
2. It has been a huge challenge for FE colleges and other providers to fulfil this condition of funding. Yes, you've guessed it - getting decent, qualified maths teachers to get so many who struggle with maths to succeed after two more years is a nightmare. The other nightmare, of course, is getting such students to attend maths lessons. This consumes huge amounts of FE college time.
3. So Sunak must know all this. I'll wait to hear what he says, but he must be considering making those who have passed GCSE maths continue with it for an extra two years, in some form. Probably won't go down well with an A* student who opts to do English, History and Classics A levels.
4. I would hope that Sunak's suggestions is more radical - that if maths is to continue, it need not be GCSE but can be tailored to the maths skills needed in different vocational (or academic) areas.
I don't think Labour sneering at the maths policy is a good look either. It makes them look anti-education and anti-success. I think the maths policy is solving a problem that's just not as urgent as other ones and it also requires a lot more joined up thinking than just throw maths teachers at it. We have an education system that isn't giving kids the necessary skills for work, numeracy is a part of that, extending maths education to 18 may be the solution, I'm not sure, but it certainly isn't a silver bullet and it does nothing for 18 year olds who can barely read and write properly, should education in English language be extended to 18 as well?
What about for people who get A* English language and English lit/maths and choose not to take it further, do you lumber them with the A-Level or make them do the 16-18 remedial maths they can do in their sleep?
Sometimes I wonder whether we need to look again at automatic progression of school years and the hard school finishing age we have.
Hmm. If you're getting top grades (whatever they're called these days, "9"?) in English, English lit and Maths and aren't taking them further, what are they doing at A Level?
There's plenty to learn out there outside Maths and English.
If an alien landed in 2023 UK and was asked what our people need to learn more of they might come up with something along the lines of Health, Fitness, Diet, Relationships, Parenting. I suggest teaching a few months of each of those would be far more beneficial to our 16-18 year olds than any of more History, Physics, Geography, Art, Design, Information Technology, French, Spanish, Economics, Chemistry.
We do not have a 'fuck Maths' attitude. We have a balanced one, which accepts the fact that people have different skill sets and brain wiring. I happen to be good at English but I wouldn't be so fucking stupid, downright wicked, as to impose that on everyone else until it was drilled into them. I wouldn't want a brilliant mathematician to have to work their way through Chaucer until they're 18. Or someone with the gift of languages. Post-16 is an opportunity to begin specialising. We're not for the most part an IB country, we have Advanced levels which are actually a bloody good set of qualifications.
It's more of the same tired ideologically driven tory crap.
They need booting out of office ASAP.
To meet the needs of today's workplace English, Maths, IT and a foreign language should be studied to 18 in my view, even if not at A level standard by most students
I agree to some extent with English and Foreign Language, but as far as IT is concerned, the use of excel, word and power point is hardly A level standard IT, and I am sure the knowledge of Calculus, coordinate geometry and algebraic equations in relation to graphical analysis is not required in the boardroom or even the shop floor.
It doesn't need to be A level but certainly study of Word, Excel, MS Teams, One Drive, PowerPoint, Outlook, Sharepoint etc should be done until 18 by most pupils
I don't think Labour sneering at the maths policy is a good look either. It makes them look anti-education and anti-success. I think the maths policy is solving a problem that's just not as urgent as other ones and it also requires a lot more joined up thinking than just throw maths teachers at it. We have an education system that isn't giving kids the necessary skills for work, numeracy is a part of that, extending maths education to 18 may be the solution, I'm not sure, but it certainly isn't a silver bullet and it does nothing for 18 year olds who can barely read and write properly, should education in English language be extended to 18 as well?
What about for people who get A* English language and English lit/maths and choose not to take it further, do you lumber them with the A-Level or make them do the 16-18 remedial maths they can do in their sleep?
Sometimes I wonder whether we need to look again at automatic progression of school years and the hard school finishing age we have.
Hmm. If you're getting top grades (whatever they're called these days, "9"?) in English, English lit and Maths and aren't taking them further, what are they doing at A Level?
There's plenty to learn out there outside Maths and English.
If an alien landed in 2023 UK and was asked what our people need to learn more of they might come up with something along the lines of Health, Fitness, Diet, Relationships, Parenting. I suggest teaching a few months of each of those would be far more beneficial to our 16-18 year olds than any of more History, Physics, Geography, Art, Design, Information Technology, French, Spanish, Economics, Chemistry.
We do not have a 'fuck Maths' attitude. We have a balanced one, which accepts the fact that people have different skill sets and brain wiring. I happen to be good at English but I wouldn't be so fucking stupid, downright wicked, as to impose that on everyone else until it was drilled into them. I wouldn't want a brilliant mathematician to have to work their way through Chaucer until they're 18. Or someone with the gift of languages. Post-16 is an opportunity to begin specialising. We're not for the most part an IB country, we have Advanced levels which are actually a bloody good set of qualifications.
(Snip)
Whilst I have some sympathy with the above, we do have a massive problem with functional illiteracy and innumeracy in this country. Anyone who is functionally illiterate and/or innumerate is at a big disadvantage in life, and has been let down by the schools system, themselves and their parents.
If studying up to 18 means things like getting core skills into those left behind, then I'm all for it.
You don't need to be forced to pursue maths to age 18 to become functional numerate. I would argue that a reasonably able year 9 could be at that stage already. Most of the population left primary school in the 50s and 60s at the functional numerate stage. It depends what functionally numerate is defined as. Is it just tables, fractions, decimals, percentages, measuring and estimation? What else is needed?
The number of adults who are functionally illiterate and/or innumerate has remained stubbornly static for decades, at around 15-20%.
This implies that 15-20% functional illiterate is just the result of a standardised assessment, especially if it hasn't changed over the years. That's like the old A level grading system where at least 20% must fail. What does functionally illiterate mean? I'm not sure how it can be linked to the economy losing 20billion. Is that just an opinion? Is that a scientific analysis? Productivity at work can be effected by many variables, including poor management.
We do not have a 'fuck Maths' attitude. We have a balanced one, which accepts the fact that people have different skill sets and brain wiring. I happen to be good at English but I wouldn't be so fucking stupid, downright wicked, as to impose that on everyone else until it was drilled into them. I wouldn't want a brilliant mathematician to have to work their way through Chaucer until they're 18. Or someone with the gift of languages. Post-16 is an opportunity to begin specialising. We're not for the most part an IB country, we have Advanced levels which are actually a bloody good set of qualifications.
(Snip)
Whilst I have some sympathy with the above, we do have a massive problem with functional illiteracy and innumeracy in this country. Anyone who is functionally illiterate and/or innumerate is at a big disadvantage in life, and has been let down by the schools system, themselves and their parents.
If studying up to 18 means things like getting core skills into those left behind, then I'm all for it.
Yet all the evidence is that better early years education is more important. Perhaps funding SureStart instead of closing a third of the centers down might help......
Well, yes. As a counter, it would be interesting to see if functional innumeracy and illiteracy altered for those kids 'helped' by SureStart. And to widen that as well; things like crime.
The scheme's been going for 25 years, so if we take primary school age kids, then there should be well over a decade of data for it.
I went to a SureStart baby club when the little 'un was a baby. It was useful. But the NCT classes we attended (as sensible middle-class folk) were much more useful. Perhaps widening access to NCT-style schemes for first-time parents may be a big advantage?
I’ve had two children go through the local state primary school in the last few years and from what I’ve seen, the quality of their maths teaching has been as good or better than I remember getting in the early 1980s.
Both were pretty numerate by midway through primary but they were by no means top of the class maths whizzes. The majority seemed to be there or thereabouts.
Maybe the school is unusual, but it’s “good” not exceptional as far as ofsted is concerned.
Similar story across most subjects. The science education seems perfectly decent, the “topic” work is usually interesting and the PSHE curriculum is infinitely better than back then (when it essentially didn’t exist). The only area where they don’t seem to be as advanced as kids were 40 years ago is creative writing.
And school assembly: they don’t have it, so they don’t get to learn all those bangers like sing hosanna and Lord of the dance.
We do not have a 'fuck Maths' attitude. We have a balanced one, which accepts the fact that people have different skill sets and brain wiring. I happen to be good at English but I wouldn't be so fucking stupid, downright wicked, as to impose that on everyone else until it was drilled into them. I wouldn't want a brilliant mathematician to have to work their way through Chaucer until they're 18. Or someone with the gift of languages. Post-16 is an opportunity to begin specialising. We're not for the most part an IB country, we have Advanced levels which are actually a bloody good set of qualifications.
It's more of the same tired ideologically driven tory crap.
They need booting out of office ASAP.
To meet the needs of today's workplace English, Maths, IT and a foreign language should be studied to 18 in my view, even if not at A level standard by most students
I agree to some extent with English and Foreign Language, but as far as IT is concerned, the use of excel, word and power point is hardly A level standard IT, and I am sure the knowledge of Calculus, coordinate geometry and algebraic equations in relation to graphical analysis is not required in the boardroom or even the shop floor.
It doesn't need to be A level but certainly study of Word, Excel, MS Teams, One Drive, PowerPoint, Outlook, Sharepoint etc should be done until 18 by most pupils
Spreadsheets, documents and presentations are useful skills - but definitely don’t just teach the products of one company that’s pushing their software hard in schools. Use OpenOffice or similar, which is free and open source.
Sunak will not last the year. I am shocked how bad he has been to be honest, unlike Truss, Johnson or May I was expecting a lot more of him.
He will and anyway the only viable alternative to him now before the next general election is Boris back
Then it will either be Boris back or a 2023 GE.
There won't be a general election this year while Sunak is PM and Boris would only come back if a general election was imminent and little change in the polls
Oh, and anyone who wanted to see applied maths in action, should have been watching the darts last night.
If you start needing 107, go for treble-19 and get the single, what’s your next dart if you want to leave either 40 or 32? You have one second, and likely don’t have A-level maths.
In fairness, I suspect from my amateur arrows that a large part of what the professionals do is learning by repetition and pattern recognition not calculation. I would have to calculate what's left but then I know from practice that 88 is treble 16 and tops - and I'd have done the "what if" calculation before throwing the first dart. I would imagine the pros don't even need to do the calculation in step one.
Edit to add: I wouldn't actually go for 19s in this situation, even if you hit the treble you aren't going for bull with your second dart. 60 leaves 47 and you can pick your favourite double from there. You need at least one treble to finish 107 (or two bulls if you want to be a real show off) and most players are best on 20s.
In the desire to stick it to the Tories we've got a "fuck maths" attitude on here this morning.
I despair.
That's balls. We already have an imposed maths curriculum which isn't fit for purpose, along with a widespread shortage of maths teachers.
Teachers who post here have chronicled for years now how successive Conservative Education ministries have made an utter hash of Gove's original idea of academisation; how they've imposed curriculum changes that don't work (despite the original promise of academies having freedom to set their own curricula); how schools have been drowned in paperwork to satisfy an OFSTED which also fails in its essential purpose.
The maths policy 'announcement' is either delusional or vapourware.
On maths, I think there's some lack of knowledge about the current situation.
1. GCSE maths (resit) is already compulsory for all students who at age 16 have not achieved a 'pass' (grade C/4) and are continuing in education or training. This is a condition of funding for all further education courses, and has been for many years. So those who 'failed' GCSE have to continue to 18. So, a level 2 beauty therapy student who failed GCSE maths must resit it. Same for English, incidentally.
2. It has been a huge challenge for FE colleges and other providers to fulfil this condition of funding. Yes, you've guessed it - getting decent, qualified maths teachers to get so many who struggle with maths to succeed after two more years is a nightmare. The other nightmare, of course, is getting such students to attend maths lessons. This consumes huge amounts of FE college time.
3. So Sunak must know all this. I'll wait to hear what he says, but he must be considering making those who have passed GCSE maths continue with it for an extra two years, in some form. Probably won't go down well with an A* student who opts to do English, History and Classics A levels.
4. I would hope that Sunak's suggestions is more radical - that if maths is to continue, it need not be GCSE but can be tailored to the maths skills needed in different vocational (or academic) areas.
Apologies for long-windedness.
We all await the details and thanks for your insight.
I think the thing that jars but has been announced nowhere is the idea as you say of a very talented all-rounder who is good at maths but prefers to take a different course (literally) is somehow forced to take maths also.
Imagine a maths teacher borderline to stay in the job and considering their options, who will now be asked to teach a load of 16-18 year olds who don't want to be there but are forced into it, many of which will have no belief they can do maths, instead of teaching motivated students who have chosen the course.
What happens next.......
Pay will need to be going up 30% or so to get enough maths teachers in for this.
That's exactly what has happened for the last ten (roughly) years, though, in FE.
Oh, and anyone who wanted to see applied maths in action, should have been watching the darts last night.
If you start needing 107, go for treble-19 and get the single, what’s your next dart if you want to leave either 40 or 32? You have one second, and likely don’t have A-level maths.
In fairness, I suspect from my amateur arrows that a large part of what the professionals do is learning by repetition and pattern recognition not calculation. I would have to calculate what's left but then I know from practice that 88 is treble 16 and tops - and I'd have done the "what if" calculation before throwing the first dart. I would imagine the pros don't even need to do the calculation in step one.
This sounds like number bonds taken to the next level, combined with remembering key number ptterns, rather than applied maths.
I don't think Labour sneering at the maths policy is a good look either. It makes them look anti-education and anti-success. I think the maths policy is solving a problem that's just not as urgent as other ones and it also requires a lot more joined up thinking than just throw maths teachers at it. We have an education system that isn't giving kids the necessary skills for work, numeracy is a part of that, extending maths education to 18 may be the solution, I'm not sure, but it certainly isn't a silver bullet and it does nothing for 18 year olds who can barely read and write properly, should education in English language be extended to 18 as well?
What about for people who get A* English language and English lit/maths and choose not to take it further, do you lumber them with the A-Level or make them do the 16-18 remedial maths they can do in their sleep?
Sometimes I wonder whether we need to look again at automatic progression of school years and the hard school finishing age we have.
Hmm. If you're getting top grades (whatever they're called these days, "9"?) in English, English lit and Maths and aren't taking them further, what are they doing at A Level?
