Just a gentle reminder to everybody that it is already compulsory to study maths to 18 unless you have a good grade at GCSE secured at 16. That applies in all 16-18 education and training - schools, colleges and apprenticeships.
So the only interesting question is what is envisaged for those aged 16-18 who already have a good GCSE maths grade but do not have the aptitude for A level and do not want to do any more maths.
That's precisely my point - we have a huge bolus of students who did "OK" at GCSE but have no particular aptitude for or delight in the maths teaching we offer them. Two more years of the same will be entirely unproductive.
This is the bigotry of low expectations. You have not performed at maths and don't like it (not surprising when you haven't performed)? Oh well, you were never up to it.
The reality is that GCSE maths is not particularly complex. If you fail at it, it's because the teaching profession has failed to build the foundation in previous years and/or adults around you have never pushed you to keep working at something when you find it hard.
Just a gentle reminder to everybody that it is already compulsory to study maths to 18 unless you have a good grade at GCSE secured at 16. That applies in all 16-18 education and training - schools, colleges and apprenticeships.
So the only interesting question is what is envisaged for those aged 16-18 who already have a good GCSE maths grade but do not have the aptitude for A level and do not want to do any more maths.
Many schools do an intermediate post GCSE maths qualification to be done alongside normal A levels for those who want to improve their maths skills but don't want to do the full course. It was also interesting at my son's 6th Form options evening in November to hear that most medical courses require maths as one of your A levels if you want to become a doctor. Not something I had been aware of before.
Forgive me for ignoring the ad hominem rants, but I assume it is boilerplate teacher chat. The rest is good. It sounds from the header like fixing education for everyone requires radical reform. Simply making kids sit more maths classes prior to uni might just push more of them towards useful degrees and away from PPE. And the price of forgoing 2 years of some other qualification seems relatively small.
The practical maths appears to be the sort of thing that people struggle with.
If a new phone costs £900 in cash, or £40/month for three years, should you save up for it or get it on the contract?
If a £50k student loan, at 5% pa interest, for a liberal arts degree, leads to you earning £3k more per year than without the degree, is it worth spending most of your life in debt to pay for three years on the piss?
Plenty of examples of human nature valuing gratification now over higher value in the future.
Should we cut taxes now, or spend the money ensuring that public buildings are better maintained?
Should we aim to pass an unpolluted environment onto future generations, even if it increases prices for us now?
But be prepared to accept that if people are capable of making them, those calculations can also go the other way to the way that you (I assume) want them to. It may be that a lot of the expense and effort expended in decarbonising (especially from a UK perspective) isn't worth the predicted benefit, and merely leaves us with less financial headroom to mitigate any future climate changes.
It may be that but many many economists have done the calculation and found that it isn't. In fact, they have shown pretty clearly that the costs of dealing with the effects of climate change are far, far higher than mitigation methods.
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
You might also have quoted this.
I share your pessimism about whether the system can be changed for the better. Ultimately, it seems to me, we need to define politicians' roles in the education system (and in other public services) in such a way that short-termism, and pet projects, do not get in the way of any system-wide consensus about what needs to be done in the long-term.
Yes very true. Everyone wants the system to be changed for the better. But we are not starting from a position where everything is dreadful (or as dreadful as the header makes out).
I think the situation is pretty bad.
1. We underperform in Education compared to our competitors. 2. The main weaknesses of our education system have been recognised for many decades - poor provision for technical education, that it primarily exists to sort kids into winners and losers and abandons the losers - but little progress on fixing these issues appears to have been achieved. 3. What has happened over the last few decades is that the relationship between teachers and politicians has become increasingly toxic, as the reforms attempted appear to worsen the working conditions of teachers for no discernible benefit, and politicians use teachers as a scapegoat to avoid taking the blame themselves.
That said, I'm a bit surprised that a modest proposal like teaching Maths to age 18 would receive such widespread criticism, both here and in the media generally. What's so special about Britain that we can stop teaching Maths at 16 while so many other countries continue to 18? ...
Nothing, other than our current dysfunction.
It's been an official aspiration of the government for a decade (and was supported by Labour at the time). The annoyance is that an effectively meaningless pledge was inserted into Sunak's recent speech, which does nothing to further that decade old aspiration.
So we have a policy that was announced before the current PM had entered the Commons, and yet our media is so poor that they've treated re-announcing it as a chance to rehash the same articles about the pointlessness of algebra, rather than hold the government to account for failing to deliver on a decade-old policy.
My post yesterday where I complained about the lack of curiosity about stuff got me thinking of what might be useful to students between 16 and 18 and it isn't just the lack of science knowledge. The following is probably bollocks but:
When I was doing my A levels I had to do one lesson a week of English. I hated English and as far as I was concerned it was no use to me whatsoever. Just a wasted hour. In my 20s I was sent on a report writing course. It was fantastic. A real eye opener, although you guys may not think so reading my posts. That course was genuinely fun and would have been really useful to me earlier.
The converse is almost certainly true for humanities with regard to the lack of understanding of science and maths. As I said I am gob smacked by the lack of curiosity in science and it should be fun.
So how about stuff that is really interesting post 16 on subjects that they are not doing that is fun and opens their mind.
Since yesterday I have been thinking more about stuff that I am shocked that people without a science background just accept that they really shouldn't. I mentioned yesterday the odd properties of water eg why do ice cubes float, why when you are wet do you feel cold, etc and it reminded me of others. Here are a couple that crop up all the time for me:
a) Relative velocity. The number of times you hear statements like the spacecrafts in orbit docked at 17,500 mph or it landed on the asteroid at a speed of 25,000 mph. If it did it would be one hell of an insurance claim.
b) Never questioning why there appears to be no gravity in a space station orbiting the earth. Why do they think that happens. Do they think there is no gravity just a short distance from the earths surface?
As I said yesterday the list is near infinite and I would have thought these were interesting questions.
Finally I was shocked to find that a relative of mine who was head of geography at a school and obviously with a geography degree and who obviously knew about the effects of water on climate had not a clue about the specific heat properties of water. Why had he never asked 'Why?'
We had a compulsory non-examined daily lesson called a Division all through school (13-18). It was the closest thing to a form we had but it’s purpose was teaching things not in the exam syllabus and covered philosophy, art, culture, music, history, politics, science matters, current affairs etc etc.
It filled in gaps such as the Italian Renaissance or slavery that weren’t studied in History to any specific level. I found it was most useful during sixth form where those who were studying Sciences and Maths etc were in Divisions where they would weight it towards arts and humanities and those studying humanities were given more of a scientific weighting to try and ensure everyone had a more rounded education even if there was no A-level or GCSE at the end of it.
I presume that this cannot be rolled out generally due to resources but it was possibly the “subject”/class I still feel i learnt most from and have benefitted from in the rest of my life.
Do any of our more thinking politicians ever look abroad to countries who do much better at these things to look at what they do right and what ideas we could adopt?
Forgive me for ignoring the ad hominem rants, but I assume it is boilerplate teacher chat. The rest is good. It sounds from the header like fixing education for everyone requires radical reform. Simply making kids sit more maths classes prior to uni might just push more of them towards useful degrees and away from PPE. And the price of forgoing 2 years of some other qualification seems relatively small.
The practical maths appears to be the sort of thing that people struggle with.
If a new phone costs £900 in cash, or £40/month for three years, should you save up for it or get it on the contract?
If a £50k student loan, at 5% pa interest, for a liberal arts degree, leads to you earning £3k more per year than without the degree, is it worth spending most of your life in debt to pay for three years on the piss?
Plenty of examples of human nature valuing gratification now over higher value in the future.
Should we cut taxes now, or spend the money ensuring that public buildings are better maintained?
Should we aim to pass an unpolluted environment onto future generations, even if it increases prices for us now?
But be prepared to accept that if people are capable of making them, those calculations can also go the other way to the way that you (I assume) want them to. It may be that a lot of the expense and effort expended in decarbonising (especially from a UK perspective) isn't worth the predicted benefit, and merely leaves us with less financial headroom to mitigate any future climate changes.
That's possible, and if you have any numbers showing that, I'm all eyes. (Not literally all eyes, obviously, that would be gross.)
But given how laggardly we collectively are at things that really ought to be uncontroversial, like getting thermal insulation of buildings up to a uniformly good standard, I know which way the cognitive bias is probably going.
Do any of our more thinking politicians ever look abroad to countries who do much better at these things to look at what they do right and what ideas we could adopt?
Do any of our more thinking politicians ever look abroad to countries who do much better at these things to look at what they do right and what ideas we could adopt?
Stop sniggering at the back.
I suspect they look, realize that what they do requires decades long incremental cultural change for which they won't get any credit, and then come up with "everyone will be mathsing until 18!"
Do any of our more thinking politicians ever look abroad to countries who do much better at these things to look at what they do right and what ideas we could adopt?
Stop sniggering at the back.
This could be applied to practically every department and subject. Housing, education, health care - they all suffer from an insular vision by politicians. This applies to learning from both successes and failures from our neighbours. Mind you I suppose we are not unique in this as I hear the same arguments from commentators in France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands about their own politicians.
I've had an idea - we should do a day in secondary schools where different departments teach each other's subjects. So the music department teaches a song to memorise the periodic table, the Drama department teaches a play to bring a historical event to life, the maths department teaches students the mathematics of art - perspective, anatomy, and gets them to create artwork based on these principles, etc.
It would be fun and probably the teachers would learn a lot more, let alone the students.
Just a gentle reminder to everybody that it is already compulsory to study maths to 18 unless you have a good grade at GCSE secured at 16. That applies in all 16-18 education and training - schools, colleges and apprenticeships.
So the only interesting question is what is envisaged for those aged 16-18 who already have a good GCSE maths grade but do not have the aptitude for A level and do not want to do any more maths.
That's precisely my point - we have a huge bolus of students who did "OK" at GCSE but have no particular aptitude for or delight in the maths teaching we offer them. Two more years of the same will be entirely unproductive.
This is the bigotry of low expectations. You have not performed at maths and don't like it (not surprising when you haven't performed)? Oh well, you were never up to it.
The reality is that GCSE maths is not particularly complex. If you fail at it, it's because the teaching profession has failed to build the foundation in previous years and/or adults around you have never pushed you to keep working at something when you find it hard.
100% - and our problem is not just how maths is taught now, it is how maths *was* taught when our current crop of young teachers was at school, and how the people that taught *them* were taught maths. Generations of stored up antipathy for the subject.
Ydoether's thread is well-written because he's a clever cookie, but it didn't need to descend into 'bollocks' and other 'below the line' style colloquialisms, because an articulate demolition of the policy without slang, which he could easily have managed, would have been more powerful.
Regarding the policy itself, I think that probably maths education from primary onward needs a complete rethink. What would be useful for the UK? A numerate population that understands (as Josias says) compound interest, can add, multiply, and subtract easily without pencil, paper or calculator, has good budgeting skills/basic accountancy skills, and (probably least importantly) has a foundation of more advanced maths skills.
I have already said that personally I feel daft not knowing my times tables off by heart - that is a very good basic foundation I feel.
Language teaching is the same - the curriculum doesn't meet the basic need; for students to converse well in the second language. Secondary importance, to write well in the second language. I got an 'A*' (German) and an 'A' (French) at GCSE, but would still struggle to have a basic conversation in either. Only now, with post school learning, I have elementary French, understand a lot of the language, and can 'manage' a basic conversation although not always find the word. I've been helped a lot by the techniques of Michel Thomas, who was an amazing man who developed a great teaching method relying on making connections between English and French (which are obviously many). In my opinion the first two years of secondary should be spent almost entirely on developing verbal confidence in the chosen language, writing and grammar should come into it later at GCSE level.
The trouble is that Ydoether has an insane and irrational hatred of Michael Gove who he seems to see as the root of all evil when it comes to education. For evidence see his comment about "obsessed with the idea of falling academic standards" as if this is something an Education Secretary should not be obsessed with.
As such he is unwilling to lay the blame for the current issues (actually issues that have existed for decades and long before Gove came along) anywhere but at the feet of the politicians. And yet the reality is that we have long had a failing education system and no one - neither teachers, academics nor politicians - have been able to come up with a way to reform it to benefit the students and the country. Given that in all his other positions - notably at Justice and DEFRA - Gove has won plaudits from all sides for his willingness to listen to the experts and make informed decisions, one wonders why it is that Education, uniquely has been a problem.
Perhaps because it's the department he didn't come to with an open mind ?
The incessant tinkering with the primary curriculum has, in the experience of my wife and her fellow teachers, been unquestionably deleterious.
And I've given before the example of the dogmatic insistence on phonics to the exclusion of other literacy teaching methods. Which is definitely Gove.
(Edit ... you also seem to suggest that it's possible for hatred to be insane and rational ?)
Forgive me for ignoring the ad hominem rants, but I assume it is boilerplate teacher chat. The rest is good. It sounds from the header like fixing education for everyone requires radical reform. Simply making kids sit more maths classes prior to uni might just push more of them towards useful degrees and away from PPE. And the price of forgoing 2 years of some other qualification seems relatively small.
The practical maths appears to be the sort of thing that people struggle with.
If a new phone costs £900 in cash, or £40/month for three years, should you save up for it or get it on the contract?
If a £50k student loan, at 5% pa interest, for a liberal arts degree, leads to you earning £3k more per year than without the degree, is it worth spending most of your life in debt to pay for three years on the piss?
Plenty of examples of human nature valuing gratification now over higher value in the future.
Should we cut taxes now, or spend the money ensuring that public buildings are better maintained?
Should we aim to pass an unpolluted environment onto future generations, even if it increases prices for us now?
But be prepared to accept that if people are capable of making them, those calculations can also go the other way to the way that you (I assume) want them to. It may be that a lot of the expense and effort expended in decarbonising (especially from a UK perspective) isn't worth the predicted benefit, and merely leaves us with less financial headroom to mitigate any future climate changes.
That's possible, and if you have any numbers showing that, I'm all eyes. (Not literally all eyes, obviously, that would be gross.)
But given how laggardly we collectively are at things that really ought to be uncontroversial, like getting thermal insulation of buildings up to a uniformly good standard, I know which way the cognitive bias is probably going.
My post yesterday where I complained about the lack of curiosity about stuff got me thinking of what might be useful to students between 16 and 18 and it isn't just the lack of science knowledge. The following is probably bollocks but:
When I was doing my A levels I had to do one lesson a week of English. I hated English and as far as I was concerned it was no use to me whatsoever. Just a wasted hour. In my 20s I was sent on a report writing course. It was fantastic. A real eye opener, although you guys may not think so reading my posts. That course was genuinely fun and would have been really useful to me earlier.
The converse is almost certainly true for humanities with regard to the lack of understanding of science and maths. As I said I am gob smacked by the lack of curiosity in science and it should be fun.
So how about stuff that is really interesting post 16 on subjects that they are not doing that is fun and opens their mind.
Because society is risk averse and science lessons are "dangerous". Chemistry labs used to be full of acids, alkalis, carcinogens and toxic substances. Physics labs deal with high voltage electricity, radioactive substances, lasers, etc. Biology might have toxins or animal diseases or animals that bite, sting or attack.