There's plenty to learn out there outside Maths and English.
If an alien landed in 2023 UK and was asked what our people need to learn more of they might come up with something along the lines of Health, Fitness, Diet, Relationships, Parenting. I suggest teaching a few months of each of those would be far more beneficial to our 16-18 year olds than any of more History, Physics, Geography, Art, Design, Information Technology, French, Spanish, Economics, Chemistry.
Geography should be compulsory up to retirement age. Misunderstanding of it is what’s led us to many of the disasters we are now facing, as a country and a planet.
If Germany had more compulsory geography in schools they might not have made themselves so dependent on Russian gas.
We do not have a 'fuck Maths' attitude. We have a balanced one, which accepts the fact that people have different skill sets and brain wiring. I happen to be good at English but I wouldn't be so fucking stupid, downright wicked, as to impose that on everyone else until it was drilled into them. I wouldn't want a brilliant mathematician to have to work their way through Chaucer until they're 18. Or someone with the gift of languages. Post-16 is an opportunity to begin specialising. We're not for the most part an IB country, we have Advanced levels which are actually a bloody good set of qualifications.
(Snip)
Whilst I have some sympathy with the above, we do have a massive problem with functional illiteracy and innumeracy in this country. Anyone who is functionally illiterate and/or innumerate is at a big disadvantage in life, and has been let down by the schools system, themselves and their parents.
If studying up to 18 means things like getting core skills into those left behind, then I'm all for it.
Yet all the evidence is that better early years education is more important. Perhaps funding SureStart instead of closing a third of the centers down might help......
Well, yes. As a counter, it would be interesting to see if functional innumeracy and illiteracy altered for those kids 'helped' by SureStart. And to widen that as well; things like crime.
The scheme's been going for 25 years, so if we take primary school age kids, then there should be well over a decade of data for it.
I went to a SureStart baby club when the little 'un was a baby. It was useful. But the NCT classes we attended (as sensible middle-class folk) were much more useful. Perhaps widening access to NCT-style schemes for first-time parents may be a big advantage?
There was a study I was aware of* (done by colleagues) on one of the very early interventions which found no particular difference on the outcomes studied. Not aware of whether there's a good evaluation of sure start as a whole. Like most government policies, proper evaluation was never part of the plan.
Children's Centres etc are great, but the one I've had most contact with (in a very deprived area in the East Riding) is mostly used, in my experience, by middle class parents from the surrounding affluent countryside/small villages. I don't think means-testing access is a good thing, but it would be interesting to assess why (and indeed whether) there is underuse by the target, local, more deprived families.
*they were of the view that they didn't really have enough data, response rates were low and the outcomes they were commissioned to study were too restrictive - very much absence of evidence rather than evidence of absence; no funding was forthcoming for a better study
We do not have a 'fuck Maths' attitude. We have a balanced one, which accepts the fact that people have different skill sets and brain wiring. I happen to be good at English but I wouldn't be so fucking stupid, downright wicked, as to impose that on everyone else until it was drilled into them. I wouldn't want a brilliant mathematician to have to work their way through Chaucer until they're 18. Or someone with the gift of languages. Post-16 is an opportunity to begin specialising. We're not for the most part an IB country, we have Advanced levels which are actually a bloody good set of qualifications.
It's more of the same tired ideologically driven tory crap.
They need booting out of office ASAP.
To meet the needs of today's workplace English, Maths, IT and a foreign language should be studied to 18 in my view, even if not at A level standard by most students
Cram all that in, and inevitably you end up diluting A Levels, which in my view is the worst possible thing you could do.
Also English - do you mean Lit? Can't see the point of an MCP* like me reading more Shakespeare. If language, then what more is to be learnt after getting an A* at GCSE?
Oh, and anyone who wanted to see applied maths in action, should have been watching the darts last night.
If you start needing 107, go for treble-19 and get the single, what’s your next dart if you want to leave either 40 or 32? You have one second, and likely don’t have A-level maths.
In fairness, I suspect from my amateur arrows that a large part of what the professionals do is learning by repetition and pattern recognition not calculation. I would have to calculate what's left but then I know from practice that 88 is treble 16 and tops - and I'd have done the "what if" calculation before throwing the first dart. I would imagine the pros don't even need to do the calculation in step one.
Yes. Darts has a relatively limited set of numbers with which to deal, but the speed of it all - from players, officials and commentators - is quite remarkable.
Compare with the number of people working in retail, who can’t calculate change from £20 if the bill is £13.64. Perhaps that’s why so many bars in London now take card payments only, a decision that’s going to bite them in the arse when the tourists (with expensive transaction fees on foreign cards) return next summer.
We do not have a 'fuck Maths' attitude. We have a balanced one, which accepts the fact that people have different skill sets and brain wiring. I happen to be good at English but I wouldn't be so fucking stupid, downright wicked, as to impose that on everyone else until it was drilled into them. I wouldn't want a brilliant mathematician to have to work their way through Chaucer until they're 18. Or someone with the gift of languages. Post-16 is an opportunity to begin specialising. We're not for the most part an IB country, we have Advanced levels which are actually a bloody good set of qualifications.
(Snip)
Whilst I have some sympathy with the above, we do have a massive problem with functional illiteracy and innumeracy in this country. Anyone who is functionally illiterate and/or innumerate is at a big disadvantage in life, and has been let down by the schools system, themselves and their parents.
If studying up to 18 means things like getting core skills into those left behind, then I'm all for it.
And there is definitely a "fuck Maths" attitude out there. It seems to be perfectly socially acceptable to admit being innumerate and it gets laughed off.
Oh dear, I risk as an educationalist getting drawn into this which I'd really rather avoid. Partly because I don't enjoy discussing education with people who are not actually in it.
Generally speaking education does not equip pupils for the world. I constantly read, especially from the reactionary Right, moaning about mobile phones in schools but THIS IS THE MODERN WORLD!!!! Not teaching with technology is as antediluvian as making pupils write with quills. Or write with pens. Or even write at all. I mean, I'm an English teacher but why do we still make pupils write exams with pens. Whoever uses a pen in real life? Seriously: it's GONE. We use keypads and phones. We even sign things electronically now or with face recognition or iris scanning.
As for school curriculum IT, it's an absolute joke.
Okay, so I'm being provocative but really, truly, education does NOT fit people for actual life. Especially, I might add, the commercial world.
Making all pupils do maths until 18 is a pathetic response to a real, deep-seated, problem.
Oh ... and if you've never watched this then you REALLY should:
If you are an accountant, a banker, a data analyst, work in finance and resources or tech or in business management at any level you will almost certainly use Maths to some degree and that is most of the commercial world
I'm an engineer. I do plenty of sums, but I don't do any proper maths.
Most of the sums involve converting numbers between imperial and metric units.
Imagine a maths teacher borderline to stay in the job and considering their options, who will now be asked to teach a load of 16-18 year olds who don't want to be there but are forced into it, many of which will have no belief they can do maths, instead of teaching motivated students who have chosen the course.
What happens next.......
Pay will need to be going up 30% or so to get enough maths teachers in for this.
That's exactly what has happened for the last ten (roughly) years, though, in FE.
Perhaps Sunak really has done his maths homework, and is hoping public sector employees leave en masse and their posts cannot be filled to reduce the cost.
We do not have a 'fuck Maths' attitude. We have a balanced one, which accepts the fact that people have different skill sets and brain wiring. I happen to be good at English but I wouldn't be so fucking stupid, downright wicked, as to impose that on everyone else until it was drilled into them. I wouldn't want a brilliant mathematician to have to work their way through Chaucer until they're 18. Or someone with the gift of languages. Post-16 is an opportunity to begin specialising. We're not for the most part an IB country, we have Advanced levels which are actually a bloody good set of qualifications.
It's more of the same tired ideologically driven tory crap.
They need booting out of office ASAP.
To meet the needs of today's workplace English, Maths, IT and a foreign language should be studied to 18 in my view, even if not at A level standard by most students
I agree to some extent with English and Foreign Language, but as far as IT is concerned, the use of excel, word and power point is hardly A level standard IT, and I am sure the knowledge of Calculus, coordinate geometry and algebraic equations in relation to graphical analysis is not required in the boardroom or even the shop floor.
It doesn't need to be A level but certainly study of Word, Excel, MS Teams, One Drive, PowerPoint, Outlook, Sharepoint etc should be done until 18 by most pupils
Spreadsheets, documents and presentations are useful skills - but definitely don’t just teach the products of one company that’s pushing their software hard in schools. Use OpenOffice or similar, which is free and open source.
Agreed, I just use the MS words for convenience. I suppose these are Level 3 skills which should be being taught/learnt in all course studies between 16 and 18, especially BTECs.
It’s a bit of a case of damned if you do and damned if you don’t for Sunak it seems.
People have been complaining he’s an empty suit/crisis manager/ treasury wonk who is only interested in controlling inflation and needs to be doing more.
The day a part of a policy is announced he’s attacked for doing things that aren’t priorities.
As far as I have understood it this morning they aren’t intending on making every child do further maths but ensuring an ongoing teaching of maths - I’m presuming basic maths that will be important in people’s lives and careers to ensure that there isn’t this huge deficit in basic maths ability in children and young adults.
Of course it’s not going to solve the strikes, fix the NHS, end war in Ukraine but being an old fashioned sort I thought governments were supposed to be multi-functional and had different departments to focus on making the country run or run better rather than just being tunnel visioned on a couple of high profile matters.
So if it is a plan to make every kid into a rocket scientist then obviously it’s stupid but if it’s about a tweak to try and improve basic maths to ensure all UK adults of the future can live a bit better than that’s cool. Of course we could just tell Sunak to only focus on the big things and leave everything else to be sorted in the future.
But again, should we not be asking ourselves why twelve years of teaching maths is insufficient, and another two will magically solve it?
What are we doing wrong that twelve years - about one-seventh of the average person's lifetime - isn't enough time?
That’s fair enough - maybe the way maths is taught from day one is wrong and teaching needs fundamental change, not the teachers fault, but the whole way needs ripping up but there is another side which I can only put from my own experience and friends’ anecdotes that brains develop and change at different times for different people.
From my own experience I hated maths, wasn’t great at it but managed to pass all the exams. I was definitely a humanities person and arts. I then fell into finance and found that I could do all sorts of complicated maths and enjoyed it and had a very successful career off the back of a subject I hated as a kid.
I find that even chemistry matters now I am able to enjoy whereas I didn’t when young.
My rambling point is that there are probably a lot of children who aren’t interested or focussed when younger who let the maths go over their heads and they are lost but then if you keep putting the important basics in front of them, as they grow older they might discover a love, lose a fear, find a relevancy for learning it and will improve their life prospects or make their day to day existence better. I can’t see why that is a bad thing.
We do not have a 'fuck Maths' attitude. We have a balanced one, which accepts the fact that people have different skill sets and brain wiring. I happen to be good at English but I wouldn't be so fucking stupid, downright wicked, as to impose that on everyone else until it was drilled into them. I wouldn't want a brilliant mathematician to have to work their way through Chaucer until they're 18. Or someone with the gift of languages. Post-16 is an opportunity to begin specialising. We're not for the most part an IB country, we have Advanced levels which are actually a bloody good set of qualifications.
(Snip)
Whilst I have some sympathy with the above, we do have a massive problem with functional illiteracy and innumeracy in this country. Anyone who is functionally illiterate and/or innumerate is at a big disadvantage in life, and has been let down by the schools system, themselves and their parents.
If studying up to 18 means things like getting core skills into those left behind, then I'm all for it.
And there is definitely a "fuck Maths" attitude out there. It seems to be perfectly socially acceptable to admit being innumerate and it gets laughed off.
Oh dear, I risk as an educationalist getting drawn into this which I'd really rather avoid. Partly because I don't enjoy discussing education with people who are not actually in it.
Generally speaking education does not equip pupils for the world. I constantly read, especially from the reactionary Right, moaning about mobile phones in schools but THIS IS THE MODERN WORLD!!!! Not teaching with technology is as antediluvian as making pupils write with quills. Or write with pens. Or even write at all. I mean, I'm an English teacher but why do we still make pupils write exams with pens. Whoever uses a pen in real life? Seriously: it's GONE. We use keypads and phones. We even sign things electronically now or with face recognition or iris scanning.
As for school curriculum IT, it's an absolute joke.
Okay, so I'm being provocative but really, truly, education does NOT fit people for actual life. Especially, I might add, the commercial world.
Making all pupils do maths until 18 is a pathetic response to a real, deep-seated, problem.
Oh ... and if you've never watched this then you REALLY should:
If you are an accountant, a banker, a data analyst, work in finance and resources or tech or in business management at any level you will almost certainly use Maths to some degree and that is most of the commercial world
I'm an engineer. I do plenty of sums, but I don't do any proper maths.
Most of the sums involve converting numbers between imperial and metric units.
Converting between imperial and metric is really important. Even actual rocket scientists can screw that one up!
Oh, and anyone who wanted to see applied maths in action, should have been watching the darts last night.
If you start needing 107, go for treble-19 and get the single, what’s your next dart if you want to leave either 40 or 32? You have one second, and likely don’t have A-level maths.
In fairness, I suspect from my amateur arrows that a large part of what the professionals do is learning by repetition and pattern recognition not calculation. I would have to calculate what's left but then I know from practice that 88 is treble 16 and tops - and I'd have done the "what if" calculation before throwing the first dart. I would imagine the pros don't even need to do the calculation in step one.
Yes. Darts has a relatively limited set of numbers with which to deal, but the speed of it all - from players, officials and commentators - is quite remarkable.
Compare with the number of people working in retail, who can’t calculate change from £20 if the bill is £13.64. Perhaps that’s why so many bars in London now take card payments only, a decision that’s going to bite them in the arse when the tourists (with expensive transaction fees on foreign cards) return next summer.
Personally slightly more likely to use cash in the UK than when on holiday. Either cash or card can be exchanged relatively cheaply or very expensively when travelling.
Oh, and anyone who wanted to see applied maths in action, should have been watching the darts last night.
If you start needing 107, go for treble-19 and get the single, what’s your next dart if you want to leave either 40 or 32? You have one second, and likely don’t have A-level maths.