So it has all been banned or relegated to teacher demonstrations. My kids found science lessons amongst the most boring because it was largely demonstrations by the teacher of risk assessments that took up most of the lesson. When I was at school, science lessons were the highlight of my day and the slight danger that existed just added to the interest.
BTW - one of my kids, after escaping the school system, eventually got a PhD in Analytical Chemistry
Since yesterday I have been thinking more about stuff that I am shocked that people without a science background just accept that they really shouldn't. I mentioned yesterday the odd properties of water eg why do ice cubes float, why when you are wet do you feel cold, etc and it reminded me of others. Here are a couple that crop up all the time for me:
a) Relative velocity. The number of times you hear statements like the spacecrafts in orbit docked at 17,500 mph or it landed on the asteroid at a speed of 25,000 mph. If it did it would be one hell of an insurance claim.
b) Never questioning why there appears to be no gravity in a space station orbiting the earth. Why do they think that happens. Do they think there is no gravity just a short distance from the earths surface?
As I said yesterday the list is near infinite and I would have thought these were interesting questions.
Finally I was shocked to find that a relative of mine who was head of geography at a school and obviously with a geography degree and who obviously knew about the effects of water on climate had not a clue about the specific heat properties of water. Why had he never asked 'Why?'
"Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house"
"The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning, while those other subjects merely require scholarship."
Ydoether's thread is well-written because he's a clever cookie, but it didn't need to descend into 'bollocks' and other 'below the line' style colloquialisms, because an articulate demolition of the policy without slang, which he could easily have managed, would have been more powerful.
Regarding the policy itself, I think that probably maths education from primary onward needs a complete rethink. What would be useful for the UK? A numerate population that understands (as Josias says) compound interest, can add, multiply, and subtract easily without pencil, paper or calculator, has good budgeting skills/basic accountancy skills, and (probably least importantly) has a foundation of more advanced maths skills.
I have already said that personally I feel daft not knowing my times tables off by heart - that is a very good basic foundation I feel.
Language teaching is the same - the curriculum doesn't meet the basic need; for students to converse well in the second language. Secondary importance, to write well in the second language. I got an 'A*' (German) and an 'A' (French) at GCSE, but would still struggle to have a basic conversation in either. Only now, with post school learning, I have elementary French, understand a lot of the language, and can 'manage' a basic conversation although not always find the word. I've been helped a lot by the techniques of Michel Thomas, who was an amazing man who developed a great teaching method relying on making connections between English and French (which are obviously many). In my opinion the first two years of secondary should be spent almost entirely on developing verbal confidence in the chosen language, writing and grammar should come into it later at GCSE level.
The trouble is that Ydoether has an insane and irrational hatred of Michael Gove who he seems to see as the root of all evil when it comes to education. For evidence see his comment about "obsessed with the idea of falling academic standards" as if this is something an Education Secretary should not be obsessed with.
As such he is unwilling to lay the blame for the current issues (actually issues that have existed for decades and long before Gove came along) anywhere but at the feet of the politicians. And yet the reality is that we have long had a failing education system and no one - neither teachers, academics nor politicians - have been able to come up with a way to reform it to benefit the students and the country. Given that in all his other positions - notably at Justice and DEFRA - Gove has won plaudits from all sides for his willingness to listen to the experts and make informed decisions, one wonders why it is that Education, uniquely has been a problem.
Perhaps because it's the department he didn't come to with an open mind ?
The incessant tinkering with the primary curriculum has, in the experience of my wife and her fellow teachers, been unquestionably deleterious.
And I've given before the example of the dogmatic insistence on phonics to the exclusion of other literacy teaching methods. Which is definitely Gove.
Agree with you about phonics and just like any other politician Gove will have his failings. But again I come back to the claim that Gove was "obsessed with falling academic standards" and should be criticised for this. Academic standards have undoubtedly been falling for decades and the idea that an Education Secretary should not be obsessed by this seems to me to be utterly deluded.
Do any of our more thinking politicians ever look abroad to countries who do much better at these things to look at what they do right and what ideas we could adopt?
Stop sniggering at the back.
This could be applied to practically every department and subject. Housing, education, health care - they all suffer from an insular vision by politicians. This applies to learning from both successes and failures from our neighbours. Mind you I suppose we are not unique in this as I hear the same arguments from commentators in France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands about their own politicians.
Indeed so. Politics can be very insular, there’s a need to look more widely at how things work in other countries.
It wouldn’t be too difficult for the Foreign Office to assemble a guide to healthcare or education systems, in the G20 countries, the top 20 countries by GDP/capita, and any known outliers, looking at what is seen to work well, and what is seen as working badly, around the world.
My post yesterday where I complained about the lack of curiosity about stuff got me thinking of what might be useful to students between 16 and 18 and it isn't just the lack of science knowledge. The following is probably bollocks but:
When I was doing my A levels I had to do one lesson a week of English. I hated English and as far as I was concerned it was no use to me whatsoever. Just a wasted hour. In my 20s I was sent on a report writing course. It was fantastic. A real eye opener, although you guys may not think so reading my posts. That course was genuinely fun and would have been really useful to me earlier.
The converse is almost certainly true for humanities with regard to the lack of understanding of science and maths. As I said I am gob smacked by the lack of curiosity in science and it should be fun.
So how about stuff that is really interesting post 16 on subjects that they are not doing that is fun and opens their mind.
Since yesterday I have been thinking more about stuff that I am shocked that people without a science background just accept that they really shouldn't. I mentioned yesterday the odd properties of water eg why do ice cubes float, why when you are wet do you feel cold, etc and it reminded me of others. Here are a couple that crop up all the time for me:
a) Relative velocity. The number of times you hear statements like the spacecrafts in orbit docked at 17,500 mph or it landed on the asteroid at a speed of 25,000 mph. If it did it would be one hell of an insurance claim.
b) Never questioning why there appears to be no gravity in a space station orbiting the earth. Why do they think that happens. Do they think there is no gravity just a short distance from the earths surface?
As I said yesterday the list is near infinite and I would have thought these were interesting questions.
Finally I was shocked to find that a relative of mine who was head of geography at a school and obviously with a geography degree and who obviously knew about the effects of water on climate had not a clue about the specific heat properties of water. Why had he never asked 'Why?'
We had a compulsory non-examined daily lesson called a Division all through school (13-18). It was the closest thing to a form we had but it’s purpose was teaching things not in the exam syllabus and covered philosophy, art, culture, music, history, politics, science matters, current affairs etc etc.
It filled in gaps such as the Italian Renaissance or slavery that weren’t studied in History to any specific level. I found it was most useful during sixth form where those who were studying Sciences and Maths etc were in Divisions where they would weight it towards arts and humanities and those studying humanities were given more of a scientific weighting to try and ensure everyone had a more rounded education even if there was no A-level or GCSE at the end of it.
I presume that this cannot be rolled out generally due to resources but it was possibly the “subject”/class I still feel i learnt most from and have benefitted from in the rest of my life.
Nice post. I had ignored resources (rash I know), but was really giving this as an alternative to the maths to 18 idea (for which resources will presumably have to be found, or will just appear by magic).
Clearly those doing the sciences will not need the extra maths and can look at stuff that improves their lives in other ways. The non scientist can be engaged by the interesting stuff that sneaks in the extra maths they need. I suspect anyone who has not got arithmetic by this stage isn't going to get it. Stats, probability, logic which are the other useful skills to non scientists can be sneaked in to the fun stuff. Eg the gravity issue in orbiting bodies could have the gravity equation introduced (which is simple and there is no need to go into any detail) and from that introduce the impact of the power of 2 (and then of course 3) which is useful.
And that brings me to another of my bug bears: Why people don't understand or even ask why sparrows can stand on thin legs, cats don't die when they fall off the roof and fleas can jump so high - the power of 3. Maths can be interesting.
My post yesterday where I complained about the lack of curiosity about stuff got me thinking of what might be useful to students between 16 and 18 and it isn't just the lack of science knowledge. The following is probably bollocks but:
When I was doing my A levels I had to do one lesson a week of English. I hated English and as far as I was concerned it was no use to me whatsoever. Just a wasted hour. In my 20s I was sent on a report writing course. It was fantastic. A real eye opener, although you guys may not think so reading my posts. That course was genuinely fun and would have been really useful to me earlier.
The converse is almost certainly true for humanities with regard to the lack of understanding of science and maths. As I said I am gob smacked by the lack of curiosity in science and it should be fun.
So how about stuff that is really interesting post 16 on subjects that they are not doing that is fun and opens their mind...
You raise a good point about 'fun'. It's an essential element of teaching, and more difficult to import into an overcrowded curriculum.
My post yesterday where I complained about the lack of curiosity about stuff got me thinking of what might be useful to students between 16 and 18 and it isn't just the lack of science knowledge. The following is probably bollocks but:
When I was doing my A levels I had to do one lesson a week of English. I hated English and as far as I was concerned it was no use to me whatsoever. Just a wasted hour. In my 20s I was sent on a report writing course. It was fantastic. A real eye opener, although you guys may not think so reading my posts. That course was genuinely fun and would have been really useful to me earlier.
The converse is almost certainly true for humanities with regard to the lack of understanding of science and maths. As I said I am gob smacked by the lack of curiosity in science and it should be fun.
So how about stuff that is really interesting post 16 on subjects that they are not doing that is fun and opens their mind.
Because society is risk averse and science lessons are "dangerous". Chemistry labs used to be full of acids, alkalis, carcinogens and toxic substances. Physics labs deal with high voltage electricity, radioactive substances, lasers, etc. Biology might have toxins or animal diseases or animals that bite, sting or attack.
So it has all been banned or relegated to teacher demonstrations. My kids found science lessons amongst the most boring because it was largely demonstrations by the teacher of risk assessments that took up most of the lesson. When I was at school, science lessons were the highlight of my day and the slight danger that existed just added to the interest.
BTW - one of my kids, after escaping the school system, eventually got a PhD in Analytical Chemistry
Since yesterday I have been thinking more about stuff that I am shocked that people without a science background just accept that they really shouldn't. I mentioned yesterday the odd properties of water eg why do ice cubes float, why when you are wet do you feel cold, etc and it reminded me of others. Here are a couple that crop up all the time for me:
a) Relative velocity. The number of times you hear statements like the spacecrafts in orbit docked at 17,500 mph or it landed on the asteroid at a speed of 25,000 mph. If it did it would be one hell of an insurance claim.
b) Never questioning why there appears to be no gravity in a space station orbiting the earth. Why do they think that happens. Do they think there is no gravity just a short distance from the earths surface?
As I said yesterday the list is near infinite and I would have thought these were interesting questions.
Finally I was shocked to find that a relative of mine who was head of geography at a school and obviously with a geography degree and who obviously knew about the effects of water on climate had not a clue about the specific heat properties of water. Why had he never asked 'Why?'
"Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house"
"The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning, while those other subjects merely require scholarship."
- Robert Heinlein (via Lazarus Long)
Ah yes, safeyism and the elimination of risk. Same reason that boys don’t fall out of trees any more.
Half the fun of science lessons, was the unexpected result, and the (perceived) risk that we might end up blowing up or setting fire to the classroom!
The only video we got was the interaction of fluorine and water, 10% was teacher demonstrations and 90% was practical for the students.
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
If you want to criticise then your target should be me for publishing it. Unlike posts on a thread responsibility for headers is by PB's editorial team.
Totally right to publish this piece. There might be some 'off my chest' in there from @ydoethur but so what? It's an interesting look under the bonnet of a vehicle he's been struggling to drive for some time and it illustrates how good outcomes rarely follow when top level policy on something is disconnected from what actually goes on there in practice.
A point I'd stress when it comes to schools. In this country we have a parallel system - the independent sector - whereby children from advantaged backgrounds are filtered off and advantaged further by access to influential networks and having double the amount per pupil invested in their education. Most of the establishment went through this alternative system and use it for their own children. This is a stumbling block to transforming the mainstream sector - an underappreciated one imo. The problem rarely gets addressed with anything more thoughtful than "well if state schools were better people wouldn't go private".
Forgive me for ignoring the ad hominem rants, but I assume it is boilerplate teacher chat. The rest is good. It sounds from the header like fixing education for everyone requires radical reform. Simply making kids sit more maths classes prior to uni might just push more of them towards useful degrees and away from PPE. And the price of forgoing 2 years of some other qualification seems relatively small.
The practical maths appears to be the sort of thing that people struggle with.
If a new phone costs £900 in cash, or £40/month for three years, should you save up for it or get it on the contract?
If a £50k student loan, at 5% pa interest, for a liberal arts degree, leads to you earning £3k more per year than without the degree, is it worth spending most of your life in debt to pay for three years on the piss?
Plenty of examples of human nature valuing gratification now over higher value in the future.
Should we cut taxes now, or spend the money ensuring that public buildings are better maintained?
Should we aim to pass an unpolluted environment onto future generations, even if it increases prices for us now?
But be prepared to accept that if people are capable of making them, those calculations can also go the other way to the way that you (I assume) want them to. It may be that a lot of the expense and effort expended in decarbonising (especially from a UK perspective) isn't worth the predicted benefit, and merely leaves us with less financial headroom to mitigate any future climate changes.
It may be that but many many economists have done the calculation and found that it isn't. In fact, they have shown pretty clearly that the costs of dealing with the effects of climate change are far, far higher than mitigation methods.
Perhaps, but their calculations will be based on a whole world effort, not based on the UK paying a heavy price to cut its already very low emissions even lower, whilst most of the rest of the world continues unabated.
Their work will also have been publicised more due to its conclusions according with the current global consensus. There are a lot of scientists, many of great repute, who dispute the current climate science consensus completely. A recent 'declaration' from this group is something that I've heard of but not read. My point in mentioning this is that dissenting voices from the global consensus are often ignored or ridiculed.
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
If you want to criticise then your target should be me for publishing it. Unlike posts on a thread responsibility for headers is by PB's editorial team.
Totally right to publish this piece. There might be some 'off my chest' in there from @ydoethur but so what? It's an interesting look under the bonnet of a vehicle he's been struggling to drive for some time and it illustrates how good outcomes rarely follow when top level policy on something is disconnected from what actually goes on there in practice.
A point I'd stress when it comes to schools. In this country we have a parallel system - the independent sector - whereby children from advantaged backgrounds are filtered off and advantaged further by access to influential networks and having double the amount per pupil invested in their education. Most of the establishment went through this alternative system and use it for their own children. This is a stumbling block to transforming the mainstream sector - an underappreciated one imo. The problem rarely gets addressed with anything more thoughtful than "well if state schools were better people wouldn't go private".
I disagree with some of what ydoethur writes but I agree it is absolutely right to publish this piece. I thought that was what we were here for to a large extent - to make make assertions and then have them debated.
Do any of our more thinking politicians ever look abroad to countries who do much better at these things to look at what they do right and what ideas we could adopt?
Stop sniggering at the back.
This could be applied to practically every department and subject. Housing, education, health care - they all suffer from an insular vision by politicians. This applies to learning from both successes and failures from our neighbours. Mind you I suppose we are not unique in this as I hear the same arguments from commentators in France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands about their own politicians.
Indeed so. Politics can be very insular, there’s a need to look more widely at how things work in other countries.
It wouldn’t be too difficult for the Foreign Office to assemble a guide to healthcare or education systems, in the G20 countries, the top 20 countries by GDP/capita, and any known outliers, looking at what is seen to work well, and what is seen as working badly, around the world.
Four of the five top PISA performers have hyper-scholastic East Asian education systems, where competition for academic places determines your success in everything else. And their societies are very hierarchical and inegalitarian on the basis of academic merit. So to some extent it is about how poor you will get due to low grades, and to what extent it's socially acceptable to sacrifice everything else in favour of study.
Many exceptionally naive PBers could do with extra life lessons, I am sure of that. It never ceases to amaze me how so many on here have lived extraordinarily sheltered lives.
Do any of our more thinking politicians ever look abroad to countries who do much better at these things to look at what they do right and what ideas we could adopt?
Stop sniggering at the back.
This could be applied to practically every department and subject. Housing, education, health care - they all suffer from an insular vision by politicians. This applies to learning from both successes and failures from our neighbours. Mind you I suppose we are not unique in this as I hear the same arguments from commentators in France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands about their own politicians.
Maybe I am a lazy person but if asked to solve one of the many "big problems" my inclination would be to spend about 5 minutes Googling the top country for X, look up some spending figures, and work out the country that gets the best bang per buck. My answer would therefore be "copy them". This never seems to be an acceptable answer, the government always finds a reason we can't do such a thing, and why we must try and make what isn't working work.
The older I get the more amazed I am that anything works at all.
Header: anecdote to be sure but having had two children recently taking GCSEs I don't agree that "mathematics in British schools will continue to be a bit shit". I think it's rather good.
In anticipation of their GCSEs, and in an effort to help, I took Maths GCSE about four years ago. My older child did Foundation Maths paper and my youngest the Higher Paper.
If anyone gets a 9 grade for maths GCSE deserves a shake of the hand; it's very challenging.
My youngest got an 8 (same as me - bah - but I console myself that she had face-to-face teaching while I only did a correspondence course. She counters that she had 8 other subjects to study while I only 1 because she's cheeky like that).
Ydoether's thread is well-written because he's a clever cookie, but it didn't need to descend into 'bollocks' and other 'below the line' style colloquialisms, because an articulate demolition of the policy without slang, which he could easily have managed, would have been more powerful.
Regarding the policy itself, I think that probably maths education from primary onward needs a complete rethink. What would be useful for the UK? A numerate population that understands (as Josias says) compound interest, can add, multiply, and subtract easily without pencil, paper or calculator, has good budgeting skills/basic accountancy skills, and (probably least importantly) has a foundation of more advanced maths skills.
I have already said that personally I feel daft not knowing my times tables off by heart - that is a very good basic foundation I feel.
Language teaching is the same - the curriculum doesn't meet the basic need; for students to converse well in the second language. Secondary importance, to write well in the second language. I got an 'A*' (German) and an 'A' (French) at GCSE, but would still struggle to have a basic conversation in either. Only now, with post school learning, I have elementary French, understand a lot of the language, and can 'manage' a basic conversation although not always find the word. I've been helped a lot by the techniques of Michel Thomas, who was an amazing man who developed a great teaching method relying on making connections between English and French (which are obviously many). In my opinion the first two years of secondary should be spent almost entirely on developing verbal confidence in the chosen language, writing and grammar should come into it later at GCSE level.
The trouble is that Ydoether has an insane and irrational hatred of Michael Gove who he seems to see as the root of all evil when it comes to education. For evidence see his comment about "obsessed with the idea of falling academic standards" as if this is something an Education Secretary should not be obsessed with.
As such he is unwilling to lay the blame for the current issues (actually issues that have existed for decades and long before Gove came along) anywhere but at the feet of the politicians. And yet the reality is that we have long had a failing education system and no one - neither teachers, academics nor politicians - have been able to come up with a way to reform it to benefit the students and the country. Given that in all his other positions - notably at Justice and DEFRA - Gove has won plaudits from all sides for his willingness to listen to the experts and make informed decisions, one wonders why it is that Education, uniquely has been a problem.
Perhaps because it's the department he didn't come to with an open mind ?
The incessant tinkering with the primary curriculum has, in the experience of my wife and her fellow teachers, been unquestionably deleterious.
And I've given before the example of the dogmatic insistence on phonics to the exclusion of other literacy teaching methods. Which is definitely Gove.
Agree with you about phonics and just like any other politician Gove will have his failings. But again I come back to the claim that Gove was "obsessed with falling academic standards" and should be criticised for this. Academic standards have undoubtedly been falling for decades and the idea that an Education Secretary should not be obsessed by this seems to me to be utterly deluded.
A fairer critique might be 'obsessed with standards'. Which is one of the drivers of the massive growth in largely fruitless paperwork.
Ironically the department recognises the problem as it has had several initiatives aimed at reducing teacher workload.
I don't fault Gove's enthusiasm - and indeed many, including ydoethur, originally had positive expectations.
Many exceptionally naive PBers could do with extra life lessons, I am sure of that. It never ceases to amaze me how so many on here have lived extraordinarily sheltered lives.
Can't help it, Bob.
If your parents won't allow you out on your own until you are 53, what's one supposed to do?
Can anyone more familiar with current green policy tell me, why is imported biomass considered carbon neutral (if indeed it is considered carbon neutral) when within our borders, the effect is purely one of adding carbon? The absorption of CO2 by the biomass when it was grown is clearly calculated in the carbon neutrality. But with imports of goods from China, made by burning coal, the addition to the greenhouse effect is not included in our carbon figures.
Isn't that a flagrant contradiction, biasing us heavily in favour of importation and against domestic production?
Many exceptionally naive PBers could do with extra life lessons, I am sure of that. It never ceases to amaze me how so many on here have lived extraordinarily sheltered lives.
I'm not sure I agree with that, although it might be I am mixing sheltered up with boring. Certainly the average poster here is more privileged and not representative of the population at large and if that is what you mean I agree.
The average person I suspect leads a very boring life (although they are probably happy with it). There are quite a few here that lead more interesting lives and some who lead extraordinary lives eg @Leon , @Dura_Ace to name but two.
My post yesterday where I complained about the lack of curiosity about stuff got me thinking of what might be useful to students between 16 and 18 and it isn't just the lack of science knowledge. The following is probably bollocks but:
When I was doing my A levels I had to do one lesson a week of English. I hated English and as far as I was concerned it was no use to me whatsoever. Just a wasted hour. In my 20s I was sent on a report writing course. It was fantastic. A real eye opener, although you guys may not think so reading my posts. That course was genuinely fun and would have been really useful to me earlier.
The converse is almost certainly true for humanities with regard to the lack of understanding of science and maths. As I said I am gob smacked by the lack of curiosity in science and it should be fun.
So how about stuff that is really interesting post 16 on subjects that they are not doing that is fun and opens their mind.
Because society is risk averse and science lessons are "dangerous". Chemistry labs used to be full of acids, alkalis, carcinogens and toxic substances. Physics labs deal with high voltage electricity, radioactive substances, lasers, etc. Biology might have toxins or animal diseases or animals that bite, sting or attack.
So it has all been banned or relegated to teacher demonstrations. My kids found science lessons amongst the most boring because it was largely demonstrations by the teacher of risk assessments that took up most of the lesson. When I was at school, science lessons were the highlight of my day and the slight danger that existed just added to the interest.
BTW - one of my kids, after escaping the school system, eventually got a PhD in Analytical Chemistry
Since yesterday I have been thinking more about stuff that I am shocked that people without a science background just accept that they really shouldn't. I mentioned yesterday the odd properties of water eg why do ice cubes float, why when you are wet do you feel cold, etc and it reminded me of others. Here are a couple that crop up all the time for me:
a) Relative velocity. The number of times you hear statements like the spacecrafts in orbit docked at 17,500 mph or it landed on the asteroid at a speed of 25,000 mph. If it did it would be one hell of an insurance claim.
b) Never questioning why there appears to be no gravity in a space station orbiting the earth. Why do they think that happens. Do they think there is no gravity just a short distance from the earths surface?
As I said yesterday the list is near infinite and I would have thought these were interesting questions.
Finally I was shocked to find that a relative of mine who was head of geography at a school and obviously with a geography degree and who obviously knew about the effects of water on climate had not a clue about the specific heat properties of water. Why had he never asked 'Why?'
"Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house"
"The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning, while those other subjects merely require scholarship."
- Robert Heinlein (via Lazarus Long)
Ah yes, safeyism and the elimination of risk. Same reason that boys don’t fall out of trees any more.
Half the fun of science lessons, was the unexpected result, and the (perceived) risk that we might end up blowing up or setting fire to the classroom!
The only video we got was the interaction of fluorine and water, 10% was teacher demonstrations and 90% was practical for the students.
Does no one get the fun of chucking lumps of lithium, sodium etc in a sink of water anymore ?
Do any of our more thinking politicians ever look abroad to countries who do much better at these things to look at what they do right and what ideas we could adopt?
Stop sniggering at the back.
This could be applied to practically every department and subject. Housing, education, health care - they all suffer from an insular vision by politicians. This applies to learning from both successes and failures from our neighbours. Mind you I suppose we are not unique in this as I hear the same arguments from commentators in France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands about their own politicians.
Indeed so. Politics can be very insular, there’s a need to look more widely at how things work in other countries.
It wouldn’t be too difficult for the Foreign Office to assemble a guide to healthcare or education systems, in the G20 countries, the top 20 countries by GDP/capita, and any known outliers, looking at what is seen to work well, and what is seen as working badly, around the world.
Four of the five top PISA performers have hyper-scholastic East Asian education systems, where competition for academic places determines your success in everything else. And their societies are very hierarchical and inegalitarian on the basis of academic merit. So to some extent it is about how poor you will get due to low grades, and to what extent it's socially acceptable to sacrifice everything else in favour of study.
Yes, there’s an argument that “successful” Asian systems are focussed too much on rote learning and hard academia, teaching very much to the test at the expense of creating well-rounded individuals able to think outside the box in later life.
That said, a large number of 40-somethings of Indian origin are CEOs of Western companies, is there a reason for this in the Indian (middle-class) education system, or is it simply a numbers game and there’s a billion Indians?
But that discussion is totally absent from most Western countries, replaced instead with constant tinkering and the latest faddish education methods.
I would genuinely love to know what happens in Estonia though. I just found that they’re at the top of the PISA rankings as I researched my post here. Do they teach excessively to the PISA criteria, to try and game the ranking at the expense of other things, or do they do something genuinely innovative and enlightening?
Can anyone more familiar with current green policy tell me, why is imported biomass considered carbon neutral (if indeed it is considered carbon neutral) when within our borders, the effect is purely one of adding carbon? The absorption of CO2 by the biomass when it was grown is clearly calculated in the carbon neutrality. But with imports of goods from China, made by burning coal, the addition to the greenhouse effect is not included in our carbon figures.
Isn't that a flagrant contradiction, biasing us heavily in favour of importation and against domestic production?
Probably. Every system has its stupidities, but that doesn't invalidate the general case.
I said, however, that it had limited value to understanding the problems it apparently seeks to address, or describe, as it was a polemic. Polemics have their place but don't necessarily help us to understand, in this case, the state of the education system.
Many exceptionally naive PBers could do with extra life lessons, I am sure of that. It never ceases to amaze me how so many on here have lived extraordinarily sheltered lives.
I'm not sure I agree with that, although it might be I am mixing sheltered up with boring. Certainly the average poster here is more privileged and not representative of the population at large and if that is what you mean I agree.
The average person I suspect leads a very boring life (although they are probably happy with it). There are quite a few here that lead more interesting lives and some who lead extraordinary lives eg @Leon , @Dura_Ace to name but two.
I think you're confusing mundane with boring. Not the same thing for a lot of folk.
Forgive me for ignoring the ad hominem rants, but I assume it is boilerplate teacher chat. The rest is good. It sounds from the header like fixing education for everyone requires radical reform. Simply making kids sit more maths classes prior to uni might just push more of them towards useful degrees and away from PPE. And the price of forgoing 2 years of some other qualification seems relatively small.
The practical maths appears to be the sort of thing that people struggle with.
If a new phone costs £900 in cash, or £40/month for three years, should you save up for it or get it on the contract?
If a £50k student loan, at 5% pa interest, for a liberal arts degree, leads to you earning £3k more per year than without the degree, is it worth spending most of your life in debt to pay for three years on the piss?
Plenty of examples of human nature valuing gratification now over higher value in the future.
Should we cut taxes now, or spend the money ensuring that public buildings are better maintained?
Should we aim to pass an unpolluted environment onto future generations, even if it increases prices for us now?
But be prepared to accept that if people are capable of making them, those calculations can also go the other way to the way that you (I assume) want them to. It may be that a lot of the expense and effort expended in decarbonising (especially from a UK perspective) isn't worth the predicted benefit, and merely leaves us with less financial headroom to mitigate any future climate changes.
It may be that but many many economists have done the calculation and found that it isn't. In fact, they have shown pretty clearly that the costs of dealing with the effects of climate change are far, far higher than mitigation methods.
Perhaps, but their calculations will be based on a whole world effort, not based on the UK paying a heavy price to cut its already very low emissions even lower, whilst most of the rest of the world continues unabated.
Their work will also have been publicised more due to its conclusions according with the current global consensus. There are a lot of scientists, many of great repute, who dispute the current climate science consensus completely. A recent 'declaration' from this group is something that I've heard of but not read. My point in mentioning this is that dissenting voices from the global consensus are often ignored or ridiculed.
Show me those scientists of great repute who (a) believe we shouldn't be taking radical action to reduce GHG pollution emissions and (b) are not funded by the oil lobby.
As for the impact of the UK, I think the arguments are even stronger for us. For a start, due to being a long thin island, a disproportionate amount of our population lives close to sea level, whether the coast or tidal rivers. Secondly, the UK has a fantastic scientific base, so our people are more likely to respond to the incentives and come up with technology that will make decarbonization easier. Thirdly, we have disproportionate cultural impact, so our example will have an outsized influence on the rest of the world following us.
Do any of our more thinking politicians ever look abroad to countries who do much better at these things to look at what they do right and what ideas we could adopt?
Stop sniggering at the back.
This could be applied to practically every department and subject. Housing, education, health care - they all suffer from an insular vision by politicians. This applies to learning from both successes and failures from our neighbours. Mind you I suppose we are not unique in this as I hear the same arguments from commentators in France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands about their own politicians.
Indeed so. Politics can be very insular, there’s a need to look more widely at how things work in other countries.
It wouldn’t be too difficult for the Foreign Office to assemble a guide to healthcare or education systems, in the G20 countries, the top 20 countries by GDP/capita, and any known outliers, looking at what is seen to work well, and what is seen as working badly, around the world.