In fairness, I suspect from my amateur arrows that a large part of what the professionals do is learning by repetition and pattern recognition not calculation. I would have to calculate what's left but then I know from practice that 88 is treble 16 and tops - and I'd have done the "what if" calculation before throwing the first dart. I would imagine the pros don't even need to do the calculation in step one.
Yes. Darts has a relatively limited set of numbers with which to deal, but the speed of it all - from players, officials and commentators - is quite remarkable.
Compare with the number of people working in retail, who can’t calculate change from £20 if the bill is £13.64. Perhaps that’s why so many bars in London now take card payments only, a decision that’s going to bite them in the arse when the tourists (with expensive transaction fees on foreign cards) return next summer.
This surprised me over Christmas. I went to a Staff Christmas meal for the first time in many years. At the bar I was in a queue behind many younger teachers who all paid by tapping, When it got to me I had to ask whether they still accepted money! as I had taken out cash for the evening. Showing my age I suspect.
Oh, and anyone who wanted to see applied maths in action, should have been watching the darts last night.
If you start needing 107, go for treble-19 and get the single, what’s your next dart if you want to leave either 40 or 32? You have one second, and likely don’t have A-level maths.
In fairness, I suspect from my amateur arrows that a large part of what the professionals do is learning by repetition and pattern recognition not calculation. I would have to calculate what's left but then I know from practice that 88 is treble 16 and tops - and I'd have done the "what if" calculation before throwing the first dart. I would imagine the pros don't even need to do the calculation in step one.
Yes. Darts has a relatively limited set of numbers with which to deal, but the speed of it all - from players, officials and commentators - is quite remarkable.
Compare with the number of people working in retail, who can’t calculate change from £20 if the bill is £13.64. Perhaps that’s why so many bars in London now take card payments only, a decision that’s going to bite them in the arse when the tourists (with expensive transaction fees on foreign cards) return next summer.
Do tourists have expensive (or any) transaction fees? I don't when I use my card abroad.
They put a load of soldiers in a large building marked on every map. They put a load of ammunition next to them. They move them about in broad daylight.
And whose fault is it when the Ukrainians blow them up?
Although I suppose the story may have the positive side effect (from the Putinista point of view) of making soldiers nervous about using mobile phones to tell people just how big a disaster Putin's penile compensation scheme is.
And, of course, it may have some truth in it, improbable though this would be for a Russian press release.
Mobiks get their phones confiscated and the Russian government makes MegaFon, MTS, etc. cancel the contracts. Because they are as thick as fuck and usually the product of fetal alcohol syndrome they go out and buy/steal new phones all the time. The Ukrainians probably have an operation to sell cheap Chinaphones with compromised baseband processors going in Donbas.
It almost certainly doesn't require any of that. In all likelihood the mobile networks are backdoored or hacked and Ukraine, or an ally, can hoover up all the signalling data in occupied Ukraine. So they know where all phones are, and even switching them off will merely give a bloody big clue that something important is nearby. Cyberwar is yet another area where Russia appears to be failing and on the back foot.
I reckon this located-by-mobile-phone is, if true, far from the whole story. There will be lots of signals and visual intelligence feeding into knowledge on the target. Saying "You idiots used mobile phones!" is a good cover for "Our intel teams on the ground, along with spy and comms satellites, saw you all congregating there."
Or it could be that one piece of evidence (say, on-ground teams) was confirmed with satellite imagery and mobile phone data.
If there really were 400+ conscripts stationed in a disused school, I’d have thought a few of the locals would have noticed and got the message out to the appropriate authority?
Where are all the new maths teachers that will be required going to come from? Recruitment and retention levels in the teaching profession are falling.
It’s a bit of a case of damned if you do and damned if you don’t for Sunak it seems.
People have been complaining he’s an empty suit/crisis manager/ treasury wonk who is only interested in controlling inflation and needs to be doing more.
The day a part of a policy is announced he’s attacked for doing things that aren’t priorities.
< Snip >
I think there is something in this which gets to the heart of why I think the chances of a Labour majority are underrated.
I get the sense that the public and the media have had enough of the Tories, and they simply aren't willing to listen anymore. It's gone beyond not giving them the benefit of the doubt, and to a level of assuming the worst, that means they will get zero credit for anything good they do and maximum blame for every stubbed toe and spilt tea.
Cold in your house - because the Tories crashed the economy. Dad can't get an ambulance - because the Tories wrecked the NHS. Everton lost badly last night - that's the Tories fault. Rains on your birthday? Blame the Tories. Burnt the toast? Damn those useless Tories!
Oh, and anyone who wanted to see applied maths in action, should have been watching the darts last night.
If you start needing 107, go for treble-19 and get the single, what’s your next dart if you want to leave either 40 or 32? You have one second, and likely don’t have A-level maths.
In fairness, I suspect from my amateur arrows that a large part of what the professionals do is learning by repetition and pattern recognition not calculation. I would have to calculate what's left but then I know from practice that 88 is treble 16 and tops - and I'd have done the "what if" calculation before throwing the first dart. I would imagine the pros don't even need to do the calculation in step one.
Yes. Darts has a relatively limited set of numbers with which to deal, but the speed of it all - from players, officials and commentators - is quite remarkable.
Compare with the number of people working in retail, who can’t calculate change from £20 if the bill is £13.64. Perhaps that’s why so many bars in London now take card payments only, a decision that’s going to bite them in the arse when the tourists (with expensive transaction fees on foreign cards) return next summer.
Do tourists have expensive (or any) transaction fees? I don't when I use my card abroad.
I do! Transaction fees and crappy exchange rates. Cheaper to use a local ATM for many people, and cheaper still to change a load of money before you travel.
It does depend on where the card was issued and where you are travelling though. I suspect there was an EU law somewhere that abolished the fees within the EU so lots of people don’t see them.
Dozens of small transactions (like buying beers one at a time on a fortnight’s holiday) and it seriously adds up. London beer still miles cheaper than Dubai beer though!
Where are all the new maths teachers that will be required going to come from? Recruitment and retention levels in the teaching profession are falling.
I hear there are some people from the NHS looking to retrain into new careers...
Where are all the new maths teachers that will be required going to come from? Recruitment and retention levels in the teaching profession are falling.
It’s a bit of a case of damned if you do and damned if you don’t for Sunak it seems.
People have been complaining he’s an empty suit/crisis manager/ treasury wonk who is only interested in controlling inflation and needs to be doing more.
The day a part of a policy is announced he’s attacked for doing things that aren’t priorities.
< Snip >
I think there is something in this which gets to the heart of why I think the chances of a Labour majority are underrated.
I get the sense that the public and the media have had enough of the Tories, and they simply aren't willing to listen anymore. It's gone beyond not giving them the benefit of the doubt, and to a level of assuming the worst, that means they will get zero credit for anything good they do and maximum blame for every stubbed toe and spilt tea.
Cold in your house - because the Tories crashed the economy. Dad can't get an ambulance - because the Tories wrecked the NHS. Everton lost badly last night - that's the Tories fault. Rains on your birthday? Blame the Tories. Burnt the toast? Damn those useless Tories!
The next election is going to be brutal.
You're assuming that midterm "antis" will automatically coalesce around Sir Keir. This might happen (especially if he ever gets around to giving people something positive to vote for), but I can't see why it can be assumed.
Oh, and anyone who wanted to see applied maths in action, should have been watching the darts last night.
If you start needing 107, go for treble-19 and get the single, what’s your next dart if you want to leave either 40 or 32? You have one second, and likely don’t have A-level maths.
In fairness, I suspect from my amateur arrows that a large part of what the professionals do is learning by repetition and pattern recognition not calculation. I would have to calculate what's left but then I know from practice that 88 is treble 16 and tops - and I'd have done the "what if" calculation before throwing the first dart. I would imagine the pros don't even need to do the calculation in step one.
Yes. Darts has a relatively limited set of numbers with which to deal, but the speed of it all - from players, officials and commentators - is quite remarkable.
Compare with the number of people working in retail, who can’t calculate change from £20 if the bill is £13.64. Perhaps that’s why so many bars in London now take card payments only, a decision that’s going to bite them in the arse when the tourists (with expensive transaction fees on foreign cards) return next summer.
Do tourists have expensive (or any) transaction fees? I don't when I use my card abroad.
I do! Transaction fees and crappy exchange rates. Cheaper to use a local ATM for many people, and cheaper still to change a load of money before you travel.
It does depend on where the card was issued and where you are travelling though. I suspect there was an EU law somewhere that abolished the fees within the EU so lots of people don’t see them.
Dozens of small transactions (like buying beers one at a time on a fortnight’s holiday) and it seriously adds up. London beer still miles cheaper than Dubai beer though!
It certainly didn't abolish them. As I noted when on holiday in Italy and Malta before we left the EU.
More likely most people didn't see them because they don't check their bank statements.
Oh, and anyone who wanted to see applied maths in action, should have been watching the darts last night.
If you start needing 107, go for treble-19 and get the single, what’s your next dart if you want to leave either 40 or 32? You have one second, and likely don’t have A-level maths.
In fairness, I suspect from my amateur arrows that a large part of what the professionals do is learning by repetition and pattern recognition not calculation. I would have to calculate what's left but then I know from practice that 88 is treble 16 and tops - and I'd have done the "what if" calculation before throwing the first dart. I would imagine the pros don't even need to do the calculation in step one.
Yes. Darts has a relatively limited set of numbers with which to deal, but the speed of it all - from players, officials and commentators - is quite remarkable.
Compare with the number of people working in retail, who can’t calculate change from £20 if the bill is £13.64. Perhaps that’s why so many bars in London now take card payments only, a decision that’s going to bite them in the arse when the tourists (with expensive transaction fees on foreign cards) return next summer.
Do tourists have expensive (or any) transaction fees? I don't when I use my card abroad.
I do! Transaction fees and crappy exchange rates. Cheaper to use a local ATM for many people, and cheaper still to change a load of money before you travel.
It does depend on where the card was issued and where you are travelling though. I suspect there was an EU law somewhere that abolished the fees within the EU so lots of people don’t see them.
Dozens of small transactions (like buying beers one at a time on a fortnight’s holiday) and it seriously adds up. London beer still miles cheaper than Dubai beer though!
Blimey, get a better bank. Our legacy banks still do crap like this sometimes, I believe, but the challenger (especially app-based) banks tend to make a big deal about not charging foreign transaction fees.
It’s a bit of a case of damned if you do and damned if you don’t for Sunak it seems.
People have been complaining he’s an empty suit/crisis manager/ treasury wonk who is only interested in controlling inflation and needs to be doing more.
The day a part of a policy is announced he’s attacked for doing things that aren’t priorities.
As far as I have understood it this morning they aren’t intending on making every child do further maths but ensuring an ongoing teaching of maths - I’m presuming basic maths that will be important in people’s lives and careers to ensure that there isn’t this huge deficit in basic maths ability in children and young adults.
Of course it’s not going to solve the strikes, fix the NHS, end war in Ukraine but being an old fashioned sort I thought governments were supposed to be multi-functional and had different departments to focus on making the country run or run better rather than just being tunnel visioned on a couple of high profile matters.
So if it is a plan to make every kid into a rocket scientist then obviously it’s stupid but if it’s about a tweak to try and improve basic maths to ensure all UK adults of the future can live a bit better than that’s cool. Of course we could just tell Sunak to only focus on the big things and leave everything else to be sorted in the future.
But again, should we not be asking ourselves why twelve years of teaching maths is insufficient, and another two will magically solve it?
What are we doing wrong that twelve years - about one-seventh of the average person's lifetime - isn't enough time?
That’s fair enough - maybe the way maths is taught from day one is wrong and teaching needs fundamental change, not the teachers fault, but the whole way needs ripping up but there is another side which I can only put from my own experience and friends’ anecdotes that brains develop and change at different times for different people.
From my own experience I hated maths, wasn’t great at it but managed to pass all the exams. I was definitely a humanities person and arts. I then fell into finance and found that I could do all sorts of complicated maths and enjoyed it and had a very successful career off the back of a subject I hated as a kid.
I find that even chemistry matters now I am able to enjoy whereas I didn’t when young.
My rambling point is that there are probably a lot of children who aren’t interested or focussed when younger who let the maths go over their heads and they are lost but then if you keep putting the important basics in front of them, as they grow older they might discover a love, lose a fear, find a relevancy for learning it and will improve their life prospects or make their day to day existence better. I can’t see why that is a bad thing.
I agree with all of this. There is a case for improving STEM teaching from a course content perspective - but ultimately it comes down to teacher attitudes towards the subject in primary school and early secondary years.
If the teachers don't like the subject themselves, how will they engender any enthusiasm among their students?
The loaf baked without love satisfies only half the hunger and all that, as Omar Khayyam (or Fitzgibbon) said.
David Davis: There are in Tory party about 20 per cent [of MPs] who are obsessed by the fact they voted for [Boris Johnson] and therefore he should be [in power] irrespective of what sin he committed,” Mr Davis told The Independent.
He added: “That really is not the view of the public – it would cost us a lot of seats if Boris was back in charge. It’s not the primary reason I don’t want him back – I don’t want him back because he was not a good prime minister.”
Mr Davis pointed to the fact that Mr Johnson had the worst public approval before Liz Truss’s disastrous six weeks at No 10. “That worst public rating means something.”
Oh, and anyone who wanted to see applied maths in action, should have been watching the darts last night.
If you start needing 107, go for treble-19 and get the single, what’s your next dart if you want to leave either 40 or 32? You have one second, and likely don’t have A-level maths.
In fairness, I suspect from my amateur arrows that a large part of what the professionals do is learning by repetition and pattern recognition not calculation. I would have to calculate what's left but then I know from practice that 88 is treble 16 and tops - and I'd have done the "what if" calculation before throwing the first dart. I would imagine the pros don't even need to do the calculation in step one.
Yes. Darts has a relatively limited set of numbers with which to deal, but the speed of it all - from players, officials and commentators - is quite remarkable.