In mathematics, Singapore did what you ask, looked around internationally and copied the Soviet system. Estonia used to be part of the USSR, of course. What the Soviets had done is ask the mathematicians what maths should be taught, and (this is the part that would not have happened in Whitehall) asked the psychologists how to teach it.
Do any of our more thinking politicians ever look abroad to countries who do much better at these things to look at what they do right and what ideas we could adopt?
Stop sniggering at the back.
This could be applied to practically every department and subject. Housing, education, health care - they all suffer from an insular vision by politicians. This applies to learning from both successes and failures from our neighbours. Mind you I suppose we are not unique in this as I hear the same arguments from commentators in France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands about their own politicians.
Indeed so. Politics can be very insular, there’s a need to look more widely at how things work in other countries.
We regularly do exchanges with other countries in the military, usually for two or three years (though I did over four because they couldn't find a replacement). It's incredibly valuable and there should probably be similar programs elsewhere in government.
The UK's 1st Division was, until recently, commanded by a French 2*. Luckily GB News never realised.
Ydoether's thread is well-written because he's a clever cookie, but it didn't need to descend into 'bollocks' and other 'below the line' style colloquialisms, because an articulate demolition of the policy without slang, which he could easily have managed, would have been more powerful.
Regarding the policy itself, I think that probably maths education from primary onward needs a complete rethink. What would be useful for the UK? A numerate population that understands (as Josias says) compound interest, can add, multiply, and subtract easily without pencil, paper or calculator, has good budgeting skills/basic accountancy skills, and (probably least importantly) has a foundation of more advanced maths skills.
I have already said that personally I feel daft not knowing my times tables off by heart - that is a very good basic foundation I feel.
Language teaching is the same - the curriculum doesn't meet the basic need; for students to converse well in the second language. Secondary importance, to write well in the second language. I got an 'A*' (German) and an 'A' (French) at GCSE, but would still struggle to have a basic conversation in either. Only now, with post school learning, I have elementary French, understand a lot of the language, and can 'manage' a basic conversation although not always find the word. I've been helped a lot by the techniques of Michel Thomas, who was an amazing man who developed a great teaching method relying on making connections between English and French (which are obviously many). In my opinion the first two years of secondary should be spent almost entirely on developing verbal confidence in the chosen language, writing and grammar should come into it later at GCSE level.
The trouble is that Ydoether has an insane and irrational hatred of Michael Gove who he seems to see as the root of all evil when it comes to education. For evidence see his comment about "obsessed with the idea of falling academic standards" as if this is something an Education Secretary should not be obsessed with.
As such he is unwilling to lay the blame for the current issues (actually issues that have existed for decades and long before Gove came along) anywhere but at the feet of the politicians. And yet the reality is that we have long had a failing education system and no one - neither teachers, academics nor politicians - have been able to come up with a way to reform it to benefit the students and the country. Given that in all his other positions - notably at Justice and DEFRA - Gove has won plaudits from all sides for his willingness to listen to the experts and make informed decisions, one wonders why it is that Education, uniquely has been a problem.
Perhaps because it's the department he didn't come to with an open mind ?
The incessant tinkering with the primary curriculum has, in the experience of my wife and her fellow teachers, been unquestionably deleterious.
And I've given before the example of the dogmatic insistence on phonics to the exclusion of other literacy teaching methods. Which is definitely Gove.
Agree with you about phonics and just like any other politician Gove will have his failings. But again I come back to the claim that Gove was "obsessed with falling academic standards" and should be criticised for this. Academic standards have undoubtedly been falling for decades and the idea that an Education Secretary should not be obsessed by this seems to me to be utterly deluded.
A fairer critique might be 'obsessed with standards'. Which is one of the drivers of the massive growth in largely fruitless paperwork.
Ironically the department recognises the problem as it has had several initiatives aimed at reducing teacher workload.
I don't fault Gove's enthusiasm - and indeed many, including ydoethur, originally had positive expectations.
In my experience, those who hate standards in business, education or any other walk of life are people that hate being held accountable for their performance.
My post yesterday where I complained about the lack of curiosity about stuff got me thinking of what might be useful to students between 16 and 18 and it isn't just the lack of science knowledge. The following is probably bollocks but:
When I was doing my A levels I had to do one lesson a week of English. I hated English and as far as I was concerned it was no use to me whatsoever. Just a wasted hour. In my 20s I was sent on a report writing course. It was fantastic. A real eye opener, although you guys may not think so reading my posts. That course was genuinely fun and would have been really useful to me earlier.
The converse is almost certainly true for humanities with regard to the lack of understanding of science and maths. As I said I am gob smacked by the lack of curiosity in science and it should be fun.
So how about stuff that is really interesting post 16 on subjects that they are not doing that is fun and opens their mind.
Because society is risk averse and science lessons are "dangerous". Chemistry labs used to be full of acids, alkalis, carcinogens and toxic substances. Physics labs deal with high voltage electricity, radioactive substances, lasers, etc. Biology might have toxins or animal diseases or animals that bite, sting or attack.
So it has all been banned or relegated to teacher demonstrations. My kids found science lessons amongst the most boring because it was largely demonstrations by the teacher of risk assessments that took up most of the lesson. When I was at school, science lessons were the highlight of my day and the slight danger that existed just added to the interest.
BTW - one of my kids, after escaping the school system, eventually got a PhD in Analytical Chemistry
Since yesterday I have been thinking more about stuff that I am shocked that people without a science background just accept that they really shouldn't. I mentioned yesterday the odd properties of water eg why do ice cubes float, why when you are wet do you feel cold, etc and it reminded me of others. Here are a couple that crop up all the time for me:
a) Relative velocity. The number of times you hear statements like the spacecrafts in orbit docked at 17,500 mph or it landed on the asteroid at a speed of 25,000 mph. If it did it would be one hell of an insurance claim.
b) Never questioning why there appears to be no gravity in a space station orbiting the earth. Why do they think that happens. Do they think there is no gravity just a short distance from the earths surface?
As I said yesterday the list is near infinite and I would have thought these were interesting questions.
Finally I was shocked to find that a relative of mine who was head of geography at a school and obviously with a geography degree and who obviously knew about the effects of water on climate had not a clue about the specific heat properties of water. Why had he never asked 'Why?'
"Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house"
"The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning, while those other subjects merely require scholarship."
- Robert Heinlein (via Lazarus Long)
Ah yes, safeyism and the elimination of risk. Same reason that boys don’t fall out of trees any more.
Half the fun of science lessons, was the unexpected result, and the (perceived) risk that we might end up blowing up or setting fire to the classroom!
The only video we got was the interaction of fluorine and water, 10% was teacher demonstrations and 90% was practical for the students.
Does no one get the fun of chucking lumps of lithium, sodium etc in a sink of water anymore ?
My daughter does - she has a stockroom full of stuff like that as well as some truly scary stuff.
Do any of our more thinking politicians ever look abroad to countries who do much better at these things to look at what they do right and what ideas we could adopt?
Stop sniggering at the back.
This could be applied to practically every department and subject. Housing, education, health care - they all suffer from an insular vision by politicians. This applies to learning from both successes and failures from our neighbours. Mind you I suppose we are not unique in this as I hear the same arguments from commentators in France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands about their own politicians.
Indeed so. Politics can be very insular, there’s a need to look more widely at how things work in other countries.
It wouldn’t be too difficult for the Foreign Office to assemble a guide to healthcare or education systems, in the G20 countries, the top 20 countries by GDP/capita, and any known outliers, looking at what is seen to work well, and what is seen as working badly, around the world.
In mathematics, Singapore did what you ask, looked around internationally and copied the Soviet system. Estonia used to be part of the USSR, of course. What the Soviets had done is ask the mathematicians what maths should be taught, and (this is the part that would not have happened in Whitehall) asked the psychologists how to teach it.
The first bit was the basis of the 'new math' in the US, way back when. For bright kids it made mathematics fun and interesting, including some of those who 'didn't like maths'.
Can anyone more familiar with current green policy tell me, why is imported biomass considered carbon neutral (if indeed it is considered carbon neutral) when within our borders, the effect is purely one of adding carbon? The absorption of CO2 by the biomass when it was grown is clearly calculated in the carbon neutrality. But with imports of goods from China, made by burning coal, the addition to the greenhouse effect is not included in our carbon figures.
Isn't that a flagrant contradiction, biasing us heavily in favour of importation and against domestic production?
It's illogical I agree, largely because it's inconsistent with how we account for imports with embedded carbon emissions where we ignore those and consider the carbon emissions post-importation.
It would be more logical to continue to treat Biomass as neutral (or near-neutral, there are still transportation related emissions to account for) but also take into account embedded emissions in other products. That will start to happen on an industrial level with the introduction of CBAM of course - whilst that is an EU initiative I expect the UK will need to copy it or facing losing the rest of its heavy industry. Or treat biomass as carbon positive if we continue to do likewise with other products.
But I suppose there is a degree of pragmatism about all this. Biomass is suitable for old coal plants so a useful transition fuel, a bit like the role gas has played more generally.
Do any of our more thinking politicians ever look abroad to countries who do much better at these things to look at what they do right and what ideas we could adopt?
Stop sniggering at the back.
This could be applied to practically every department and subject. Housing, education, health care - they all suffer from an insular vision by politicians. This applies to learning from both successes and failures from our neighbours. Mind you I suppose we are not unique in this as I hear the same arguments from commentators in France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands about their own politicians.
Indeed so. Politics can be very insular, there’s a need to look more widely at how things work in other countries.
It wouldn’t be too difficult for the Foreign Office to assemble a guide to healthcare or education systems, in the G20 countries, the top 20 countries by GDP/capita, and any known outliers, looking at what is seen to work well, and what is seen as working badly, around the world.
In mathematics, Singapore did what you ask, looked around internationally and copied the Soviet system. Estonia used to be part of the USSR, of course. What the Soviets had done is ask the mathematicians what maths should be taught, and (this is the part that would not have happened in Whitehall) asked the psychologists how to teach it.
Of course the teaching method that was developed by a scientist and entirely based on how children's brains learn at different ages is Montessori. A system of education that has been entirely rejected on numerous occasions by Whitehall even though the evidence shows superior outcomes, even with perfect lottery based admissions and therefore accounting for parental difference.
Can anyone more familiar with current green policy tell me, why is imported biomass considered carbon neutral (if indeed it is considered carbon neutral) when within our borders, the effect is purely one of adding carbon? The absorption of CO2 by the biomass when it was grown is clearly calculated in the carbon neutrality. But with imports of goods from China, made by burning coal, the addition to the greenhouse effect is not included in our carbon figures.
Isn't that a flagrant contradiction, biasing us heavily in favour of importation and against domestic production?
Probably. Every system has its stupidities, but that doesn't invalidate the general case.
Overall, I'm quite glad, because cleverly switching to burning American wood pellets managed to save Drax from useless Alok Sharma blowing it up (as he criminally did to other coal power stations rather than sensibly mothballing them like the Germans), thus making our current crisis a good deal less catastrophic than it could have been.
However, it's still an indefensible contradiction, and if we're including calculations of carbon sequestered offshore in our positive column, we should be including calculations of carbon released offshore in our negative column - which would lead to a lot more on-shoring of industry and energy production, where we can do it in a more environmentally responsible way, and with no global transportation or (in the case of gas) carbon intensive processes like LNG production.
Do any of our more thinking politicians ever look abroad to countries who do much better at these things to look at what they do right and what ideas we could adopt?
Stop sniggering at the back.
This could be applied to practically every department and subject. Housing, education, health care - they all suffer from an insular vision by politicians. This applies to learning from both successes and failures from our neighbours. Mind you I suppose we are not unique in this as I hear the same arguments from commentators in France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands about their own politicians.
Indeed so. Politics can be very insular, there’s a need to look more widely at how things work in other countries.
It wouldn’t be too difficult for the Foreign Office to assemble a guide to healthcare or education systems, in the G20 countries, the top 20 countries by GDP/capita, and any known outliers, looking at what is seen to work well, and what is seen as working badly, around the world.
In mathematics, Singapore did what you ask, looked around internationally and copied the Soviet system. Estonia used to be part of the USSR, of course. What the Soviets had done is ask the mathematicians what maths should be taught, and (this is the part that would not have happened in Whitehall) asked the psychologists how to teach it.
Eastern European colleagues boast about their better maths teaching, but it's true across the whole region, so it's still interesting to wonder why Estonia and not Romania etc.
I think that this discussion misses the wider issue.
The world of work, and life generally, is about to undergo fundamental change with the advent of AI.
Change is upon us.
What should schools be teaching as a consequence?
Why should teaching end at 18? Why should what we are taught then be still relevant and suitable in 30 years time?
What parts of our workforce need upskilling the most? A one size fits all approach is not appropriate.
PS I approve of more maths, whatever that actually means? More numeracy? More quantum field theory? But what does the country and the economy actually need?
Ydoether's thread is well-written because he's a clever cookie, but it didn't need to descend into 'bollocks' and other 'below the line' style colloquialisms, because an articulate demolition of the policy without slang, which he could easily have managed, would have been more powerful.
Regarding the policy itself, I think that probably maths education from primary onward needs a complete rethink. What would be useful for the UK? A numerate population that understands (as Josias says) compound interest, can add, multiply, and subtract easily without pencil, paper or calculator, has good budgeting skills/basic accountancy skills, and (probably least importantly) has a foundation of more advanced maths skills.
I have already said that personally I feel daft not knowing my times tables off by heart - that is a very good basic foundation I feel.
Language teaching is the same - the curriculum doesn't meet the basic need; for students to converse well in the second language. Secondary importance, to write well in the second language. I got an 'A*' (German) and an 'A' (French) at GCSE, but would still struggle to have a basic conversation in either. Only now, with post school learning, I have elementary French, understand a lot of the language, and can 'manage' a basic conversation although not always find the word. I've been helped a lot by the techniques of Michel Thomas, who was an amazing man who developed a great teaching method relying on making connections between English and French (which are obviously many). In my opinion the first two years of secondary should be spent almost entirely on developing verbal confidence in the chosen language, writing and grammar should come into it later at GCSE level.
The trouble is that Ydoether has an insane and irrational hatred of Michael Gove who he seems to see as the root of all evil when it comes to education. For evidence see his comment about "obsessed with the idea of falling academic standards" as if this is something an Education Secretary should not be obsessed with.
As such he is unwilling to lay the blame for the current issues (actually issues that have existed for decades and long before Gove came along) anywhere but at the feet of the politicians. And yet the reality is that we have long had a failing education system and no one - neither teachers, academics nor politicians - have been able to come up with a way to reform it to benefit the students and the country. Given that in all his other positions - notably at Justice and DEFRA - Gove has won plaudits from all sides for his willingness to listen to the experts and make informed decisions, one wonders why it is that Education, uniquely has been a problem.
Perhaps because it's the department he didn't come to with an open mind ?
The incessant tinkering with the primary curriculum has, in the experience of my wife and her fellow teachers, been unquestionably deleterious.
And I've given before the example of the dogmatic insistence on phonics to the exclusion of other literacy teaching methods. Which is definitely Gove.