Compare with the number of people working in retail, who can’t calculate change from £20 if the bill is £13.64. Perhaps that’s why so many bars in London now take card payments only, a decision that’s going to bite them in the arse when the tourists (with expensive transaction fees on foreign cards) return next summer.
This surprised me over Christmas. I went to a Staff Christmas meal for the first time in many years. At the bar I was in a queue behind many younger teachers who all paid by tapping, When it got to me I had to ask whether they still accepted money! as I had taken out cash for the evening. Showing my age I suspect.
Yes, I realised a couple of years ago when I started frequenting pubs again that hardly anyone uses cash anymore, even at the bar. Almost all transactions are by card or, more frequently, phone. After a while I stopped carrying cash at all, and now just take my phone out with me. This did catch me out a couple of weeks ago when paying for a meal. The payment itself was fine but, strangely and embarrassingly, there was no way to add a tip without cash.
Oh, and anyone who wanted to see applied maths in action, should have been watching the darts last night.
If you start needing 107, go for treble-19 and get the single, what’s your next dart if you want to leave either 40 or 32? You have one second, and likely don’t have A-level maths.
In fairness, I suspect from my amateur arrows that a large part of what the professionals do is learning by repetition and pattern recognition not calculation. I would have to calculate what's left but then I know from practice that 88 is treble 16 and tops - and I'd have done the "what if" calculation before throwing the first dart. I would imagine the pros don't even need to do the calculation in step one.
Yes. Darts has a relatively limited set of numbers with which to deal, but the speed of it all - from players, officials and commentators - is quite remarkable.
Compare with the number of people working in retail, who can’t calculate change from £20 if the bill is £13.64. Perhaps that’s why so many bars in London now take card payments only, a decision that’s going to bite them in the arse when the tourists (with expensive transaction fees on foreign cards) return next summer.
Do tourists have expensive (or any) transaction fees? I don't when I use my card abroad.
I do! Transaction fees and crappy exchange rates. Cheaper to use a local ATM for many people, and cheaper still to change a load of money before you travel.
It does depend on where the card was issued and where you are travelling though. I suspect there was an EU law somewhere that abolished the fees within the EU so lots of people don’t see them.
Dozens of small transactions (like buying beers one at a time on a fortnight’s holiday) and it seriously adds up. London beer still miles cheaper than Dubai beer though!
It certainly didn't abolish them. As I noted when on holiday in Italy and Malta before we left the EU.
More likely most people didn't see them because they don't check their bank statements.
Or they use something like Revolut.
Before some people used to exchange their cash at the airport and lose 10%, others in advance and lose 3%.
Now it is the same with cards, some pay £2 + 3%, others pay close to zero.
I have no argument with a greater focus on numeracy and maths. They are clearly vital in the modern age. However, I think it’s a strange one for the PM to go large on. It does also raise a lot of questions about how to do it in practice. Recruitment and retention in STEM subjects is a major challenge, while education is also devolved, so Sunak is talking about England, not the UK.
For me, it’s further evidence of Sunak’s poor grasp of politics and leadership. This is very much second-in-command stuff.
The entire PB debate this morning is almost completely pointless. Why? Because it ignores AI
It’s like a bunch of people discussing the widening of roads to incorporate horse-drawn omnibuses in 1901
“Microsoft plans to release a version of Bing that uses OpenAI's #ChatGPT tech to answer some search queries, possibly launching as soon as Q1 2023 (Aaron Holmes/The Information) #AI pulse.ly/jzf7onqvp7 @BetaMoroney@IanLJones98@Shi4Tech@lyakovet@enilev@EvaSmartAI”
I'm also going to mention my deep-seated fundamental belief, certainty, that not only are there multiple forms of intelligence but there are also multiple learning differences.
Probably not a popular belief on here, especially amongst the reactionary Right, but it's undoubtedly true.
Generally speaking those who believe sitting compliant children behind individual desks and lecturing them with chalk and talk is the right way to educate are dismissive of such things. Ironically, private schools are stuffed full of pupils who could most benefit from teachers with a better comprehension of education.
Your prejudices are out of date. Private schools these days all have, under various names, learning methods departments.
Making all pupils do maths until 18 is a pathetic response to a real, deep-seated, problem.
...
Just for a bit of perspective, have run today's British political contretemps past my Irish family and their response can be broadly summarised as, "what sort of backwards country isn't teaching all their children Maths to age 18?"
It's time for Congress to come together and make George Santos Speaker of the House. After all, he already served two terms as President, was a hero in the Crimean War, won a Pulitzer and a Nobel, is a qualified neurosurgeon, and won silver in downhill slalom at Innsbruck in '64. https://mobile.twitter.com/KeithNHumphreys/status/1610465677042929666
Where are all the new maths teachers that will be required going to come from? Recruitment and retention levels in the teaching profession are falling.
Give it until 2024 and they will stop falling.
Because they will have collapsed entirely....
Depends if there is a recession or not, teacher recruitment is normally inversely correlated to the state of the economy. In a recession and if unemployment goes up so normally does teacher recruitment, especially in Maths and Science.
There was a big rise in trainee teachers after the 2008 Crash for example
As somebody who did both A Level Maths and Further Maths and thought about reading Mathematics at University I am very pro Maths so good on Sunak for focussing on Maths.
Not sure the country is in the mood for it though.
Well done to you (genuinely) but that's just the problem. Someone, private-educated, who is good at Maths wants to impose it on everyone else. I was very good at English. Am I supposed to impose that on everyone with a maths-brain? Or those who are brilliant at drama or art or languages or design or sport?
This country has a zillion more important things on which to focus, not someone's pet subject. This just shows him up to be a student politician. Out of touch, ideological, aloof.
They are a bunch of fucking idiots.
The other thing that is being forgotten here is just how intensive our post-16 courses, especially the new ones, actually are. There is a reason why only people doing further maths routinely do four a-levels these days. Adding a compulsory subject on top, especially for modern apprenticeships where the college time has to be quite limited, would be a nightmare.
It's entirely typical of the whole government's approach to education. 'We all did well in maths at post-16. We are talented and successful people. Therefore, the key to making people talented and successful is to make them do more maths.'
Can't escape the feeling that the government's thinking hasn't got further than:
1 City quants are fabulously wealthy and have private healthcare.
2 If everyone in Britain was a city quant they would all have private healthcare and we wouldn't have to worry about the NHS any more.
3 Therefore, everyone needs to study maths.
This is a bit unfair. From what Casino says upthread it sounds like this is a result of a serious report that's considered the issue, rather than something made up in ten minutes in Downing Street. The extension of compulsory Maths education to 18 is likely only to be the most eye-catching of many proposals, rather than the main policy itself.
It is total bollox from a bunch of half witted numpties, they could not run a bath.
Does Hollywood not have a statute of limitations? It’s taken a while for the case to be brought, and Zeffirelli is now dead. Incidentally, Olivia Hussey is the best Juliet on film by miles.
Oh, and anyone who wanted to see applied maths in action, should have been watching the darts last night.
If you start needing 107, go for treble-19 and get the single, what’s your next dart if you want to leave either 40 or 32? You have one second, and likely don’t have A-level maths.
In fairness, I suspect from my amateur arrows that a large part of what the professionals do is learning by repetition and pattern recognition not calculation. I would have to calculate what's left but then I know from practice that 88 is treble 16 and tops - and I'd have done the "what if" calculation before throwing the first dart. I would imagine the pros don't even need to do the calculation in step one.
Yes. Darts has a relatively limited set of numbers with which to deal, but the speed of it all - from players, officials and commentators - is quite remarkable.
Compare with the number of people working in retail, who can’t calculate change from £20 if the bill is £13.64. Perhaps that’s why so many bars in London now take card payments only, a decision that’s going to bite them in the arse when the tourists (with expensive transaction fees on foreign cards) return next summer.
Do tourists have expensive (or any) transaction fees? I don't when I use my card abroad.
You need to get yourself a Starling account in that case. Or a Barclays reward credit card. Neither have transaction fees for spending overseas.
We do not have a 'fuck Maths' attitude. We have a balanced one, which accepts the fact that people have different skill sets and brain wiring. I happen to be good at English but I wouldn't be so fucking stupid, downright wicked, as to impose that on everyone else until it was drilled into them. I wouldn't want a brilliant mathematician to have to work their way through Chaucer until they're 18. Or someone with the gift of languages. Post-16 is an opportunity to begin specialising. We're not for the most part an IB country, we have Advanced levels which are actually a bloody good set of qualifications.
(Snip)
Whilst I have some sympathy with the above, we do have a massive problem with functional illiteracy and innumeracy in this country. Anyone who is functionally illiterate and/or innumerate is at a big disadvantage in life, and has been let down by the schools system, themselves and their parents.
If studying up to 18 means things like getting core skills into those left behind, then I'm all for it.
And there is definitely a "fuck Maths" attitude out there. It seems to be perfectly socially acceptable to admit being innumerate and it gets laughed off.
Oh dear, I risk as an educationalist getting drawn into this which I'd really rather avoid. Partly because I don't enjoy discussing education with people who are not actually in it.
Generally speaking education does not equip pupils for the world. I constantly read, especially from the reactionary Right, moaning about mobile phones in schools but THIS IS THE MODERN WORLD!!!! Not teaching with technology is as antediluvian as making pupils write with quills. Or write with pens. Or even write at all. I mean, I'm an English teacher but why do we still make pupils write exams with pens. Whoever uses a pen in real life? Seriously: it's GONE. We use keypads and phones. We even sign things electronically now or with face recognition or iris scanning.
As for school curriculum IT, it's an absolute joke.
Okay, so I'm being provocative but really, truly, education does NOT fit people for actual life. Especially, I might add, the commercial world.
Making all pupils do maths until 18 is a pathetic response to a real, deep-seated, problem.
Oh ... and if you've never watched this then you REALLY should:
If you are an accountant, a banker, a data analyst, work in finance and resources or tech or in business management at any level you will almost certainly use Maths to some degree and that is most of the commercial world
I'm an engineer. I do plenty of sums, but I don't do any proper maths.
Most of the sums involve converting numbers between imperial and metric units.
Sunak's maths approach is not inherently bad, but it is irrelevant to the primary concerns of the electorate and sounds... odd. Not Truss' energy wibbling when asked about borrowing/inflation/mortgage costs weird, but still out of kilter with the general public discourse of the minute. And that's not exactly a subtle or hidden conversation people are having (economic, and, lately, A&E).
I disagree.
It is inherently bad because it is based on a damaging misunderstanding.
And if ever implemented (it won't be) it would be a disaster for that reason.
It would be nice, just for once, to have leaders who bothered to actually understand matters in education before coming up with policies.
Education really is a subject where everyone is an expert (or thinks they are). The problem is compounded by the fact that many of those pontificating on the subject, and implementing it across the state sector, have never actually been anywhere near a state school. A horrible thought is starting to cross my mind - is Sunak actually a worse PM than Johnson?
Certainly trying hard to be for sure, though a tough one.
In the desire to stick it to the Tories we've got a "fuck maths" attitude on here this morning.
I despair.
If Rishi announced an increase in pensions, there would be people arguing that the problem with the country is keeping old people alive.
Edit: One amusement of the Elon Musk thing is how progressives have adopted the MAGA republican talking points from a couple of years back. The peak of this has been self proclaimed socialists defending the actions of Richard Fucking Shelby.
I have no argument with a greater focus on numeracy and maths. They are clearly vital in the modern age. However, I think it’s a strange one for the PM to go large on. It does also raise a lot of questions about how to do it in practice. Recruitment and retention in STEM subjects is a major challenge, while education is also devolved, so Sunak is talking about England, not the UK.
For me, it’s further evidence of Sunak’s poor grasp of politics and leadership. This is very much second-in-command stuff.
Indeed he says it is personal for him. He is signposting what he wants to do, not what is needed or practical.
There are far bigger immediate problems for the country, and on maths the problems are early years maths not post 16 maths and we don't have enough maths teachers anyway, nor are we willing to pay significantly more to get more of them.
The entire PB debate this morning is almost completely pointless. Why? Because it ignores AI
It’s like a bunch of people discussing the widening of roads to incorporate horse-drawn omnibuses in 1901
“Microsoft plans to release a version of Bing that uses OpenAI's #ChatGPT tech to answer some search queries, possibly launching as soon as Q1 2023 (Aaron Holmes/The Information) #AI pulse.ly/jzf7onqvp7 @BetaMoroney@IanLJones98@Shi4Tech@lyakovet@enilev@EvaSmartAI”
AI is about to transform the world. One of the first sectors to be revolutionised (devastated?) is education
Teaching people more maths is arguably like training adolescents to carry sedan chairs
While your 'everything is pointless because...' posts are becoming a little hackneyed, you do touch on a fair point about secondary education's disconnect from the world.
That's not going to be resolved by government setting a national curriculum - particularly this government.
Oh, and anyone who wanted to see applied maths in action, should have been watching the darts last night.
If you start needing 107, go for treble-19 and get the single, what’s your next dart if you want to leave either 40 or 32? You have one second, and likely don’t have A-level maths.
In fairness, I suspect from my amateur arrows that a large part of what the professionals do is learning by repetition and pattern recognition not calculation. I would have to calculate what's left but then I know from practice that 88 is treble 16 and tops - and I'd have done the "what if" calculation before throwing the first dart. I would imagine the pros don't even need to do the calculation in step one.
Yes. Darts has a relatively limited set of numbers with which to deal, but the speed of it all - from players, officials and commentators - is quite remarkable.
Compare with the number of people working in retail, who can’t calculate change from £20 if the bill is £13.64. Perhaps that’s why so many bars in London now take card payments only, a decision that’s going to bite them in the arse when the tourists (with expensive transaction fees on foreign cards) return next summer.
This surprised me over Christmas. I went to a Staff Christmas meal for the first time in many years. At the bar I was in a queue behind many younger teachers who all paid by tapping, When it got to me I had to ask whether they still accepted money! as I had taken out cash for the evening. Showing my age I suspect.
Yes, I realised a couple of years ago when I started frequenting pubs again that hardly anyone uses cash anymore, even at the bar. Almost all transactions are by card or, more frequently, phone. After a while I stopped carrying cash at all, and now just take my phone out with me. This did catch me out a couple of weeks ago when paying for a meal. The payment itself was fine but, strangely and embarrassingly, there was no way to add a tip without cash.