Agree with you about phonics and just like any other politician Gove will have his failings. But again I come back to the claim that Gove was "obsessed with falling academic standards" and should be criticised for this. Academic standards have undoubtedly been falling for decades and the idea that an Education Secretary should not be obsessed by this seems to me to be utterly deluded.
I do think you need to provide some evidence for the assertion in bold. You may be right, but I'm not persuaded. It depends to some extent on what you mean by "academic standards".
It's possible that academic rigour for the top 10/20% has fallen off a bit. But at the same time, far fewer pupils leave school (or college) with no education, training or qualifications than was the case decades ago. The lowest achievers and the middle achievers leave school with higher education standards than was the case 30/40 years ago. There's a debate to be had about whether that's true of the high achievers, though - but it's a complex debate that would involve scrutiny of the standards of individual A levels.
Ydoether's thread is well-written because he's a clever cookie, but it didn't need to descend into 'bollocks' and other 'below the line' style colloquialisms, because an articulate demolition of the policy without slang, which he could easily have managed, would have been more powerful.
Regarding the policy itself, I think that probably maths education from primary onward needs a complete rethink. What would be useful for the UK? A numerate population that understands (as Josias says) compound interest, can add, multiply, and subtract easily without pencil, paper or calculator, has good budgeting skills/basic accountancy skills, and (probably least importantly) has a foundation of more advanced maths skills.
I have already said that personally I feel daft not knowing my times tables off by heart - that is a very good basic foundation I feel.
Language teaching is the same - the curriculum doesn't meet the basic need; for students to converse well in the second language. Secondary importance, to write well in the second language. I got an 'A*' (German) and an 'A' (French) at GCSE, but would still struggle to have a basic conversation in either. Only now, with post school learning, I have elementary French, understand a lot of the language, and can 'manage' a basic conversation although not always find the word. I've been helped a lot by the techniques of Michel Thomas, who was an amazing man who developed a great teaching method relying on making connections between English and French (which are obviously many). In my opinion the first two years of secondary should be spent almost entirely on developing verbal confidence in the chosen language, writing and grammar should come into it later at GCSE level.
The trouble is that Ydoether has an insane and irrational hatred of Michael Gove who he seems to see as the root of all evil when it comes to education. For evidence see his comment about "obsessed with the idea of falling academic standards" as if this is something an Education Secretary should not be obsessed with.
As such he is unwilling to lay the blame for the current issues (actually issues that have existed for decades and long before Gove came along) anywhere but at the feet of the politicians. And yet the reality is that we have long had a failing education system and no one - neither teachers, academics nor politicians - have been able to come up with a way to reform it to benefit the students and the country. Given that in all his other positions - notably at Justice and DEFRA - Gove has won plaudits from all sides for his willingness to listen to the experts and make informed decisions, one wonders why it is that Education, uniquely has been a problem.
Perhaps because it's the department he didn't come to with an open mind ?
The incessant tinkering with the primary curriculum has, in the experience of my wife and her fellow teachers, been unquestionably deleterious.
And I've given before the example of the dogmatic insistence on phonics to the exclusion of other literacy teaching methods. Which is definitely Gove.
Agree with you about phonics and just like any other politician Gove will have his failings. But again I come back to the claim that Gove was "obsessed with falling academic standards" and should be criticised for this. Academic standards have undoubtedly been falling for decades and the idea that an Education Secretary should not be obsessed by this seems to me to be utterly deluded.
A fairer critique might be 'obsessed with standards'. Which is one of the drivers of the massive growth in largely fruitless paperwork.
Ironically the department recognises the problem as it has had several initiatives aimed at reducing teacher workload.
I don't fault Gove's enthusiasm - and indeed many, including ydoethur, originally had positive expectations.
In my experience, those who hate standards in business, education or any other walk of life are people that hate being held accountable for their performance.
Not in this case. You'll note from @ydoethur 's previous accounts, for example, that he was a high performing teacher.
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
A surprising number of younger shop staff panic if you hand them cash rather than tapping your card. A noticeable number struggle with working out change. Heaven knows how they would have coped with the idiotic Pounds, Shillings and Pence of Imperial Britain
Basic arithmetic is in decline.
The ability to do mental arithmetic and guesstimate answers (to double check calculators etc) is a long lamented, diminished skill. It’s also fairly different to what most people here were talking if in terms of maths.
I use it all the time - an instinctive “is that even the right magnitude?”
But then again, I work with computers full time. Which are brilliant at generating a very exact, completely wrong answer.
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
A surprising number of younger shop staff panic if you hand them cash rather than tapping your card. A noticeable number struggle with working out change. Heaven knows how they would have coped with the idiotic Pounds, Shillings and Pence of Imperial Britain
Basic arithmetic is in decline.
The ability to do mental arithmetic and guesstimate answers (to double check calculators etc) is a long lamented, diminished skill. It’s also fairly different to what most people here were talking if in terms of maths.
I use it all the time - an instinctive “is that even the right magnitude?”
But then again, I work with computers full time. Which are brilliant at generating a very exact, completely wrong answer.
My post yesterday where I complained about the lack of curiosity about stuff got me thinking of what might be useful to students between 16 and 18 and it isn't just the lack of science knowledge. The following is probably bollocks but:
When I was doing my A levels I had to do one lesson a week of English. I hated English and as far as I was concerned it was no use to me whatsoever. Just a wasted hour. In my 20s I was sent on a report writing course. It was fantastic. A real eye opener, although you guys may not think so reading my posts. That course was genuinely fun and would have been really useful to me earlier.
The converse is almost certainly true for humanities with regard to the lack of understanding of science and maths. As I said I am gob smacked by the lack of curiosity in science and it should be fun.
So how about stuff that is really interesting post 16 on subjects that they are not doing that is fun and opens their mind.
Because society is risk averse and science lessons are "dangerous". Chemistry labs used to be full of acids, alkalis, carcinogens and toxic substances. Physics labs deal with high voltage electricity, radioactive substances, lasers, etc. Biology might have toxins or animal diseases or animals that bite, sting or attack.
So it has all been banned or relegated to teacher demonstrations. My kids found science lessons amongst the most boring because it was largely demonstrations by the teacher of risk assessments that took up most of the lesson. When I was at school, science lessons were the highlight of my day and the slight danger that existed just added to the interest.
BTW - one of my kids, after escaping the school system, eventually got a PhD in Analytical Chemistry
Since yesterday I have been thinking more about stuff that I am shocked that people without a science background just accept that they really shouldn't. I mentioned yesterday the odd properties of water eg why do ice cubes float, why when you are wet do you feel cold, etc and it reminded me of others. Here are a couple that crop up all the time for me:
a) Relative velocity. The number of times you hear statements like the spacecrafts in orbit docked at 17,500 mph or it landed on the asteroid at a speed of 25,000 mph. If it did it would be one hell of an insurance claim.
b) Never questioning why there appears to be no gravity in a space station orbiting the earth. Why do they think that happens. Do they think there is no gravity just a short distance from the earths surface?
As I said yesterday the list is near infinite and I would have thought these were interesting questions.
Finally I was shocked to find that a relative of mine who was head of geography at a school and obviously with a geography degree and who obviously knew about the effects of water on climate had not a clue about the specific heat properties of water. Why had he never asked 'Why?'
"Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house"
"The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning, while those other subjects merely require scholarship."
- Robert Heinlein (via Lazarus Long)
Ah yes, safeyism and the elimination of risk. Same reason that boys don’t fall out of trees any more.
Half the fun of science lessons, was the unexpected result, and the (perceived) risk that we might end up blowing up or setting fire to the classroom!
The only video we got was the interaction of fluorine and water, 10% was teacher demonstrations and 90% was practical for the students.
Does no one get the fun of chucking lumps of lithium, sodium etc in a sink of water anymore ?
Do any of our more thinking politicians ever look abroad to countries who do much better at these things to look at what they do right and what ideas we could adopt?
Stop sniggering at the back.
This could be applied to practically every department and subject. Housing, education, health care - they all suffer from an insular vision by politicians. This applies to learning from both successes and failures from our neighbours. Mind you I suppose we are not unique in this as I hear the same arguments from commentators in France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands about their own politicians.
Indeed so. Politics can be very insular, there’s a need to look more widely at how things work in other countries.
It wouldn’t be too difficult for the Foreign Office to assemble a guide to healthcare or education systems, in the G20 countries, the top 20 countries by GDP/capita, and any known outliers, looking at what is seen to work well, and what is seen as working badly, around the world.
In mathematics, Singapore did what you ask, looked around internationally and copied the Soviet system. Estonia used to be part of the USSR, of course. What the Soviets had done is ask the mathematicians what maths should be taught, and (this is the part that would not have happened in Whitehall) asked the psychologists how to teach it.
Of course the teaching method that was developed by a scientist and entirely based on how children's brains learn at different ages is Montessori. A system of education that has been entirely rejected on numerous occasions by Whitehall even though the evidence shows superior outcomes, even with perfect lottery based admissions and therefore accounting for parental difference.
I've a little experience of that (early primary years only) and it was indeed very good.
Similar philosophy to Finnish education, I think ? Which also has excellent outcomes.
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
A surprising number of younger shop staff panic if you hand them cash rather than tapping your card. A noticeable number struggle with working out change. Heaven knows how they would have coped with the idiotic Pounds, Shillings and Pence of Imperial Britain
Basic arithmetic is in decline.
The ability to do mental arithmetic and guesstimate answers (to double check calculators etc) is a long lamented, diminished skill. It’s also fairly different to what most people here were talking if in terms of maths.
I use it all the time - an instinctive “is that even the right magnitude?”
But then again, I work with computers full time. Which are brilliant at generating a very exact, completely wrong answer.
I understand what you mean when you say "It’s also fairly different to what most people here were talking [about]" but I would contend that basic arithmetic and a feel for numbers is what everybody should have before they reach secondary.
To say that it is not relevant to the discussion is like saying that a lack of knowledge of the alphabet and how to read should be no impediment to writing a letter ...
Can anyone more familiar with current green policy tell me, why is imported biomass considered carbon neutral (if indeed it is considered carbon neutral) when within our borders, the effect is purely one of adding carbon? The absorption of CO2 by the biomass when it was grown is clearly calculated in the carbon neutrality. But with imports of goods from China, made by burning coal, the addition to the greenhouse effect is not included in our carbon figures.
Isn't that a flagrant contradiction, biasing us heavily in favour of importation and against domestic production?
Biomass is problematic for lots of reasons, but this isn't really one of them.
The cross-border aspects - international aviation, shipping, exports and imports - were put into a "too difficult to deal with right now," pile early on in climate negotiations, but the rest of it has proved difficult enough that they've never been returned to.
Often campaigners will work out national carbon accounts based on consumption, rather than production, and in those figures countries like the UK (which import a lot) have higher emissions, and countries like China (which export a lot) consequently lower emissions. This also provides some context to the argument that the UK shouldn't do anything until China does, when a chunk of their emissions are to provide consumer goods for our population.
Remembering also that the time this was all first being discussed - the early 90s - encouraging international trade was seen as a good thing in itself, so the context would have been hostile to anything that would have discouraged international trade.
So, yes, it's all a bit of a mess and there are lots of contradictions. It's quite hard to get compromises between large numbers of countries that aren't messy.
Ydoether's thread is well-written because he's a clever cookie, but it didn't need to descend into 'bollocks' and other 'below the line' style colloquialisms, because an articulate demolition of the policy without slang, which he could easily have managed, would have been more powerful.
Regarding the policy itself, I think that probably maths education from primary onward needs a complete rethink. What would be useful for the UK? A numerate population that understands (as Josias says) compound interest, can add, multiply, and subtract easily without pencil, paper or calculator, has good budgeting skills/basic accountancy skills, and (probably least importantly) has a foundation of more advanced maths skills.
I have already said that personally I feel daft not knowing my times tables off by heart - that is a very good basic foundation I feel.
Language teaching is the same - the curriculum doesn't meet the basic need; for students to converse well in the second language. Secondary importance, to write well in the second language. I got an 'A*' (German) and an 'A' (French) at GCSE, but would still struggle to have a basic conversation in either. Only now, with post school learning, I have elementary French, understand a lot of the language, and can 'manage' a basic conversation although not always find the word. I've been helped a lot by the techniques of Michel Thomas, who was an amazing man who developed a great teaching method relying on making connections between English and French (which are obviously many). In my opinion the first two years of secondary should be spent almost entirely on developing verbal confidence in the chosen language, writing and grammar should come into it later at GCSE level.
The trouble is that Ydoether has an insane and irrational hatred of Michael Gove who he seems to see as the root of all evil when it comes to education. For evidence see his comment about "obsessed with the idea of falling academic standards" as if this is something an Education Secretary should not be obsessed with.
As such he is unwilling to lay the blame for the current issues (actually issues that have existed for decades and long before Gove came along) anywhere but at the feet of the politicians. And yet the reality is that we have long had a failing education system and no one - neither teachers, academics nor politicians - have been able to come up with a way to reform it to benefit the students and the country. Given that in all his other positions - notably at Justice and DEFRA - Gove has won plaudits from all sides for his willingness to listen to the experts and make informed decisions, one wonders why it is that Education, uniquely has been a problem.
Perhaps because it's the department he didn't come to with an open mind ?
The incessant tinkering with the primary curriculum has, in the experience of my wife and her fellow teachers, been unquestionably deleterious.
And I've given before the example of the dogmatic insistence on phonics to the exclusion of other literacy teaching methods. Which is definitely Gove.
Agree with you about phonics and just like any other politician Gove will have his failings. But again I come back to the claim that Gove was "obsessed with falling academic standards" and should be criticised for this. Academic standards have undoubtedly been falling for decades and the idea that an Education Secretary should not be obsessed by this seems to me to be utterly deluded.
A fairer critique might be 'obsessed with standards'. Which is one of the drivers of the massive growth in largely fruitless paperwork.
Ironically the department recognises the problem as it has had several initiatives aimed at reducing teacher workload.
I don't fault Gove's enthusiasm - and indeed many, including ydoethur, originally had positive expectations.
In my experience, those who hate standards in business, education or any other walk of life are people that hate being held accountable for their performance.
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
You might also have quoted this.
I share your pessimism about whether the system can be changed for the better. Ultimately, it seems to me, we need to define politicians' roles in the education system (and in other public services) in such a way that short-termism, and pet projects, do not get in the way of any system-wide consensus about what needs to be done in the long-term.
Yes very true. Everyone wants the system to be changed for the better. But we are not starting from a position where everything is dreadful (or as dreadful as the header makes out).
I think the situation is pretty bad.
1. We underperform in Education compared to our competitors. 2. The main weaknesses of our education system have been recognised for many decades - poor provision for technical education, that it primarily exists to sort kids into winners and losers and abandons the losers - but little progress on fixing these issues appears to have been achieved. 3. What has happened over the last few decades is that the relationship between teachers and politicians has become increasingly toxic, as the reforms attempted appear to worsen the working conditions of teachers for no discernible benefit, and politicians use teachers as a scapegoat to avoid taking the blame themselves.