At least some sorts of card machines can be programmed to add tips. If I'm at a restaurant and the card machine doesn't accept tips, I assume that the restaurant doesn't want tips - it's an easier way of signalling it than putting "tips not expected" on the menu, which I have seen in various places.
We do not have a 'fuck Maths' attitude. We have a balanced one, which accepts the fact that people have different skill sets and brain wiring. I happen to be good at English but I wouldn't be so fucking stupid, downright wicked, as to impose that on everyone else until it was drilled into them. I wouldn't want a brilliant mathematician to have to work their way through Chaucer until they're 18. Or someone with the gift of languages. Post-16 is an opportunity to begin specialising. We're not for the most part an IB country, we have Advanced levels which are actually a bloody good set of qualifications.
It's more of the same tired ideologically driven tory crap.
They need booting out of office ASAP.
To meet the needs of today's workplace English, Maths, IT and a foreign language should be studied to 18 in my view, even if not at A level standard by most students
I agree to some extent with English and Foreign Language, but as far as IT is concerned, the use of excel, word and power point is hardly A level standard IT, and I am sure the knowledge of Calculus, coordinate geometry and algebraic equations in relation to graphical analysis is not required in the boardroom or even the shop floor.
It doesn't need to be A level but certainly study of Word, Excel, MS Teams, One Drive, PowerPoint, Outlook, Sharepoint etc should be done until 18 by most pupils
Spreadsheets, documents and presentations are useful skills - but definitely don’t just teach the products of one company that’s pushing their software hard in schools. Use OpenOffice or similar, which is free and open source.
In the workplace the reality is most products will be from Microsoft
I have no argument with a greater focus on numeracy and maths. They are clearly vital in the modern age. However, I think it’s a strange one for the PM to go large on. It does also raise a lot of questions about how to do it in practice. Recruitment and retention in STEM subjects is a major challenge, while education is also devolved, so Sunak is talking about England, not the UK.
For me, it’s further evidence of Sunak’s poor grasp of politics and leadership. This is very much second-in-command stuff.
Yes, it just comes across as weird and out of touch for the PM to be focussing on this. What people want are solutions to our health care crisis. The government's apparent inability or unwillingness to make an effort to resolve the social care bed-blocking issue seems particularly baffling.
Oh, and anyone who wanted to see applied maths in action, should have been watching the darts last night.
If you start needing 107, go for treble-19 and get the single, what’s your next dart if you want to leave either 40 or 32? You have one second, and likely don’t have A-level maths.
In fairness, I suspect from my amateur arrows that a large part of what the professionals do is learning by repetition and pattern recognition not calculation. I would have to calculate what's left but then I know from practice that 88 is treble 16 and tops - and I'd have done the "what if" calculation before throwing the first dart. I would imagine the pros don't even need to do the calculation in step one.
Yes. Darts has a relatively limited set of numbers with which to deal, but the speed of it all - from players, officials and commentators - is quite remarkable.
Compare with the number of people working in retail, who can’t calculate change from £20 if the bill is £13.64. Perhaps that’s why so many bars in London now take card payments only, a decision that’s going to bite them in the arse when the tourists (with expensive transaction fees on foreign cards) return next summer.
Do tourists have expensive (or any) transaction fees? I don't when I use my card abroad.
You need to get yourself a Starling account in that case. Or a Barclays reward credit card. Neither have transaction fees for spending overseas.
I think you've misread my comment. I do have a Starling account, which I got specifically because it has zero fees abroad. So does Monzo although I believe that has some limits on cash withdrawals both in the UK and abroad.
A former aide to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was convicted Thursday after being found guilty of helping funnel illegal foreign campaign contributions from a Russian national into former President Trump's 2016 campaign https://mobile.twitter.com/anneapplebaum/status/1610442829901484033
Oh, and anyone who wanted to see applied maths in action, should have been watching the darts last night.
If you start needing 107, go for treble-19 and get the single, what’s your next dart if you want to leave either 40 or 32? You have one second, and likely don’t have A-level maths.
In fairness, I suspect from my amateur arrows that a large part of what the professionals do is learning by repetition and pattern recognition not calculation. I would have to calculate what's left but then I know from practice that 88 is treble 16 and tops - and I'd have done the "what if" calculation before throwing the first dart. I would imagine the pros don't even need to do the calculation in step one.
Yes. Darts has a relatively limited set of numbers with which to deal, but the speed of it all - from players, officials and commentators - is quite remarkable.
Compare with the number of people working in retail, who can’t calculate change from £20 if the bill is £13.64. Perhaps that’s why so many bars in London now take card payments only, a decision that’s going to bite them in the arse when the tourists (with expensive transaction fees on foreign cards) return next summer.
This surprised me over Christmas. I went to a Staff Christmas meal for the first time in many years. At the bar I was in a queue behind many younger teachers who all paid by tapping, When it got to me I had to ask whether they still accepted money! as I had taken out cash for the evening. Showing my age I suspect.
Yes, I realised a couple of years ago when I started frequenting pubs again that hardly anyone uses cash anymore, even at the bar. Almost all transactions are by card or, more frequently, phone. After a while I stopped carrying cash at all, and now just take my phone out with me. This did catch me out a couple of weeks ago when paying for a meal. The payment itself was fine but, strangely and embarrassingly, there was no way to add a tip without cash.
Taking only cards for the payment, but only cash for a tip, must lead to a huge reduction in tips to the staff.
The entire PB debate this morning is almost completely pointless. Why? Because it ignores AI
It’s like a bunch of people discussing the widening of roads to incorporate horse-drawn omnibuses in 1901
“Microsoft plans to release a version of Bing that uses OpenAI's #ChatGPT tech to answer some search queries, possibly launching as soon as Q1 2023 (Aaron Holmes/The Information) #AI pulse.ly/jzf7onqvp7 @BetaMoroney@IanLJones98@Shi4Tech@lyakovet@enilev@EvaSmartAI”
AI is about to transform the world. One of the first sectors to be revolutionised (devastated?) is education
Teaching people more maths is arguably like training adolescents to carry sedan chairs
While your 'everything is pointless because...' posts are becoming a little hackneyed, you do touch on a fair point about secondary education's disconnect from the world.
That's not going to be resolved by government setting a national curriculum - particularly this government.
I keep saying this because it remains true. A debate about education (and many other things) which completely ignores AI is a bizarre thing. It’s a chat on the beach about the day’s surfing even as the tsunami is visible on the horizon
“The rapid emergence of smart, accessible artificial intelligence tools - notably OpenAI’s remarkable #ChatGPT - has sent shockwaves around global higher education, raising fears of a new era of undetectable cheating. @timeshighered’s analysis 👇”
"If other impersonal intelligences can produce this knowledge better than a student can, then why do we value human learning? Why do we mandate the education of our children?" #ChatGPT“
We do need a huge debate about the value, purpose and future - if there is one - of education. But that debate should be a bit bigger than “let’s do more maths”
The entire PB debate this morning is almost completely pointless. Why? Because it ignores AI
It’s like a bunch of people discussing the widening of roads to incorporate horse-drawn omnibuses in 1901
“Microsoft plans to release a version of Bing that uses OpenAI's #ChatGPT tech to answer some search queries, possibly launching as soon as Q1 2023 (Aaron Holmes/The Information) #AI pulse.ly/jzf7onqvp7 @BetaMoroney@IanLJones98@Shi4Tech@lyakovet@enilev@EvaSmartAI”
AI is about to transform the world. One of the first sectors to be revolutionised (devastated?) is education
Teaching people more maths is arguably like training adolescents to carry sedan chairs
While your 'everything is pointless because...' posts are becoming a little hackneyed, you do touch on a fair point about secondary education's disconnect from the world.
That's not going to be resolved by government setting a national curriculum - particularly this government.
Does he though? How does not teaching maths help create the next generation of data scientists and ML engineers? If anything we need to be starting tougher concepts at an earlier age and raising expectations, not dumbing down.
A former aide to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was convicted Thursday after being found guilty of helping funnel illegal foreign campaign contributions from a Russian national into former President Trump's 2016 campaign https://mobile.twitter.com/anneapplebaum/status/1610442829901484033
I have no argument with a greater focus on numeracy and maths. They are clearly vital in the modern age. However, I think it’s a strange one for the PM to go large on. It does also raise a lot of questions about how to do it in practice. Recruitment and retention in STEM subjects is a major challenge, while education is also devolved, so Sunak is talking about England, not the UK.
For me, it’s further evidence of Sunak’s poor grasp of politics and leadership. This is very much second-in-command stuff.
Yes, it just comes across as weird and out of touch for the PM to be focussing on this. What people want are solutions to our health care crisis. The government's apparent inability or unwillingness to make an effort to resolve the social care bed-blocking issue seems particularly baffling.
It shouldn't be baffling - you just need to remember what happened last time they tried.
The entire PB debate this morning is almost completely pointless. Why? Because it ignores AI
It’s like a bunch of people discussing the widening of roads to incorporate horse-drawn omnibuses in 1901
“Microsoft plans to release a version of Bing that uses OpenAI's #ChatGPT tech to answer some search queries, possibly launching as soon as Q1 2023 (Aaron Holmes/The Information) #AI pulse.ly/jzf7onqvp7 @BetaMoroney@IanLJones98@Shi4Tech@lyakovet@enilev@EvaSmartAI”
AI is about to transform the world. One of the first sectors to be revolutionised (devastated?) is education
Teaching people more maths is arguably like training adolescents to carry sedan chairs
While your 'everything is pointless because...' posts are becoming a little hackneyed, you do touch on a fair point about secondary education's disconnect from the world.
That's not going to be resolved by government setting a national curriculum - particularly this government.
I keep saying this because it remains true. A debate about education (and many other things) which completely ignores AI is a bizarre thing. It’s a chat on the beach about the day’s surfing even as the tsunami is visible on the horizon
“The rapid emergence of smart, accessible artificial intelligence tools - notably OpenAI’s remarkable #ChatGPT - has sent shockwaves around global higher education, raising fears of a new era of undetectable cheating. @timeshighered’s analysis 👇”
"If other impersonal intelligences can produce this knowledge better than a student can, then why do we value human learning? Why do we mandate the education of our children?" #ChatGPT“
We do need a huge debate about the value, purpose and future - if there is one - of education. But that debate should be a bit bigger than “let’s do more maths”
I don't disagree. But that is a very long way from saying that maths is pointless.
The entire PB debate this morning is almost completely pointless. Why? Because it ignores AI
It’s like a bunch of people discussing the widening of roads to incorporate horse-drawn omnibuses in 1901
“Microsoft plans to release a version of Bing that uses OpenAI's #ChatGPT tech to answer some search queries, possibly launching as soon as Q1 2023 (Aaron Holmes/The Information) #AI pulse.ly/jzf7onqvp7 @BetaMoroney@IanLJones98@Shi4Tech@lyakovet@enilev@EvaSmartAI”
AI is about to transform the world. One of the first sectors to be revolutionised (devastated?) is education
Teaching people more maths is arguably like training adolescents to carry sedan chairs
While your 'everything is pointless because...' posts are becoming a little hackneyed, you do touch on a fair point about secondary education's disconnect from the world.
That's not going to be resolved by government setting a national curriculum - particularly this government.
I seem to remember a previous poster arguing that our education system is perfectly set up to produce generalist administrators for an Empire that ceased to exist somewhere between 1921 and 1965.
Leon seems to expect a dystopian future with a rich and leisured 2% sitting on top of 98% helots. No doubt the Grecian master-servant dynamics will appeal to him.
For the rest of us - roboticisation and AI will lead to some quite radical social changes as middle manager roles become progressively eliminated.
First they came for the typists, then they came for the secretaries, then they came for the accounts team, who will speak for me etc?
Unfortunately, neither Sunak nor Starmer look like they have the first clue about how to respond to these changes.
I have no argument with a greater focus on numeracy and maths. They are clearly vital in the modern age. However, I think it’s a strange one for the PM to go large on. It does also raise a lot of questions about how to do it in practice. Recruitment and retention in STEM subjects is a major challenge, while education is also devolved, so Sunak is talking about England, not the UK.
For me, it’s further evidence of Sunak’s poor grasp of politics and leadership. This is very much second-in-command stuff.
Yes, it just comes across as weird and out of touch for the PM to be focussing on this. What people want are solutions to our health care crisis. The government's apparent inability or unwillingness to make an effort to resolve the social care bed-blocking issue seems particularly baffling.
It shouldn't be baffling - you just need to remember what happened last time they tried.
Funding more hospice places probably wouldn't cost a lot of money and it would free up some mad number of beds like 8000. It's a no brainer tbh, but the government just seems completely stuck in treacle.
"What really surprised me was the high diversity we detected. . . . We took one tea bag (100 [or] 150 milligrams of dried plant material), we extracted DNA. And we found in green tea up to 400 species of insects in a single tea bag. . . . " https://mobile.twitter.com/DoctorKarl/status/1609853087853981696
Dutch TTF Natural Gas Futures have fallen continuously since December 7th and are now lower than a year ago, before the invasion of Ukraine.
Also, since August 11th, Germany has imported no Russian coal. Natural gas imports have been reduced from 55% at the beginning of 2022 to zero now. Oil imports dropped from 40% to 20% and will be zero by year end.
The entire PB debate this morning is almost completely pointless. Why? Because it ignores AI
It’s like a bunch of people discussing the widening of roads to incorporate horse-drawn omnibuses in 1901
“Microsoft plans to release a version of Bing that uses OpenAI's #ChatGPT tech to answer some search queries, possibly launching as soon as Q1 2023 (Aaron Holmes/The Information) #AI pulse.ly/jzf7onqvp7 @BetaMoroney@IanLJones98@Shi4Tech@lyakovet@enilev@EvaSmartAI”
AI is about to transform the world. One of the first sectors to be revolutionised (devastated?) is education
Teaching people more maths is arguably like training adolescents to carry sedan chairs
While your 'everything is pointless because...' posts are becoming a little hackneyed, you do touch on a fair point about secondary education's disconnect from the world.
That's not going to be resolved by government setting a national curriculum - particularly this government.
Does he though? How does not teaching maths help create the next generation of data scientists and ML engineers? If anything we need to be starting tougher concepts at an earlier age and raising expectations, not dumbing down.
Most people aren’t clever enough to learn maths, usefully, beyond the age of about 14. Most people have an IQ between 85-115
I have no argument with a greater focus on numeracy and maths. They are clearly vital in the modern age. However, I think it’s a strange one for the PM to go large on. It does also raise a lot of questions about how to do it in practice. Recruitment and retention in STEM subjects is a major challenge, while education is also devolved, so Sunak is talking about England, not the UK.
For me, it’s further evidence of Sunak’s poor grasp of politics and leadership. This is very much second-in-command stuff.
Yes, it just comes across as weird and out of touch for the PM to be focussing on this. What people want are solutions to our health care crisis. The government's apparent inability or unwillingness to make an effort to resolve the social care bed-blocking issue seems particularly baffling.
It shouldn't be baffling - you just need to remember what happened last time they tried.
Funding more hospice places probably wouldn't cost a lot of money and it would free up some mad number of beds like 8000. It's a no brainer tbh, but the government just seems completely stuck in treacle.
Because That’s Not How It Is Done.
You would be moving billions from a department that had “won” that from the treasury to a department that hadn’t “won” it.
Next you’ll be suggesting that we should pay people by skill, rather than making sure their manager earns more than them.
The entire PB debate this morning is almost completely pointless. Why? Because it ignores AI
It’s like a bunch of people discussing the widening of roads to incorporate horse-drawn omnibuses in 1901
“Microsoft plans to release a version of Bing that uses OpenAI's #ChatGPT tech to answer some search queries, possibly launching as soon as Q1 2023 (Aaron Holmes/The Information) #AI pulse.ly/jzf7onqvp7 @BetaMoroney@IanLJones98@Shi4Tech@lyakovet@enilev@EvaSmartAI”
AI is about to transform the world. One of the first sectors to be revolutionised (devastated?) is education
Teaching people more maths is arguably like training adolescents to carry sedan chairs
While your 'everything is pointless because...' posts are becoming a little hackneyed, you do touch on a fair point about secondary education's disconnect from the world.
That's not going to be resolved by government setting a national curriculum - particularly this government.
Does he though? How does not teaching maths help create the next generation of data scientists and ML engineers? If anything we need to be starting tougher concepts at an earlier age and raising expectations, not dumbing down.
See my above reply to Leon. Regarding maths, it's not a question of 'tougher' concepts, but rather what concepts.
As an example, the 'new math' taught for a time in the US, post the Sputnik panic, comprised much more fundamental mathematical concepts, but it wasn't actually 'tougher'; instead completely unfamiliar to anyone with a conventional high school maths education.
We do not have a 'fuck Maths' attitude. We have a balanced one, which accepts the fact that people have different skill sets and brain wiring. I happen to be good at English but I wouldn't be so fucking stupid, downright wicked, as to impose that on everyone else until it was drilled into them. I wouldn't want a brilliant mathematician to have to work their way through Chaucer until they're 18. Or someone with the gift of languages. Post-16 is an opportunity to begin specialising. We're not for the most part an IB country, we have Advanced levels which are actually a bloody good set of qualifications.
(Snip)
Whilst I have some sympathy with the above, we do have a massive problem with functional illiteracy and innumeracy in this country. Anyone who is functionally illiterate and/or innumerate is at a big disadvantage in life, and has been let down by the schools system, themselves and their parents.
If studying up to 18 means things like getting core skills into those left behind, then I'm all for it.
And there is definitely a "fuck Maths" attitude out there. It seems to be perfectly socially acceptable to admit being innumerate and it gets laughed off.
Oh dear, I risk as an educationalist getting drawn into this which I'd really rather avoid. Partly because I don't enjoy discussing education with people who are not actually in it.
Generally speaking education does not equip pupils for the world. I constantly read, especially from the reactionary Right, moaning about mobile phones in schools but THIS IS THE MODERN WORLD!!!! Not teaching with technology is as antediluvian as making pupils write with quills. Or write with pens. Or even write at all. I mean, I'm an English teacher but why do we still make pupils write exams with pens. Whoever uses a pen in real life? Seriously: it's GONE. We use keypads and phones. We even sign things electronically now or with face recognition or iris scanning.
As for school curriculum IT, it's an absolute joke.
Okay, so I'm being provocative but really, truly, education does NOT fit people for actual life. Especially, I might add, the commercial world.
Making all pupils do maths until 18 is a pathetic response to a real, deep-seated, problem.
Oh ... and if you've never watched this then you REALLY should:
If you are an accountant, a banker, a data analyst, work in finance and resources or tech or in business management at any level you will almost certainly use Maths to some degree and that is most of the commercial world
I'm an engineer. I do plenty of sums, but I don't do any proper maths.
Most of the sums involve converting numbers between imperial and metric units.
In which case I have Good News! When the Tories win again in 2024 on the back of the great Lady Cock Fear, they will abolish metric measures and go back to good old Imperial.
Oh, and anyone who wanted to see applied maths in action, should have been watching the darts last night.
If you start needing 107, go for treble-19 and get the single, what’s your next dart if you want to leave either 40 or 32? You have one second, and likely don’t have A-level maths.
In fairness, I suspect from my amateur arrows that a large part of what the professionals do is learning by repetition and pattern recognition not calculation. I would have to calculate what's left but then I know from practice that 88 is treble 16 and tops - and I'd have done the "what if" calculation before throwing the first dart. I would imagine the pros don't even need to do the calculation in step one.
Yes. Darts has a relatively limited set of numbers with which to deal, but the speed of it all - from players, officials and commentators - is quite remarkable.
Compare with the number of people working in retail, who can’t calculate change from £20 if the bill is £13.64. Perhaps that’s why so many bars in London now take card payments only, a decision that’s going to bite them in the arse when the tourists (with expensive transaction fees on foreign cards) return next summer.
Do tourists have expensive (or any) transaction fees? I don't when I use my card abroad.
You need to get yourself a Starling account in that case. Or a Barclays reward credit card. Neither have transaction fees for spending overseas.
Which are great if you’re an outbound tourist from the UK. Not so much if you’re an inbound tourist into the UK as I was, with a large pile of purple beer tokens that the pubs didn’t accept.
As for the policy of maths education - it is a decent discussion point and somewhat of a relief to be discussing policy.
Hardly policy Topping , given it is a physical impossibility it is just a squirrel to avoid the real elephant herd in the room. Back to wine discussion please.
It's time for Congress to come together and make George Santos Speaker of the House. After all, he already served two terms as President, was a hero in the Crimean War, won a Pulitzer and a Nobel, is a qualified neurosurgeon, and won silver in downhill slalom at Innsbruck in '64. https://mobile.twitter.com/KeithNHumphreys/status/1610465677042929666
You forgot the Paul Nuttall award for political honesty.
It’s a bit of a case of damned if you do and damned if you don’t for Sunak it seems.
People have been complaining he’s an empty suit/crisis manager/ treasury wonk who is only interested in controlling inflation and needs to be doing more.
The day a part of a policy is announced he’s attacked for doing things that aren’t priorities.
< Snip >
I think there is something in this which gets to the heart of why I think the chances of a Labour majority are underrated.
I get the sense that the public and the media have had enough of the Tories, and they simply aren't willing to listen anymore. It's gone beyond not giving them the benefit of the doubt, and to a level of assuming the worst, that means they will get zero credit for anything good they do and maximum blame for every stubbed toe and spilt tea.
Cold in your house - because the Tories crashed the economy. Dad can't get an ambulance - because the Tories wrecked the NHS. Everton lost badly last night - that's the Tories fault. Rains on your birthday? Blame the Tories. Burnt the toast? Damn those useless Tories!
The next election is going to be brutal.
You're assuming that midterm "antis" will automatically coalesce around Sir Keir. This might happen (especially if he ever gets around to giving people something positive to vote for), but I can't see why it can be assumed.
On the contrary. I am assuming that anti-Tories will reduce their tribal affiliations to use their vote with maximum tactical efficiency - in general this will benefit Labour more than other parties because Labour are second to the Tories in more seats.
One stumbling block is the new boundaries, that will complicate tactical voting.
It’s a bit of a case of damned if you do and damned if you don’t for Sunak it seems.
People have been complaining he’s an empty suit/crisis manager/ treasury wonk who is only interested in controlling inflation and needs to be doing more.
The day a part of a policy is announced he’s attacked for doing things that aren’t priorities.
As far as I have understood it this morning they aren’t intending on making every child do further maths but ensuring an ongoing teaching of maths - I’m presuming basic maths that will be important in people’s lives and careers to ensure that there isn’t this huge deficit in basic maths ability in children and young adults.
Of course it’s not going to solve the strikes, fix the NHS, end war in Ukraine but being an old fashioned sort I thought governments were supposed to be multi-functional and had different departments to focus on making the country run or run better rather than just being tunnel visioned on a couple of high profile matters.
So if it is a plan to make every kid into a rocket scientist then obviously it’s stupid but if it’s about a tweak to try and improve basic maths to ensure all UK adults of the future can live a bit better than that’s cool. Of course we could just tell Sunak to only focus on the big things and leave everything else to be sorted in the future.
All that money wasted on private education , country going down the toilet and the combined wisdom of the cabinet is let's make the children do an extra 2 years of Maths , self taught as we have no teachers. Unbelievable.
The entire PB debate this morning is almost completely pointless. Why? Because it ignores AI
It’s like a bunch of people discussing the widening of roads to incorporate horse-drawn omnibuses in 1901
“Microsoft plans to release a version of Bing that uses OpenAI's #ChatGPT tech to answer some search queries, possibly launching as soon as Q1 2023 (Aaron Holmes/The Information) #AI pulse.ly/jzf7onqvp7 @BetaMoroney@IanLJones98@Shi4Tech@lyakovet@enilev@EvaSmartAI”
AI is about to transform the world. One of the first sectors to be revolutionised (devastated?) is education
Teaching people more maths is arguably like training adolescents to carry sedan chairs
While your 'everything is pointless because...' posts are becoming a little hackneyed, you do touch on a fair point about secondary education's disconnect from the world.
That's not going to be resolved by government setting a national curriculum - particularly this government.
Does he though? How does not teaching maths help create the next generation of data scientists and ML engineers? If anything we need to be starting tougher concepts at an earlier age and raising expectations, not dumbing down.
See my above reply to Leon. Regarding maths, it's not a question of 'tougher' concepts, but rather what concepts.
As an example, the 'new math' taught for a time in the US, post the Sputnik panic, comprised much more fundamental mathematical concepts, but it wasn't actually 'tougher'; instead completely unfamiliar to anyone with a conventional high school maths education.
Ah, the New Math: where the important thing is to understand what you're doing rather than to get the right answer.
Oh, and anyone who wanted to see applied maths in action, should have been watching the darts last night.
If you start needing 107, go for treble-19 and get the single, what’s your next dart if you want to leave either 40 or 32? You have one second, and likely don’t have A-level maths.
In fairness, I suspect from my amateur arrows that a large part of what the professionals do is learning by repetition and pattern recognition not calculation. I would have to calculate what's left but then I know from practice that 88 is treble 16 and tops - and I'd have done the "what if" calculation before throwing the first dart. I would imagine the pros don't even need to do the calculation in step one.
Edit to add: I wouldn't actually go for 19s in this situation, even if you hit the treble you aren't going for bull with your second dart. 60 leaves 47 and you can pick your favourite double from there. You need at least one treble to finish 107 (or two bulls if you want to be a real show off) and most players are best on 20s.
Unless you're a very good player I always think 11 or 6 is a better finishing double as most players are more accurate in the X axis than the Y axis. Although 3 is my most reliable double for some reason. I can hit it about 5/6 darts.
The maths is trivial for regular players as there aren't that many finishing combinations so it's just rote memorisation. Even "Inbred Jed" at our local can do it and he uses a length of car seat belt to keep his trousers up. So fuck maths and fuck the tories.
The entire PB debate this morning is almost completely pointless. Why? Because it ignores AI
It’s like a bunch of people discussing the widening of roads to incorporate horse-drawn omnibuses in 1901
“Microsoft plans to release a version of Bing that uses OpenAI's #ChatGPT tech to answer some search queries, possibly launching as soon as Q1 2023 (Aaron Holmes/The Information) #AI pulse.ly/jzf7onqvp7 @BetaMoroney@IanLJones98@Shi4Tech@lyakovet@enilev@EvaSmartAI”
AI is about to transform the world. One of the first sectors to be revolutionised (devastated?) is education
Teaching people more maths is arguably like training adolescents to carry sedan chairs
While your 'everything is pointless because...' posts are becoming a little hackneyed, you do touch on a fair point about secondary education's disconnect from the world.
That's not going to be resolved by government setting a national curriculum - particularly this government.
Does he though? How does not teaching maths help create the next generation of data scientists and ML engineers? If anything we need to be starting tougher concepts at an earlier age and raising expectations, not dumbing down.
See my above reply to Leon. Regarding maths, it's not a question of 'tougher' concepts, but rather what concepts.
As an example, the 'new math' taught for a time in the US, post the Sputnik panic, comprised much more fundamental mathematical concepts, but it wasn't actually 'tougher'; instead completely unfamiliar to anyone with a conventional high school maths education.
I remember about the age of 16 rejecting maths when (a) it got quite hard and (b) it felt overwhelmingly pointless. I knew by then that my future work would not involve “shearing” or *calculus*
I could still do the maths - with effort - but it’s redundancy irked. So, emotionally I gave up, and dropped it soon after
Much of education will soon be like this for billions of school kids. Learning maths will be like learning Latin: nice to have, probably good for the brain, but, really, what’s the point?
Same goes for history, English, art, almost everything. The machines will do it all better - a machine you carry in your pocket. The only purpose of learning will be to acquire a pleasant skill that will never financially reward you. Like learning clarinet to grade 5
99% of people haven’t begun to grasp this. Including our prime minister
The idea appears to be an aspiration rather than a fully developed policy, with the precise mechanics for how it would work not set out. The government acknowledges it would not be possible to implement before the next general election, although the prime minister is expected to begin working on the plan in this parliament.