That said, I'm a bit surprised that a modest proposal like teaching Maths to age 18 would receive such widespread criticism, both here and in the media generally. What's so special about Britain that we can stop teaching Maths at 16 while so many other countries continue to 18? ...
Nothing, other than our current dysfunction.
It's been an official aspiration of the government for a decade (and was supported by Labour at the time). The annoyance is that an effectively meaningless pledge was inserted into Sunak's recent speech, which does nothing to further that decade old aspiration.
So we have a policy that was announced before the current PM had entered the Commons, and yet our media is so poor that they've treated re-announcing it as a chance to rehash the same articles about the pointlessness of algebra, rather than hold the government to account for failing to deliver on a decade-old policy.
I am disappointed.
To be fair, if the media were to try and go back more than 5 years, they’d need to use the fingers in both hands for counting. How would they hold the mike in the air, while doing that, and shouting across the road to ministers leaving Number 10?
Going back a decade or more would be even worse. The winter is mild, but taking shoes and socks off in the street would be bloody awful.
For all the criticisms of Gove, it could be worse.
The Security Service of Ukraine has seized the property of former Minister of Education and Science Dmytro Tabachnyk, who is suspected of high treason. The total amount of seized assets exceeds $2 million, reported the press service of the SBU on January 9. https://mobile.twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1612406643987202048
Many exceptionally naive PBers could do with extra life lessons, I am sure of that. It never ceases to amaze me how so many on here have lived extraordinarily sheltered lives.
The public image that people portray on a website such as this is rarely a full image of their life or experiences.
People who think that they don't need any extra 'life lessons'; who consider that they already know everything they need to know, are IMO dangerous, for they try to fit the world into their incomplete and stunted world view.
The problem is not 'exceptionally naive' people who need 'extra life lessons'. The problem is people who do not think they are naive and therefore don't try to learn more from life. They think they already have all the answers.
My post yesterday where I complained about the lack of curiosity about stuff got me thinking of what might be useful to students between 16 and 18 and it isn't just the lack of science knowledge. The following is probably bollocks but:
When I was doing my A levels I had to do one lesson a week of English. I hated English and as far as I was concerned it was no use to me whatsoever. Just a wasted hour. In my 20s I was sent on a report writing course. It was fantastic. A real eye opener, although you guys may not think so reading my posts. That course was genuinely fun and would have been really useful to me earlier.
The converse is almost certainly true for humanities with regard to the lack of understanding of science and maths. As I said I am gob smacked by the lack of curiosity in science and it should be fun.
So how about stuff that is really interesting post 16 on subjects that they are not doing that is fun and opens their mind.
Because society is risk averse and science lessons are "dangerous". Chemistry labs used to be full of acids, alkalis, carcinogens and toxic substances. Physics labs deal with high voltage electricity, radioactive substances, lasers, etc. Biology might have toxins or animal diseases or animals that bite, sting or attack.
So it has all been banned or relegated to teacher demonstrations. My kids found science lessons amongst the most boring because it was largely demonstrations by the teacher of risk assessments that took up most of the lesson. When I was at school, science lessons were the highlight of my day and the slight danger that existed just added to the interest.
BTW - one of my kids, after escaping the school system, eventually got a PhD in Analytical Chemistry
Since yesterday I have been thinking more about stuff that I am shocked that people without a science background just accept that they really shouldn't. I mentioned yesterday the odd properties of water eg why do ice cubes float, why when you are wet do you feel cold, etc and it reminded me of others. Here are a couple that crop up all the time for me:
a) Relative velocity. The number of times you hear statements like the spacecrafts in orbit docked at 17,500 mph or it landed on the asteroid at a speed of 25,000 mph. If it did it would be one hell of an insurance claim.
b) Never questioning why there appears to be no gravity in a space station orbiting the earth. Why do they think that happens. Do they think there is no gravity just a short distance from the earths surface?
As I said yesterday the list is near infinite and I would have thought these were interesting questions.
Finally I was shocked to find that a relative of mine who was head of geography at a school and obviously with a geography degree and who obviously knew about the effects of water on climate had not a clue about the specific heat properties of water. Why had he never asked 'Why?'
"Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house"
"The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning, while those other subjects merely require scholarship."
- Robert Heinlein (via Lazarus Long)
That Heinlein quote is nonsense. And as an history and philosophy graduate I know the answers to kjh's questions.
I think that this discussion misses the wider issue.
The world of work, and life generally, is about to undergo fundamental change with the advent of AI.
Change is upon us.
What should schools be teaching as a consequence?
Why should teaching end at 18? Why should what we are taught then be still relevant and suitable in 30 years time?
What parts of our workforce need upskilling the most? A one size fits all approach is not appropriate.
PS I approve of more maths, whatever that actually means? More numeracy? More quantum field theory? But what does the country and the economy actually need?
Oh lordy.... when do you propose to start the cull of humanity? After all, HumanGPT will be sufficient. Apparently....
Does no one get the fun of chucking lumps of lithium, sodium etc in a sink of water anymore ?
Half the fun of a chemistry lesson was the things that shouldn't have been happening. I recall that the bunsen burners fitted on the water taps, so you would see jets of water shoot across the classroom when the teacher's back was turned. There was always someone setting something on fire, be it the desk, blazers, school books, or bags. Magnesium ribbon was our absolute favourite for burning, a fair amount of that got pocketed.
I always remember a chemistry lesson where a substitute teacher had us doing an experiment which involved heating some gunk in a test tube, and within about 5 minutes or so about half the class had managed to break their test tube. It wasn't even deliberate with us messing around to her annoy her, just carelessness. She must have been glad to get home that day.
Ydoether's thread is well-written because he's a clever cookie, but it didn't need to descend into 'bollocks' and other 'below the line' style colloquialisms, because an articulate demolition of the policy without slang, which he could easily have managed, would have been more powerful.
Regarding the policy itself, I think that probably maths education from primary onward needs a complete rethink. What would be useful for the UK? A numerate population that understands (as Josias says) compound interest, can add, multiply, and subtract easily without pencil, paper or calculator, has good budgeting skills/basic accountancy skills, and (probably least importantly) has a foundation of more advanced maths skills.
I have already said that personally I feel daft not knowing my times tables off by heart - that is a very good basic foundation I feel.
Language teaching is the same - the curriculum doesn't meet the basic need; for students to converse well in the second language. Secondary importance, to write well in the second language. I got an 'A*' (German) and an 'A' (French) at GCSE, but would still struggle to have a basic conversation in either. Only now, with post school learning, I have elementary French, understand a lot of the language, and can 'manage' a basic conversation although not always find the word. I've been helped a lot by the techniques of Michel Thomas, who was an amazing man who developed a great teaching method relying on making connections between English and French (which are obviously many). In my opinion the first two years of secondary should be spent almost entirely on developing verbal confidence in the chosen language, writing and grammar should come into it later at GCSE level.
The trouble is that Ydoether has an insane and irrational hatred of Michael Gove who he seems to see as the root of all evil when it comes to education. For evidence see his comment about "obsessed with the idea of falling academic standards" as if this is something an Education Secretary should not be obsessed with.
As such he is unwilling to lay the blame for the current issues (actually issues that have existed for decades and long before Gove came along) anywhere but at the feet of the politicians. And yet the reality is that we have long had a failing education system and no one - neither teachers, academics nor politicians - have been able to come up with a way to reform it to benefit the students and the country. Given that in all his other positions - notably at Justice and DEFRA - Gove has won plaudits from all sides for his willingness to listen to the experts and make informed decisions, one wonders why it is that Education, uniquely has been a problem.
Perhaps because it's the department he didn't come to with an open mind ?
The incessant tinkering with the primary curriculum has, in the experience of my wife and her fellow teachers, been unquestionably deleterious.
And I've given before the example of the dogmatic insistence on phonics to the exclusion of other literacy teaching methods. Which is definitely Gove.
Agree with you about phonics and just like any other politician Gove will have his failings. But again I come back to the claim that Gove was "obsessed with falling academic standards" and should be criticised for this. Academic standards have undoubtedly been falling for decades and the idea that an Education Secretary should not be obsessed by this seems to me to be utterly deluded.
A fairer critique might be 'obsessed with standards'. Which is one of the drivers of the massive growth in largely fruitless paperwork.
Ironically the department recognises the problem as it has had several initiatives aimed at reducing teacher workload.
I don't fault Gove's enthusiasm - and indeed many, including ydoethur, originally had positive expectations.
In my experience, those who hate standards in business, education or any other walk of life are people that hate being held accountable for their performance.
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
A surprising number of younger shop staff panic if you hand them cash rather than tapping your card. A noticeable number struggle with working out change. Heaven knows how they would have coped with the idiotic Pounds, Shillings and Pence of Imperial Britain
Basic arithmetic is in decline.
The ability to do mental arithmetic and guesstimate answers (to double check calculators etc) is a long lamented, diminished skill. It’s also fairly different to what most people here were talking if in terms of maths.
I use it all the time - an instinctive “is that even the right magnitude?”
But then again, I work with computers full time. Which are brilliant at generating a very exact, completely wrong answer.
Totally agree with that. I'd add that it's vital to know the difference between precision and accuracy; something people get wrong all the time (including myself, at times).
Something can be very precise but also utterly inaccurate; whilst something can be fairly imprecise but also accurate.
As an example, if you want to sanity-check a calculation you could use pi at 3.1 That is imprecise but fairly accurate for the purposes. If you set pi at 5.3421342, that is precise, but very inaccurate.
Ydoether's thread is well-written because he's a clever cookie, but it didn't need to descend into 'bollocks' and other 'below the line' style colloquialisms, because an articulate demolition of the policy without slang, which he could easily have managed, would have been more powerful.
Regarding the policy itself, I think that probably maths education from primary onward needs a complete rethink. What would be useful for the UK? A numerate population that understands (as Josias says) compound interest, can add, multiply, and subtract easily without pencil, paper or calculator, has good budgeting skills/basic accountancy skills, and (probably least importantly) has a foundation of more advanced maths skills.
I have already said that personally I feel daft not knowing my times tables off by heart - that is a very good basic foundation I feel.
Language teaching is the same - the curriculum doesn't meet the basic need; for students to converse well in the second language. Secondary importance, to write well in the second language. I got an 'A*' (German) and an 'A' (French) at GCSE, but would still struggle to have a basic conversation in either. Only now, with post school learning, I have elementary French, understand a lot of the language, and can 'manage' a basic conversation although not always find the word. I've been helped a lot by the techniques of Michel Thomas, who was an amazing man who developed a great teaching method relying on making connections between English and French (which are obviously many). In my opinion the first two years of secondary should be spent almost entirely on developing verbal confidence in the chosen language, writing and grammar should come into it later at GCSE level.
The trouble is that Ydoether has an insane and irrational hatred of Michael Gove who he seems to see as the root of all evil when it comes to education. For evidence see his comment about "obsessed with the idea of falling academic standards" as if this is something an Education Secretary should not be obsessed with.
As such he is unwilling to lay the blame for the current issues (actually issues that have existed for decades and long before Gove came along) anywhere but at the feet of the politicians. And yet the reality is that we have long had a failing education system and no one - neither teachers, academics nor politicians - have been able to come up with a way to reform it to benefit the students and the country. Given that in all his other positions - notably at Justice and DEFRA - Gove has won plaudits from all sides for his willingness to listen to the experts and make informed decisions, one wonders why it is that Education, uniquely has been a problem.
Perhaps because it's the department he didn't come to with an open mind ?
The incessant tinkering with the primary curriculum has, in the experience of my wife and her fellow teachers, been unquestionably deleterious.
And I've given before the example of the dogmatic insistence on phonics to the exclusion of other literacy teaching methods. Which is definitely Gove.
Agree with you about phonics and just like any other politician Gove will have his failings. But again I come back to the claim that Gove was "obsessed with falling academic standards" and should be criticised for this. Academic standards have undoubtedly been falling for decades and the idea that an Education Secretary should not be obsessed by this seems to me to be utterly deluded.
I do think you need to provide some evidence for the assertion in bold. You may be right, but I'm not persuaded. It depends to some extent on what you mean by "academic standards".
It's possible that academic rigour for the top 10/20% has fallen off a bit. But at the same time, far fewer pupils leave school (or college) with no education, training or qualifications than was the case decades ago. The lowest achievers and the middle achievers leave school with higher education standards than was the case 30/40 years ago. There's a debate to be had about whether that's true of the high achievers, though - but it's a complex debate that would involve scrutiny of the standards of individual A levels.
Worth remembering that, until 1998, the school leaving age (either Easter or May of what we now call Year 11) was before GCSE exams took place. And some weren't chased particularly hard if they took matters into their own hands before that.
That's created all sorts of challenges; motivation, morale and how to assess when O Levels were originally aimed at the top 20 percent of the attainment range, CSEs at the next forty percent and GCSEs are still supposed to map onto them.
But there's no doubt that people lower down the scale leave education knowing a lot more than they used to.
Forgive me for ignoring the ad hominem rants, but I assume it is boilerplate teacher chat. The rest is good. It sounds from the header like fixing education for everyone requires radical reform. Simply making kids sit more maths classes prior to uni might just push more of them towards useful degrees and away from PPE. And the price of forgoing 2 years of some other qualification seems relatively small.
The practical maths appears to be the sort of thing that people struggle with.
If a new phone costs £900 in cash, or £40/month for three years, should you save up for it or get it on the contract?
If a £50k student loan, at 5% pa interest, for a liberal arts degree, leads to you earning £3k more per year than without the degree, is it worth spending most of your life in debt to pay for three years on the piss?
Plenty of examples of human nature valuing gratification now over higher value in the future.
Should we cut taxes now, or spend the money ensuring that public buildings are better maintained?
Should we aim to pass an unpolluted environment onto future generations, even if it increases prices for us now?
But be prepared to accept that if people are capable of making them, those calculations can also go the other way to the way that you (I assume) want them to. It may be that a lot of the expense and effort expended in decarbonising (especially from a UK perspective) isn't worth the predicted benefit, and merely leaves us with less financial headroom to mitigate any future climate changes.
It may be that but many many economists have done the calculation and found that it isn't. In fact, they have shown pretty clearly that the costs of dealing with the effects of climate change are far, far higher than mitigation methods.
Perhaps, but their calculations will be based on a whole world effort, not based on the UK paying a heavy price to cut its already very low emissions even lower, whilst most of the rest of the world continues unabated.
Their work will also have been publicised more due to its conclusions according with the current global consensus. There are a lot of scientists, many of great repute, who dispute the current climate science consensus completely. A recent 'declaration' from this group is something that I've heard of but not read. My point in mentioning this is that dissenting voices from the global consensus are often ignored or ridiculed.
Show me those scientists of great repute who (a) believe we shouldn't be taking radical action to reduce GHG pollution emissions and (b) are not funded by the oil lobby.
As for the impact of the UK, I think the arguments are even stronger for us. For a start, due to being a long thin island, a disproportionate amount of our population lives close to sea level, whether the coast or tidal rivers. Secondly, the UK has a fantastic scientific base, so our people are more likely to respond to the incentives and come up with technology that will make decarbonization easier. Thirdly, we have disproportionate cultural impact, so our example will have an outsized influence on the rest of the world following us.