The entire PB debate this morning is almost completely pointless. Why? Because it ignores AI
It’s like a bunch of people discussing the widening of roads to incorporate horse-drawn omnibuses in 1901
“Microsoft plans to release a version of Bing that uses OpenAI's #ChatGPT tech to answer some search queries, possibly launching as soon as Q1 2023 (Aaron Holmes/The Information) #AI pulse.ly/jzf7onqvp7 @BetaMoroney@IanLJones98@Shi4Tech@lyakovet@enilev@EvaSmartAI”
AI is about to transform the world. One of the first sectors to be revolutionised (devastated?) is education
Teaching people more maths is arguably like training adolescents to carry sedan chairs
While your 'everything is pointless because...' posts are becoming a little hackneyed, you do touch on a fair point about secondary education's disconnect from the world.
That's not going to be resolved by government setting a national curriculum - particularly this government.
Does he though? How does not teaching maths help create the next generation of data scientists and ML engineers? If anything we need to be starting tougher concepts at an earlier age and raising expectations, not dumbing down.
Most people aren’t clever enough to learn maths, usefully, beyond the age of about 14. Most people have an IQ between 85-115
From having gone to both private and state schools, and sending my children to both private and state schools -
Private education - in a large chunk of the sector - consists of optimising the amount of educational difference imparted. At least as measured by exams. That is - the pupils are not especially different from the achieving* state pupils - but the money is used to try and get the most into pupils heads.
The difference centres on self motivation, I think. There are those who, if parked in a library with the text books at 11, would teach themselves. I was one (nearly) of these. For such people, the actual school has a smaller input.
Nearly everyone isn’t like that. State schools, because of their lower resources, find it hard to help all the children all of the time.
This leads, inescapably, to the fact that the state system fails huge numbers of bright children.
I personally think that this gap may be bigger for the “bright but non genius, motivated but need quite a bit of teaching help” group.
*parents interested in education, books in the home etc
Oh, and anyone who wanted to see applied maths in action, should have been watching the darts last night.
If you start needing 107, go for treble-19 and get the single, what’s your next dart if you want to leave either 40 or 32? You have one second, and likely don’t have A-level maths.
In fairness, I suspect from my amateur arrows that a large part of what the professionals do is learning by repetition and pattern recognition not calculation. I would have to calculate what's left but then I know from practice that 88 is treble 16 and tops - and I'd have done the "what if" calculation before throwing the first dart. I would imagine the pros don't even need to do the calculation in step one.
Edit to add: I wouldn't actually go for 19s in this situation, even if you hit the treble you aren't going for bull with your second dart. 60 leaves 47 and you can pick your favourite double from there. You need at least one treble to finish 107 (or two bulls if you want to be a real show off) and most players are best on 20s.
Unless you're a very good player I always think 11 or 6 is a better finishing double as most players are more accurate in the X axis than the Y axis. Although 3 is my most reliable double for some reason. I can hit it about 5/6 darts..
That's true, but the downside of hitting a single 11 or 3 is severe. (Though I suppose it depends on what your barrier for "a very good player" is.) Personally, I like three dart outshots where 33 and 42 both leave decent finishes. So from 107, I'd probably go for treble 14 with a view to 15-bull or treble 15-double 10. And if I hit the treble 11 I have another shot at treble 14 to leave 32.
As someone whose preferences fall very much on the maths-and-science side of the spectrum, I do think we need to produce more and better skilled mathematicians and scientists. But for the majority, competent maths GCSE standard will be as numerate as they ever need to be. This is a typical government tack of 'this approach isn't working - we need to do more of it'.
It strikes me that there are two problems: - Too many not getting to the standard we would want at GCSE - to which the solution, I would have thought would be 'better' (I don't know how!) teaching to GCSE, rather than taking everyone beyond GCSE. - Not getting enough highly skilled mathematicians - to which the solution might be encouraging those with the skills to do so to develop their maths skills deeper and earlier (a further maths GCSE?), and/or better motivation to take maths further (more bursaries to pay tuition fees for those doing maths at university?)
Now I have put no more than five minutes thought into the above, so if it can be easily picked apart I'm not surprised. But my point is that getting everyone to do maths beyond GCSE does not appear to be solving the problems with learning maths that we have.
SCOOP: Letter from Culture Secretary Michelle Donelan to Rishi Sunak confirming her recommendation is that Channel 4 privatisation does NOT go ahead. Says there are “better ways to ensure C4’s sustainability.”
We do not have a 'fuck Maths' attitude. We have a balanced one, which accepts the fact that people have different skill sets and brain wiring. I happen to be good at English but I wouldn't be so fucking stupid, downright wicked, as to impose that on everyone else until it was drilled into them. I wouldn't want a brilliant mathematician to have to work their way through Chaucer until they're 18. Or someone with the gift of languages. Post-16 is an opportunity to begin specialising. We're not for the most part an IB country, we have Advanced levels which are actually a bloody good set of qualifications.
It's more of the same tired ideologically driven tory crap.
They need booting out of office ASAP.
To meet the needs of today's workplace English, Maths, IT and a foreign language should be studied to 18 in my view, even if not at A level standard by most students
I agree to some extent with English and Foreign Language, but as far as IT is concerned, the use of excel, word and power point is hardly A level standard IT, and I am sure the knowledge of Calculus, coordinate geometry and algebraic equations in relation to graphical analysis is not required in the boardroom or even the shop floor.
It doesn't need to be A level but certainly study of Word, Excel, MS Teams, One Drive, PowerPoint, Outlook, Sharepoint etc should be done until 18 by most pupils
Spreadsheets, documents and presentations are useful skills - but definitely don’t just teach the products of one company that’s pushing their software hard in schools. Use OpenOffice or similar, which is free and open source.
In the workplace the reality is most products will be from Microsoft
Does depend on the workplace...
Re MS Office, it's an interesting thing. Office is better than Open/LibreOffice in many/most* ways but Open/LibreOffice is already far more capable than most office workers need. Companies use MS Office because that's what their existing and future staff know (and they may have some legacy stuff with macros which won't directly translate to Open/LibreOffice, but mostly the former). Schools teach MS Office because that's what their students' future employers will expect them to use. Chicken, meet egg.
*I've used both extensively and for some more complex things than the typical user. LibreOffice used to have a bit advantage on large text docs, particularly with many images, which used to cause MS Word crashes/freezes, but MS Word now much improved. The MS things are better presented (I'm actually a fan of the ribbon interface, which can be copied in LO but is not default). Nowadays I tend to use both only for very simple things, mostly I'm in R, SQL, Stata or some other IDE for Python etc.
The entire PB debate this morning is almost completely pointless. Why? Because it ignores AI
It’s like a bunch of people discussing the widening of roads to incorporate horse-drawn omnibuses in 1901
“Microsoft plans to release a version of Bing that uses OpenAI's #ChatGPT tech to answer some search queries, possibly launching as soon as Q1 2023 (Aaron Holmes/The Information) #AI pulse.ly/jzf7onqvp7 @BetaMoroney@IanLJones98@Shi4Tech@lyakovet@enilev@EvaSmartAI”
AI is about to transform the world. One of the first sectors to be revolutionised (devastated?) is education
Teaching people more maths is arguably like training adolescents to carry sedan chairs
While your 'everything is pointless because...' posts are becoming a little hackneyed, you do touch on a fair point about secondary education's disconnect from the world.
That's not going to be resolved by government setting a national curriculum - particularly this government.
Does he though? How does not teaching maths help create the next generation of data scientists and ML engineers? If anything we need to be starting tougher concepts at an earlier age and raising expectations, not dumbing down.
See my above reply to Leon. Regarding maths, it's not a question of 'tougher' concepts, but rather what concepts.
As an example, the 'new math' taught for a time in the US, post the Sputnik panic, comprised much more fundamental mathematical concepts, but it wasn't actually 'tougher'; instead completely unfamiliar to anyone with a conventional high school maths education.
I remember about the age of 16 rejecting maths when (a) it got quite hard and (b) it felt overwhelmingly pointless. I knew by then that my future work would not involve “shearing” or *calculus*
I could still do the maths - with effort - but it’s redundancy irked. So, emotionally I gave up, and dropped it soon after
Much of education will soon be like this for billions of school kids. Learning maths will be like learning Latin: nice to have, probably good for the brain, but, really, what’s the point?
Same goes for history, English, art, almost everything. The machines will do it all better - a machine you carry in your pocket. The only purpose of learning will be to acquire a pleasant skill that will never financially reward you. Like learning clarinet to grade 5
99% of people haven’t begun to grasp this. Including our prime minister
"but, really, what’s the point? "
*) Sanity checking. If someone (or a computer) tells you something, does it feel correct? You don't need to do a Fermi estimation, but knowing that, for example, the area of a circle radius 5cm is not 1,260 cm is a big advantage.
*) Knowing what questions to ask. If you do not have the basic knowledge, the chances are that you will end up asking the wrong question. And that's not just the case for maths.
*) When you don't have access to a computer/calculator. This can happen surprisingly often, even nowadays.
And many more. Your attitude is just to create generations of ignoramuses, presumably modelled on yourself.
As someone whose preferences fall very much on the maths-and-science side of the spectrum, I do think we need to produce more and better skilled mathematicians and scientists. But for the majority, competent maths GCSE standard will be as numerate as they ever need to be. This is a typical government tack of 'this approach isn't working - we need to do more of it'.
It strikes me that there are two problems: - Too many not getting to the standard we would want at GCSE - to which the solution, I would have thought would be 'better' (I don't know how!) teaching to GCSE, rather than taking everyone beyond GCSE. - Not getting enough highly skilled mathematicians - to which the solution might be encouraging those with the skills to do so to develop their maths skills deeper and earlier (a further maths GCSE?), and/or better motivation to take maths further (more bursaries to pay tuition fees for those doing maths at university?)
Now I have put no more than five minutes thought into the above, so if it can be easily picked apart I'm not surprised. But my point is that getting everyone to do maths beyond GCSE does not appear to be solving the problems with learning maths that we have.
It is basically Rishi saying he wishes everyone was a bit more like him, as then we could all be super rich and stop moaning. He does not commit to doing anything, funding anything, its just his personal wishlist not a policy.
Again: how are we going to persuade our kids to learn *anything* when they will quite rightly say: “I will never need this, and never use it, and it will never make me any money in any job, and anyway I have a small machine in my pocket which can do all of these things, instantly, for free, and 100 times better than me. Or you, Sir”
That’s quite hard to answer. “Because it’s good for you in some vague way I can’t define, Jennings” isn’t going to cut it
The entire PB debate this morning is almost completely pointless. Why? Because it ignores AI
It’s like a bunch of people discussing the widening of roads to incorporate horse-drawn omnibuses in 1901
“Microsoft plans to release a version of Bing that uses OpenAI's #ChatGPT tech to answer some search queries, possibly launching as soon as Q1 2023 (Aaron Holmes/The Information) #AI pulse.ly/jzf7onqvp7 @BetaMoroney@IanLJones98@Shi4Tech@lyakovet@enilev@EvaSmartAI”
AI is about to transform the world. One of the first sectors to be revolutionised (devastated?) is education
Teaching people more maths is arguably like training adolescents to carry sedan chairs
While your 'everything is pointless because...' posts are becoming a little hackneyed, you do touch on a fair point about secondary education's disconnect from the world.
That's not going to be resolved by government setting a national curriculum - particularly this government.
Does he though? How does not teaching maths help create the next generation of data scientists and ML engineers? If anything we need to be starting tougher concepts at an earlier age and raising expectations, not dumbing down.
See my above reply to Leon. Regarding maths, it's not a question of 'tougher' concepts, but rather what concepts.
As an example, the 'new math' taught for a time in the US, post the Sputnik panic, comprised much more fundamental mathematical concepts, but it wasn't actually 'tougher'; instead completely unfamiliar to anyone with a conventional high school maths education.
I remember about the age of 16 rejecting maths when (a) it got quite hard and (b) it felt overwhelmingly pointless. I knew by then that my future work would not involve “shearing” or *calculus*
I could still do the maths - with effort - but it’s redundancy irked. So, emotionally I gave up, and dropped it soon after
Much of education will soon be like this for billions of school kids. Learning maths will be like learning Latin: nice to have, probably good for the brain, but, really, what’s the point?
Same goes for history, English, art, almost everything. The machines will do it all better - a machine you carry in your pocket. The only purpose of learning will be to acquire a pleasant skill that will never financially reward you. Like learning clarinet to grade 5
99% of people haven’t begun to grasp this. Including our prime minister
In which case most jobs will be done by machines anyway so why learn to get a job either as there will be few if any permanent jobs left.
The only paid jobs for humans left will be for the most creative and innovative, making advanced learning perhaps even more important. Everyone else will have to rely on a universal basic income from the government funded by a robot tax
Comments
But many of them probably have excellent qualifications in maths, so that doesn't get us much further forward!
If you start needing 107, go for treble-19 and get the single, what’s your next dart if you want to leave either 40 or 32? You have one second, and likely don’t have A-level maths.
If there is then a vaguely practical application (we all have our stories of having to help with the arithmetic at checkout) then why is this bad.
If you are of the I wouldn't have started from here mould about education then what is your solution for the system?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/03/kevin-mcarthy-next-gop-speaker-unknown/
English language and grammar should certainly be studied until 18 if Maths is. Not just for those who are retaking GCSES in them to get a pass but at a more advanced level for those who passed first time
1. GCSE maths (resit) is already compulsory for all students who at age 16 have not achieved a 'pass' (grade C/4) and are continuing in education or training. This is a condition of funding for all further education courses, and has been for many years. So those who 'failed' GCSE have to continue to 18. So, a level 2 beauty therapy student who failed GCSE maths must resit it. Same for English, incidentally.
2. It has been a huge challenge for FE colleges and other providers to fulfil this condition of funding. Yes, you've guessed it - getting decent, qualified maths teachers to get so many who struggle with maths to succeed after two more years is a nightmare. The other nightmare, of course, is getting such students to attend maths lessons. This consumes huge amounts of FE college time.