There are apparently 1400 signatories - I am sure many will be connected commercially with oil and gas - and many more won't be.
You can perhaps show me scientists on the climate emergency side of the argument who do not benefit from patronage by the corporations, NGOs, Governments, and supranational Governing organisations promoting the current climate consensus.
Do any of our more thinking politicians ever look abroad to countries who do much better at these things to look at what they do right and what ideas we could adopt?
Stop sniggering at the back.
This could be applied to practically every department and subject. Housing, education, health care - they all suffer from an insular vision by politicians. This applies to learning from both successes and failures from our neighbours. Mind you I suppose we are not unique in this as I hear the same arguments from commentators in France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands about their own politicians.
Indeed so. Politics can be very insular, there’s a need to look more widely at how things work in other countries.
It wouldn’t be too difficult for the Foreign Office to assemble a guide to healthcare or education systems, in the G20 countries, the top 20 countries by GDP/capita, and any known outliers, looking at what is seen to work well, and what is seen as working badly, around the world.
In mathematics, Singapore did what you ask, looked around internationally and copied the Soviet system. Estonia used to be part of the USSR, of course. What the Soviets had done is ask the mathematicians what maths should be taught, and (this is the part that would not have happened in Whitehall) asked the psychologists how to teach it.
Of course the teaching method that was developed by a scientist and entirely based on how children's brains learn at different ages is Montessori. A system of education that has been entirely rejected on numerous occasions by Whitehall even though the evidence shows superior outcomes, even with perfect lottery based admissions and therefore accounting for parental difference.
I've a little experience of that (early primary years only) and it was indeed very good.
Similar philosophy to Finnish education, I think ? Which also has excellent outcomes.
Yes, oddly a lot of concepts of Montessori education have been brought into the Early Years framework, but without the rigour to make sure it works practically. Unfortunately the Montessori term is not copyrighted so there are lots of poor imitators, but those under the standards of MMI are extremely good. Quite a marvel to walk into a room of four year olds and hear an eerie silence as they are all diligently working under their own motivation.
My post yesterday where I complained about the lack of curiosity about stuff got me thinking of what might be useful to students between 16 and 18 and it isn't just the lack of science knowledge. The following is probably bollocks but:
When I was doing my A levels I had to do one lesson a week of English. I hated English and as far as I was concerned it was no use to me whatsoever. Just a wasted hour. In my 20s I was sent on a report writing course. It was fantastic. A real eye opener, although you guys may not think so reading my posts. That course was genuinely fun and would have been really useful to me earlier.
The converse is almost certainly true for humanities with regard to the lack of understanding of science and maths. As I said I am gob smacked by the lack of curiosity in science and it should be fun.
So how about stuff that is really interesting post 16 on subjects that they are not doing that is fun and opens their mind.
Because society is risk averse and science lessons are "dangerous". Chemistry labs used to be full of acids, alkalis, carcinogens and toxic substances. Physics labs deal with high voltage electricity, radioactive substances, lasers, etc. Biology might have toxins or animal diseases or animals that bite, sting or attack.
So it has all been banned or relegated to teacher demonstrations. My kids found science lessons amongst the most boring because it was largely demonstrations by the teacher of risk assessments that took up most of the lesson. When I was at school, science lessons were the highlight of my day and the slight danger that existed just added to the interest.
BTW - one of my kids, after escaping the school system, eventually got a PhD in Analytical Chemistry
Since yesterday I have been thinking more about stuff that I am shocked that people without a science background just accept that they really shouldn't. I mentioned yesterday the odd properties of water eg why do ice cubes float, why when you are wet do you feel cold, etc and it reminded me of others. Here are a couple that crop up all the time for me:
a) Relative velocity. The number of times you hear statements like the spacecrafts in orbit docked at 17,500 mph or it landed on the asteroid at a speed of 25,000 mph. If it did it would be one hell of an insurance claim.
b) Never questioning why there appears to be no gravity in a space station orbiting the earth. Why do they think that happens. Do they think there is no gravity just a short distance from the earths surface?
As I said yesterday the list is near infinite and I would have thought these were interesting questions.
Finally I was shocked to find that a relative of mine who was head of geography at a school and obviously with a geography degree and who obviously knew about the effects of water on climate had not a clue about the specific heat properties of water. Why had he never asked 'Why?'
"Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house"
"The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning, while those other subjects merely require scholarship."
- Robert Heinlein (via Lazarus Long)
That Heinlein quote is nonsense. And as an history and philosophy graduate I know the answers to kjh's questions.
Do any of our more thinking politicians ever look abroad to countries who do much better at these things to look at what they do right and what ideas we could adopt?
Stop sniggering at the back.
This could be applied to practically every department and subject. Housing, education, health care - they all suffer from an insular vision by politicians. This applies to learning from both successes and failures from our neighbours. Mind you I suppose we are not unique in this as I hear the same arguments from commentators in France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands about their own politicians.
Indeed so. Politics can be very insular, there’s a need to look more widely at how things work in other countries.
We regularly do exchanges with other countries in the military, usually for two or three years (though I did over four because they couldn't find a replacement). It's incredibly valuable and there should probably be similar programs elsewhere in government.
The UK's 1st Division was, until recently, commanded by a French 2*. Luckily GB News never realised.
Did the rations improve or am I culturally stereotyping?
Worth remembering that, until 1998, the school leaving age (either Easter or May of what we now call Year 11) was before GCSE exams took place. And some weren't chased particularly hard if they took matters into their own hands before that.
That's created all sorts of challenges; motivation, morale and how to assess when O Levels were originally aimed at the top 20 percent of the attainment range, CSEs at the next forty percent and GCSEs are still supposed to map onto them.
But there's no doubt that people lower down the scale leave education knowing a lot more than they used to.
My dad left school with no formal qualifications, but he also then did National Service where he got a couple of O levels but more importantly learned all sorts of life lessons that served him well in his future very successful careers.
Does no one get the fun of chucking lumps of lithium, sodium etc in a sink of water anymore ?
Half the fun of a chemistry lesson was the things that shouldn't have been happening. I recall that the bunsen burners fitted on the water taps, so you would see jets of water shoot across the classroom when the teacher's back was turned. There was always someone setting something on fire, be it the desk, blazers, school books, or bags. Magnesium ribbon was our absolute favourite for burning, a fair amount of that got pocketed.
I always remember a chemistry lesson where a substitute teacher had us doing an experiment which involved heating some gunk in a test tube, and within about 5 minutes or so about half the class had managed to break their test tube. It wasn't even deliberate with us messing around to her annoy her, just carelessness. She must have been glad to get home that day.
Seeing how hot you could get a carbon rod with a variable power supply.
Forgive me for ignoring the ad hominem rants, but I assume it is boilerplate teacher chat. The rest is good. It sounds from the header like fixing education for everyone requires radical reform. Simply making kids sit more maths classes prior to uni might just push more of them towards useful degrees and away from PPE. And the price of forgoing 2 years of some other qualification seems relatively small.
The practical maths appears to be the sort of thing that people struggle with.
If a new phone costs £900 in cash, or £40/month for three years, should you save up for it or get it on the contract?
If a £50k student loan, at 5% pa interest, for a liberal arts degree, leads to you earning £3k more per year than without the degree, is it worth spending most of your life in debt to pay for three years on the piss?
Plenty of examples of human nature valuing gratification now over higher value in the future.
Should we cut taxes now, or spend the money ensuring that public buildings are better maintained?
Should we aim to pass an unpolluted environment onto future generations, even if it increases prices for us now?
But be prepared to accept that if people are capable of making them, those calculations can also go the other way to the way that you (I assume) want them to. It may be that a lot of the expense and effort expended in decarbonising (especially from a UK perspective) isn't worth the predicted benefit, and merely leaves us with less financial headroom to mitigate any future climate changes.
It may be that but many many economists have done the calculation and found that it isn't. In fact, they have shown pretty clearly that the costs of dealing with the effects of climate change are far, far higher than mitigation methods.
Perhaps, but their calculations will be based on a whole world effort, not based on the UK paying a heavy price to cut its already very low emissions even lower, whilst most of the rest of the world continues unabated.
Their work will also have been publicised more due to its conclusions according with the current global consensus. There are a lot of scientists, many of great repute, who dispute the current climate science consensus completely. A recent 'declaration' from this group is something that I've heard of but not read. My point in mentioning this is that dissenting voices from the global consensus are often ignored or ridiculed.
Show me those scientists of great repute who (a) believe we shouldn't be taking radical action to reduce GHG pollution emissions and (b) are not funded by the oil lobby.
As for the impact of the UK, I think the arguments are even stronger for us. For a start, due to being a long thin island, a disproportionate amount of our population lives close to sea level, whether the coast or tidal rivers. Secondly, the UK has a fantastic scientific base, so our people are more likely to respond to the incentives and come up with technology that will make decarbonization easier. Thirdly, we have disproportionate cultural impact, so our example will have an outsized influence on the rest of the world following us.
There are apparently 1400 signatories - I am sure many will be connected commercially with oil and gas - and many more won't be.
You can perhaps show me scientists on the climate emergency side of the argument who do not benefit from patronage by the corporations, NGOs, Governments, and supranational Governing organisations promoting the current climate consensus.
The scientific academy of Russia upheld the consensus despite the outright opposition of the Russian autocratic state. The idea that they were doing so for personal ambition is laughable.
You say "many more won't be" paid by oil companies. Go on then, give some examples.
My post yesterday where I complained about the lack of curiosity about stuff got me thinking of what might be useful to students between 16 and 18 and it isn't just the lack of science knowledge. The following is probably bollocks but:
When I was doing my A levels I had to do one lesson a week of English. I hated English and as far as I was concerned it was no use to me whatsoever. Just a wasted hour. In my 20s I was sent on a report writing course. It was fantastic. A real eye opener, although you guys may not think so reading my posts. That course was genuinely fun and would have been really useful to me earlier.
The converse is almost certainly true for humanities with regard to the lack of understanding of science and maths. As I said I am gob smacked by the lack of curiosity in science and it should be fun.
So how about stuff that is really interesting post 16 on subjects that they are not doing that is fun and opens their mind.
Because society is risk averse and science lessons are "dangerous". Chemistry labs used to be full of acids, alkalis, carcinogens and toxic substances. Physics labs deal with high voltage electricity, radioactive substances, lasers, etc. Biology might have toxins or animal diseases or animals that bite, sting or attack.
So it has all been banned or relegated to teacher demonstrations. My kids found science lessons amongst the most boring because it was largely demonstrations by the teacher of risk assessments that took up most of the lesson. When I was at school, science lessons were the highlight of my day and the slight danger that existed just added to the interest.
BTW - one of my kids, after escaping the school system, eventually got a PhD in Analytical Chemistry
Since yesterday I have been thinking more about stuff that I am shocked that people without a science background just accept that they really shouldn't. I mentioned yesterday the odd properties of water eg why do ice cubes float, why when you are wet do you feel cold, etc and it reminded me of others. Here are a couple that crop up all the time for me:
a) Relative velocity. The number of times you hear statements like the spacecrafts in orbit docked at 17,500 mph or it landed on the asteroid at a speed of 25,000 mph. If it did it would be one hell of an insurance claim.
b) Never questioning why there appears to be no gravity in a space station orbiting the earth. Why do they think that happens. Do they think there is no gravity just a short distance from the earths surface?
As I said yesterday the list is near infinite and I would have thought these were interesting questions.
Finally I was shocked to find that a relative of mine who was head of geography at a school and obviously with a geography degree and who obviously knew about the effects of water on climate had not a clue about the specific heat properties of water. Why had he never asked 'Why?'
"Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house"
"The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning, while those other subjects merely require scholarship."
- Robert Heinlein (via Lazarus Long)
That Heinlein quote is nonsense. And as an history and philosophy graduate I know the answers to kjh's questions.
LOL no doubt, but how do you propose we do history or philosophy without reasoning?
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
If you want to criticise then your target should be me for publishing it. Unlike posts on a thread responsibility for headers is by PB's editorial team.
Totally right to publish this piece. There might be some 'off my chest' in there from @ydoethur but so what? It's an interesting look under the bonnet of a vehicle he's been struggling to drive for some time and it illustrates how good outcomes rarely follow when top level policy on something is disconnected from what actually goes on there in practice.
A point I'd stress when it comes to schools. In this country we have a parallel system - the independent sector - whereby children from advantaged backgrounds are filtered off and advantaged further by access to influential networks and having double the amount per pupil invested in their education. Most of the establishment went through this alternative system and use it for their own children. This is a stumbling block to transforming the mainstream sector - an underappreciated one imo. The problem rarely gets addressed with anything more thoughtful than "well if state schools were better people wouldn't go private".
When an actual school started attracting parents back from the private system* - a Free School - it was attacked for not having a less diverse pupil group. As measured by being eligible for free school meals.
Yes, it was attacked for being more middle class. Than schools with no middle class kids going to them….
*A substantial number of local parents decided that free education meant they could afford a fuck ton of private tuition.
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
A surprising number of younger shop staff panic if you hand them cash rather than tapping your card. A noticeable number struggle with working out change. Heaven knows how they would have coped with the idiotic Pounds, Shillings and Pence of Imperial Britain
Basic arithmetic is in decline.
The ability to do mental arithmetic and guesstimate answers (to double check calculators etc) is a long lamented, diminished skill. It’s also fairly different to what most people here were talking if in terms of maths.
I use it all the time - an instinctive “is that even the right magnitude?”
But then again, I work with computers full time. Which are brilliant at generating a very exact, completely wrong answer.
Totally agree with that. I'd add that it's vital to know the difference between precision and accuracy; something people get wrong all the time (including myself, at times).
Something can be very precise but also utterly inaccurate; whilst something can be fairly imprecise but also accurate.
As an example, if you want to sanity-check a calculation you could use pi at 3.1 That is imprecise but fairly accurate for the purposes. If you set pi at 5.3421342, that is precise, but very inaccurate.
22/7 is a much better approximation for pi and, ideally, everyone knows their times tables will enough that they can handle the divide by seven.
A crazy idea might be judging scientific arguments based on their merits (evidence/proof, an internally consistent set of assumptions etc) rather than who is making the claims.
Forgive me for ignoring the ad hominem rants, but I assume it is boilerplate teacher chat. The rest is good. It sounds from the header like fixing education for everyone requires radical reform. Simply making kids sit more maths classes prior to uni might just push more of them towards useful degrees and away from PPE. And the price of forgoing 2 years of some other qualification seems relatively small.
The practical maths appears to be the sort of thing that people struggle with.
If a new phone costs £900 in cash, or £40/month for three years, should you save up for it or get it on the contract?
If a £50k student loan, at 5% pa interest, for a liberal arts degree, leads to you earning £3k more per year than without the degree, is it worth spending most of your life in debt to pay for three years on the piss?
Plenty of examples of human nature valuing gratification now over higher value in the future.