3. So Sunak must know all this. I'll wait to hear what he says, but he must be considering making those who have passed GCSE maths continue with it for an extra two years, in some form. Probably won't go down well with an A* student who opts to do English, History and Classics A levels.
4. I would hope that Sunak's suggestions is more radical - that if maths is to continue, it need not be GCSE but can be tailored to the maths skills needed in different vocational (or academic) areas.
Apologies for long-windedness.
Both were pretty numerate by midway through primary but they were by no means top of the class maths whizzes. The majority seemed to be there or thereabouts.
Maybe the school is unusual, but it’s “good” not exceptional as far as ofsted is concerned.
Similar story across most subjects. The science education seems perfectly decent, the “topic” work is usually interesting and the PSHE curriculum is infinitely better than back then (when it essentially didn’t exist). The only area where they don’t seem to be as advanced as kids were 40 years ago is
creative writing.
And school assembly: they don’t have it, so they don’t get to learn all those bangers like sing hosanna and Lord of the dance.
Edit to add: I wouldn't actually go for 19s in this situation, even if you hit the treble you aren't going for bull with your second dart. 60 leaves 47 and you can pick your favourite double from there. You need at least one treble to finish 107 (or two bulls if you want to be a real show off) and most players are best on 20s.
We already have an imposed maths curriculum which isn't fit for purpose, along with a widespread shortage of maths teachers.
Teachers who post here have chronicled for years now how successive Conservative Education ministries have made an utter hash of Gove's original idea of academisation; how they've imposed curriculum changes that don't work (despite the original promise of academies having freedom to set their own curricula); how schools have been drowned in paperwork to satisfy an OFSTED which also fails in its essential purpose.
The maths policy 'announcement' is either delusional or vapourware.
I think the thing that jars but has been announced nowhere is the idea as you say of a very talented all-rounder who is good at maths but prefers to take a different course (literally) is somehow forced to take maths also.
If Germany had more compulsory geography in schools they might not have made themselves so dependent on Russian gas.
Children's Centres etc are great, but the one I've had most contact with (in a very deprived area in the East Riding) is mostly used, in my experience, by middle class parents from the surrounding affluent countryside/small villages. I don't think means-testing access is a good thing, but it would be interesting to assess why (and indeed whether) there is underuse by the target, local, more deprived families.
*they were of the view that they didn't really have enough data, response rates were low and the outcomes they were commissioned to study were too restrictive - very much absence of evidence rather than evidence of absence; no funding was forthcoming for a better study
Compare with the number of people working in retail, who can’t calculate change from £20 if the bill is £13.64. Perhaps that’s why so many bars in London now take card payments only, a decision that’s going to bite them in the arse when the tourists (with expensive transaction fees on foreign cards) return next summer.
Most of the sums involve converting numbers between imperial and metric units.
From my own experience I hated maths, wasn’t great at it but managed to pass all the exams. I was definitely a humanities person and arts. I then fell into finance and found that I could do all sorts of complicated maths and enjoyed it and had a very successful career off the back of a subject I hated as a kid.
I find that even chemistry matters now I am able to enjoy whereas I didn’t when young.
My rambling point is that there are probably a lot of children who aren’t interested or focussed when younger who let the maths go over their heads and they are lost but then if you keep putting the important basics in front of them, as they grow older they might discover a love, lose a fear, find a relevancy for learning it and will improve their life prospects or make their day to day existence better. I can’t see why that is a bad thing.
https://everydayastronaut.com/mars-climate-orbiter/ - at a cost of $327m
Will be far easier to teach and students, of whatever age, will get far more from it.
I get the sense that the public and the media have had enough of the Tories, and they simply aren't willing to listen anymore. It's gone beyond not giving them the benefit of the doubt, and to a level of assuming the worst, that means they will get zero credit for anything good they do and maximum blame for every stubbed toe and spilt tea.
Cold in your house - because the Tories crashed the economy. Dad can't get an ambulance - because the Tories wrecked the NHS. Everton lost badly last night - that's the Tories fault. Rains on your birthday? Blame the Tories. Burnt the toast? Damn those useless Tories!
The next election is going to be brutal.
It does depend on where the card was issued and where you are travelling though. I suspect there was an EU law somewhere that abolished the fees within the EU so lots of people don’t see them.
Dozens of small transactions (like buying beers one at a time on a fortnight’s holiday) and it seriously adds up. London beer still miles cheaper than Dubai beer though!
Because they will have collapsed entirely....
More likely most people didn't see them because they don't check their bank statements.
If the teachers don't like the subject themselves, how will they engender any enthusiasm among their students?
The loaf baked without love satisfies only half the hunger and all that, as Omar Khayyam (or Fitzgibbon) said.
He added: “That really is not the view of the public – it would cost us a lot of seats if Boris was back in charge. It’s not the primary reason I don’t want him back – I don’t want him back because he was not a good prime minister.”
Mr Davis pointed to the fact that Mr Johnson had the worst public approval before Liz Truss’s disastrous six weeks at No 10. “That worst public rating means something.”
Before some people used to exchange their cash at the airport and lose 10%, others in advance and lose 3%.
Now it is the same with cards, some pay £2 + 3%, others pay close to zero.
For me, it’s further evidence of Sunak’s poor grasp of politics and leadership. This is very much second-in-command stuff.
https://mobile.twitter.com/simongerman600/status/1609884714768236544
It’s like a bunch of people discussing the widening of roads to incorporate horse-drawn omnibuses in 1901
“Microsoft plans to release a version of Bing that uses OpenAI's #ChatGPT tech to answer some search queries, possibly launching as soon as Q1 2023 (Aaron Holmes/The Information) #AI
pulse.ly/jzf7onqvp7 @BetaMoroney @IanLJones98 @Shi4Tech @lyakovet @enilev @EvaSmartAI”
https://twitter.com/akwyz/status/1610574360418328579?s=46&t=5D3OrwpAXOPOwYLcHjcJzg
AI is about to transform the world. One of the first sectors to be revolutionised (devastated?) is education
Teaching people more maths is arguably like training adolescents to carry sedan chairs
https://mobile.twitter.com/KeithNHumphreys/status/1610465677042929666
There was a big rise in trainee teachers after the 2008 Crash for example
Does Hollywood not have a statute of limitations? It’s taken a while for the case to be brought, and Zeffirelli is now dead. Incidentally, Olivia Hussey is the best Juliet on film by miles.
Be careful with your EvulToryPublicSectorCrushTheWorkers pension. Being a huge mountain of dragon gold, they can be dangerous at first.
They you learn how to slide down them, just so, while laughing like a cartoon villain.
Edit: One amusement of the Elon Musk thing is how progressives have adopted the MAGA republican talking points from a couple of years back. The peak of this has been self proclaimed socialists defending the actions of Richard Fucking Shelby.
There are far bigger immediate problems for the country, and on maths the problems are early years maths not post 16 maths and we don't have enough maths teachers anyway, nor are we willing to pay significantly more to get more of them.
That's not going to be resolved by government setting a national curriculum - particularly this government.
https://mobile.twitter.com/anneapplebaum/status/1610442829901484033
“The rapid emergence of smart, accessible artificial intelligence tools - notably OpenAI’s remarkable #ChatGPT - has sent shockwaves around global higher education, raising fears of a new era of undetectable cheating. @timeshighered’s analysis 👇”
https://twitter.com/phil_baty/status/1609822976995725312?s=46&t=5D3OrwpAXOPOwYLcHjcJzg
"If other impersonal intelligences can produce this knowledge better than a student can, then why do we value human learning? Why do we mandate the education of our children?" #ChatGPT“
https://twitter.com/sondrawriter/status/1609982984974700549?s=46&t=5D3OrwpAXOPOwYLcHjcJzg
And so it begins!
#NYC #education department blocks #ChatGPT on #school devices, networks.
https://twitter.com/eslweb/status/1610545628941254656?s=46&t=5D3OrwpAXOPOwYLcHjcJzg
We do need a huge debate about the value, purpose and future - if there is one - of education. But that debate should be a bit bigger than “let’s do more maths”
"Too tainted..."
But that is a very long way from saying that maths is pointless.
Leon seems to expect a dystopian future with a rich and leisured 2% sitting on top of 98% helots. No doubt the Grecian master-servant dynamics will appeal to him.
For the rest of us - roboticisation and AI will lead to some quite radical social changes as middle manager roles become progressively eliminated.
First they came for the typists, then they came for the secretaries, then they came for the accounts team, who will speak for me etc?
Unfortunately, neither Sunak nor Starmer look like they have the first clue about how to respond to these changes.
"What really surprised me was the high diversity we detected. . . . We took one tea bag (100 [or] 150 milligrams of dried plant material), we extracted DNA. And we found in green tea up to 400 species of insects in a single tea bag. . . . "
https://mobile.twitter.com/DoctorKarl/status/1609853087853981696
Meanwhile, the latest stats suggest nearly half of all schools are forced to use non-specialists to teach kids because of a shortage of maths teachers. https://twitter.com/AdamBienkov/status/1610584589688360960/photo/1
Also, since August 11th, Germany has imported no Russian coal. Natural gas imports have been reduced from 55% at the beginning of 2022 to zero now. Oil imports dropped from 40% to 20% and will be zero by year end.
It's almost as if Merkel had never existed.
How long before Putin is similarly forgotten?
You would be moving billions from a department that had “won” that from the treasury to a department that hadn’t “won” it.
Next you’ll be suggesting that we should pay people by skill, rather than making sure their manager earns more than them.
Regarding maths, it's not a question of 'tougher' concepts, but rather what concepts.
As an example, the 'new math' taught for a time in the US, post the Sputnik panic, comprised much more fundamental mathematical concepts, but it wasn't actually 'tougher'; instead completely unfamiliar to anyone with a conventional high school maths education.
One stumbling block is the new boundaries, that will complicate tactical voting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6OaYPVueW4
The maths is trivial for regular players as there aren't that many finishing combinations so it's just rote memorisation. Even "Inbred Jed" at our local can do it and he uses a length of car seat belt to keep his trousers up. So fuck maths and fuck the tories.
I could still do the maths - with effort - but it’s redundancy irked. So, emotionally I gave up, and dropped it soon after
Much of education will soon be like this for billions of school kids. Learning maths will be like learning Latin: nice to have, probably good for the brain, but, really, what’s the point?
Same goes for history, English, art, almost everything. The machines will do it all better - a machine you carry in your pocket. The only purpose of learning will be to acquire a pleasant skill that will never financially reward you. Like learning clarinet to grade 5
99% of people haven’t begun to grasp this. Including our prime minister
As the BBC reports…
The idea appears to be an aspiration rather than a fully developed policy, with the precise mechanics for how it would work not set out. The government acknowledges it would not be possible to implement before the next general election, although the prime minister is expected to begin working on the plan in this parliament.
This is your big New Year announcement?
Really?
Private education - in a large chunk of the sector - consists of optimising the amount of educational difference imparted. At least as measured by exams. That is - the pupils are not especially different from the achieving* state pupils - but the money is used to try and get the most into pupils heads.
The difference centres on self motivation, I think. There are those who, if parked in a library with the text books at 11, would teach themselves. I was one (nearly) of these. For such people, the actual school has a smaller input.
Nearly everyone isn’t like that. State schools, because of their lower resources, find it hard to help all the children all of the time.
This leads, inescapably, to the fact that the state system fails huge numbers of bright children.
I personally think that this gap may be bigger for the “bright but non genius, motivated but need quite a bit of teaching help” group.
*parents interested in education, books in the home etc
But for the majority, competent maths GCSE standard will be as numerate as they ever need to be.
This is a typical government tack of 'this approach isn't working - we need to do more of it'.
It strikes me that there are two problems:
- Too many not getting to the standard we would want at GCSE - to which the solution, I would have thought would be 'better' (I don't know how!) teaching to GCSE, rather than taking everyone beyond GCSE.
- Not getting enough highly skilled mathematicians - to which the solution might be encouraging those with the skills to do so to develop their maths skills deeper and earlier (a further maths GCSE?), and/or better motivation to take maths further (more bursaries to pay tuition fees for those doing maths at university?)
Now I have put no more than five minutes thought into the above, so if it can be easily picked apart I'm not surprised. But my point is that getting everyone to do maths beyond GCSE does not appear to be solving the problems with learning maths that we have.
Direct opposite of what the Johnson government said. https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1610590521595928577/photo/1
Re MS Office, it's an interesting thing. Office is better than Open/LibreOffice in many/most* ways but Open/LibreOffice is already far more capable than most office workers need. Companies use MS Office because that's what their existing and future staff know (and they may have some legacy stuff with macros which won't directly translate to Open/LibreOffice, but mostly the former). Schools teach MS Office because that's what their students' future employers will expect them to use. Chicken, meet egg.
*I've used both extensively and for some more complex things than the typical user. LibreOffice used to have a bit advantage on large text docs, particularly with many images, which used to cause MS Word crashes/freezes, but MS Word now much improved. The MS things are better presented (I'm actually a fan of the ribbon interface, which can be copied in LO but is not default). Nowadays I tend to use both only for very simple things, mostly I'm in R, SQL, Stata or some other IDE for Python etc.
*) Sanity checking. If someone (or a computer) tells you something, does it feel correct? You don't need to do a Fermi estimation, but knowing that, for example, the area of a circle radius 5cm is not 1,260 cm is a big advantage.
*) Knowing what questions to ask. If you do not have the basic knowledge, the chances are that you will end up asking the wrong question. And that's not just the case for maths.
*) When you don't have access to a computer/calculator. This can happen surprisingly often, even nowadays.
And many more. Your attitude is just to create generations of ignoramuses, presumably modelled on yourself.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/i-shall-stand-against-boris-myself-if-he-comes-north-0gbmxrp68 https://twitter.com/JohnRentoul/status/1610590800693399555/photo/1
That’s quite hard to answer. “Because it’s good for you in some vague way I can’t define, Jennings” isn’t going to cut it
The only paid jobs for humans left will be for the most creative and innovative, making advanced learning perhaps even more important. Everyone else will have to rely on a universal basic income from the government funded by a robot tax