Should we cut taxes now, or spend the money ensuring that public buildings are better maintained?
Should we aim to pass an unpolluted environment onto future generations, even if it increases prices for us now?
But be prepared to accept that if people are capable of making them, those calculations can also go the other way to the way that you (I assume) want them to. It may be that a lot of the expense and effort expended in decarbonising (especially from a UK perspective) isn't worth the predicted benefit, and merely leaves us with less financial headroom to mitigate any future climate changes.
It may be that but many many economists have done the calculation and found that it isn't. In fact, they have shown pretty clearly that the costs of dealing with the effects of climate change are far, far higher than mitigation methods.
Perhaps, but their calculations will be based on a whole world effort, not based on the UK paying a heavy price to cut its already very low emissions even lower, whilst most of the rest of the world continues unabated.
Their work will also have been publicised more due to its conclusions according with the current global consensus. There are a lot of scientists, many of great repute, who dispute the current climate science consensus completely. A recent 'declaration' from this group is something that I've heard of but not read. My point in mentioning this is that dissenting voices from the global consensus are often ignored or ridiculed.
Show me those scientists of great repute who (a) believe we shouldn't be taking radical action to reduce GHG pollution emissions and (b) are not funded by the oil lobby.
As for the impact of the UK, I think the arguments are even stronger for us. For a start, due to being a long thin island, a disproportionate amount of our population lives close to sea level, whether the coast or tidal rivers. Secondly, the UK has a fantastic scientific base, so our people are more likely to respond to the incentives and come up with technology that will make decarbonization easier. Thirdly, we have disproportionate cultural impact, so our example will have an outsized influence on the rest of the world following us.
There are apparently 1400 signatories - I am sure many will be connected commercially with oil and gas - and many more won't be.
You can perhaps show me scientists on the climate emergency side of the argument who do not benefit from patronage by the corporations, NGOs, Governments, and supranational Governing organisations promoting the current climate consensus.
If something can’t be challenged critically, then it’s a religion rather than a science. The whole point of science is continuous questioning and critique of our knowledge.
Some areas of ‘science’, such as the climate stuff and a lot of what we saw during the pandemic, do veer towards religion more than is healthy. That doesn’t mean that idiots spouting rubbish should always have a platform, but is does mean that there should be a process by which a ‘consensus’ should be able to be challenged using the scientific method.
Funding sources for research, are of course a significant factor in such ‘consensus’ positions arising in the first place, as is - especially in the US - the tendency for lobby groups to try and use ‘science’ to push a position advantageous to themselves.
A crazy idea might be judging scientific arguments based on their merits (evidence/proof, an internally consistent set of assumptions etc) rather than who is making the claims.
Yes, scientists do. Which is why the vast, vast majority of them working in the field have come to the same conclusion.
Been dropping in and out of reading this. As someone who’s been interested in Continuing Education all his life, including after retirement, I wonder what is meant by ‘maths’?
For example, I could have done with learning a lot more about statistics!
Forgive me for ignoring the ad hominem rants, but I assume it is boilerplate teacher chat. The rest is good. It sounds from the header like fixing education for everyone requires radical reform. Simply making kids sit more maths classes prior to uni might just push more of them towards useful degrees and away from PPE. And the price of forgoing 2 years of some other qualification seems relatively small.
The practical maths appears to be the sort of thing that people struggle with.
If a new phone costs £900 in cash, or £40/month for three years, should you save up for it or get it on the contract?
If a £50k student loan, at 5% pa interest, for a liberal arts degree, leads to you earning £3k more per year than without the degree, is it worth spending most of your life in debt to pay for three years on the piss?
Plenty of examples of human nature valuing gratification now over higher value in the future.
Should we cut taxes now, or spend the money ensuring that public buildings are better maintained?
Should we aim to pass an unpolluted environment onto future generations, even if it increases prices for us now?
But be prepared to accept that if people are capable of making them, those calculations can also go the other way to the way that you (I assume) want them to. It may be that a lot of the expense and effort expended in decarbonising (especially from a UK perspective) isn't worth the predicted benefit, and merely leaves us with less financial headroom to mitigate any future climate changes.
It may be that but many many economists have done the calculation and found that it isn't. In fact, they have shown pretty clearly that the costs of dealing with the effects of climate change are far, far higher than mitigation methods.
Perhaps, but their calculations will be based on a whole world effort, not based on the UK paying a heavy price to cut its already very low emissions even lower, whilst most of the rest of the world continues unabated.
Their work will also have been publicised more due to its conclusions according with the current global consensus. There are a lot of scientists, many of great repute, who dispute the current climate science consensus completely. A recent 'declaration' from this group is something that I've heard of but not read. My point in mentioning this is that dissenting voices from the global consensus are often ignored or ridiculed.
Show me those scientists of great repute who (a) believe we shouldn't be taking radical action to reduce GHG pollution emissions and (b) are not funded by the oil lobby.
As for the impact of the UK, I think the arguments are even stronger for us. For a start, due to being a long thin island, a disproportionate amount of our population lives close to sea level, whether the coast or tidal rivers. Secondly, the UK has a fantastic scientific base, so our people are more likely to respond to the incentives and come up with technology that will make decarbonization easier. Thirdly, we have disproportionate cultural impact, so our example will have an outsized influence on the rest of the world following us.
There are apparently 1400 signatories - I am sure many will be connected commercially with oil and gas - and many more won't be.
You can perhaps show me scientists on the climate emergency side of the argument who do not benefit from patronage by the corporations, NGOs, Governments, and supranational Governing organisations promoting the current climate consensus.
Signed by that arse and nutter Monckton which tells us what we need to know
I have just learned I am incapable of reasoning, but I can judge scientific models after the fact by their predictive power. 25 years ago the warmists were saying catastrophic change and the Moncktons were saying pooh pooh and nonsense. Last year I made money betting the UK would top 40 C. This winter the alps are green. Who was right?
My post yesterday where I complained about the lack of curiosity about stuff got me thinking of what might be useful to students between 16 and 18 and it isn't just the lack of science knowledge. The following is probably bollocks but:
When I was doing my A levels I had to do one lesson a week of English. I hated English and as far as I was concerned it was no use to me whatsoever. Just a wasted hour. In my 20s I was sent on a report writing course. It was fantastic. A real eye opener, although you guys may not think so reading my posts. That course was genuinely fun and would have been really useful to me earlier.
The converse is almost certainly true for humanities with regard to the lack of understanding of science and maths. As I said I am gob smacked by the lack of curiosity in science and it should be fun.
So how about stuff that is really interesting post 16 on subjects that they are not doing that is fun and opens their mind.
Because society is risk averse and science lessons are "dangerous". Chemistry labs used to be full of acids, alkalis, carcinogens and toxic substances. Physics labs deal with high voltage electricity, radioactive substances, lasers, etc. Biology might have toxins or animal diseases or animals that bite, sting or attack.
So it has all been banned or relegated to teacher demonstrations. My kids found science lessons amongst the most boring because it was largely demonstrations by the teacher of risk assessments that took up most of the lesson. When I was at school, science lessons were the highlight of my day and the slight danger that existed just added to the interest.
BTW - one of my kids, after escaping the school system, eventually got a PhD in Analytical Chemistry
Since yesterday I have been thinking more about stuff that I am shocked that people without a science background just accept that they really shouldn't. I mentioned yesterday the odd properties of water eg why do ice cubes float, why when you are wet do you feel cold, etc and it reminded me of others. Here are a couple that crop up all the time for me:
a) Relative velocity. The number of times you hear statements like the spacecrafts in orbit docked at 17,500 mph or it landed on the asteroid at a speed of 25,000 mph. If it did it would be one hell of an insurance claim.
b) Never questioning why there appears to be no gravity in a space station orbiting the earth. Why do they think that happens. Do they think there is no gravity just a short distance from the earths surface?
As I said yesterday the list is near infinite and I would have thought these were interesting questions.
Finally I was shocked to find that a relative of mine who was head of geography at a school and obviously with a geography degree and who obviously knew about the effects of water on climate had not a clue about the specific heat properties of water. Why had he never asked 'Why?'
"Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house"
"The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning, while those other subjects merely require scholarship."
- Robert Heinlein (via Lazarus Long)
That Heinlein quote is nonsense. And as an history and philosophy graduate I know the answers to kjh's questions.
So is Rishi Sunak a fan of Robert Heinlein? I think we should be told.
Can anyone more familiar with current green policy tell me, why is imported biomass considered carbon neutral (if indeed it is considered carbon neutral) when within our borders, the effect is purely one of adding carbon? The absorption of CO2 by the biomass when it was grown is clearly calculated in the carbon neutrality. But with imports of goods from China, made by burning coal, the addition to the greenhouse effect is not included in our carbon figures.
Isn't that a flagrant contradiction, biasing us heavily in favour of importation and against domestic production?
It's illogical I agree, largely because it's inconsistent with how we account for imports with embedded carbon emissions where we ignore those and consider the carbon emissions post-importation.
It would be more logical to continue to treat Biomass as neutral (or near-neutral, there are still transportation related emissions to account for) but also take into account embedded emissions in other products. That will start to happen on an industrial level with the introduction of CBAM of course - whilst that is an EU initiative I expect the UK will need to copy it or facing losing the rest of its heavy industry. Or treat biomass as carbon positive if we continue to do likewise with other products.
But I suppose there is a degree of pragmatism about all this. Biomass is suitable for old coal plants so a useful transition fuel, a bit like the role gas has played more generally.
Thanks @TimS and @LostPassword for the responses. I think we're probably all agreed that this is a glitch, regardless of how important or otherwise we think it is. As seems the trend with such glitches, whoever is winning, it ain't the UK.
Since burning imported pellets is considered carbon neutral, no carbon sequestration technology is used (I assume), whereas if new coal power stations were to be built, they would have to include carbon capture as standard. So potentially burning coal would add less carbon to the atmosphere than imported biomass, at least from a UK perspective.
Does no one get the fun of chucking lumps of lithium, sodium etc in a sink of water anymore ?
Half the fun of a chemistry lesson was the things that shouldn't have been happening. I recall that the bunsen burners fitted on the water taps, so you would see jets of water shoot across the classroom when the teacher's back was turned. There was always someone setting something on fire, be it the desk, blazers, school books, or bags. Magnesium ribbon was our absolute favourite for burning, a fair amount of that got pocketed.
I always remember a chemistry lesson where a substitute teacher had us doing an experiment which involved heating some gunk in a test tube, and within about 5 minutes or so about half the class had managed to break their test tube. It wasn't even deliberate with us messing around to her annoy her, just carelessness. She must have been glad to get home that day.
Our "end of term experiment" was feeding the gas taps into a washing up liquid / water mix and then setting fire to the bubbles on their way up. Many an eyebrow lost.
The competent were allowed to partake in some "special" experiments during free periods, although one did go a bit wrong and the whole classroom had to be evacuated when the fume cupboard was insufficient to contain an attempt to make some explosive or another.
There were also complaints about the Nitrogen Triiodide sprinkles, which made amusing crackles when trodden on, but ate away at the soles of shoes and the chemistry lab floor.
My post yesterday where I complained about the lack of curiosity about stuff got me thinking of what might be useful to students between 16 and 18 and it isn't just the lack of science knowledge. The following is probably bollocks but:
When I was doing my A levels I had to do one lesson a week of English. I hated English and as far as I was concerned it was no use to me whatsoever. Just a wasted hour. In my 20s I was sent on a report writing course. It was fantastic. A real eye opener, although you guys may not think so reading my posts. That course was genuinely fun and would have been really useful to me earlier.
The converse is almost certainly true for humanities with regard to the lack of understanding of science and maths. As I said I am gob smacked by the lack of curiosity in science and it should be fun.
So how about stuff that is really interesting post 16 on subjects that they are not doing that is fun and opens their mind.
Because society is risk averse and science lessons are "dangerous". Chemistry labs used to be full of acids, alkalis, carcinogens and toxic substances. Physics labs deal with high voltage electricity, radioactive substances, lasers, etc. Biology might have toxins or animal diseases or animals that bite, sting or attack.
So it has all been banned or relegated to teacher demonstrations. My kids found science lessons amongst the most boring because it was largely demonstrations by the teacher of risk assessments that took up most of the lesson. When I was at school, science lessons were the highlight of my day and the slight danger that existed just added to the interest.
BTW - one of my kids, after escaping the school system, eventually got a PhD in Analytical Chemistry
Since yesterday I have been thinking more about stuff that I am shocked that people without a science background just accept that they really shouldn't. I mentioned yesterday the odd properties of water eg why do ice cubes float, why when you are wet do you feel cold, etc and it reminded me of others. Here are a couple that crop up all the time for me:
a) Relative velocity. The number of times you hear statements like the spacecrafts in orbit docked at 17,500 mph or it landed on the asteroid at a speed of 25,000 mph. If it did it would be one hell of an insurance claim.
b) Never questioning why there appears to be no gravity in a space station orbiting the earth. Why do they think that happens. Do they think there is no gravity just a short distance from the earths surface?
As I said yesterday the list is near infinite and I would have thought these were interesting questions.
Finally I was shocked to find that a relative of mine who was head of geography at a school and obviously with a geography degree and who obviously knew about the effects of water on climate had not a clue about the specific heat properties of water. Why had he never asked 'Why?'
"Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house"
"The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning, while those other subjects merely require scholarship."
- Robert Heinlein (via Lazarus Long)
That Heinlein quote is nonsense. And as an history and philosophy graduate I know the answers to kjh's questions.
LOL no doubt, but how do you propose we do history or philosophy without reasoning?
SIASL is boring as hell anyway.
We are managing perfectly well without "reasoning" (see the govt for details) and history can seemingly only be viewed by those using rose-tinted glasses. Since Heaven cannot scientifically proven to exist, philosophy is no longer required since we know that there are no angels dancing on the head of a pin.
Does no one get the fun of chucking lumps of lithium, sodium etc in a sink of water anymore ?
Half the fun of a chemistry lesson was the things that shouldn't have been happening. I recall that the bunsen burners fitted on the water taps, so you would see jets of water shoot across the classroom when the teacher's back was turned. There was always someone setting something on fire, be it the desk, blazers, school books, or bags. Magnesium ribbon was our absolute favourite for burning, a fair amount of that got pocketed.
I always remember a chemistry lesson where a substitute teacher had us doing an experiment which involved heating some gunk in a test tube, and within about 5 minutes or so about half the class had managed to break their test tube. It wasn't even deliberate with us messing around to her annoy her, just carelessness. She must have been glad to get home that day.
Seeing how hot you could get a carbon rod with a variable power supply.
When choosing a school for my daughter, I made the chemistry teacher laugh at the open day. I commented, unfavourably, on the pristine state of the lab ceiling.
Forgive me for ignoring the ad hominem rants, but I assume it is boilerplate teacher chat. The rest is good. It sounds from the header like fixing education for everyone requires radical reform. Simply making kids sit more maths classes prior to uni might just push more of them towards useful degrees and away from PPE. And the price of forgoing 2 years of some other qualification seems relatively small.
The practical maths appears to be the sort of thing that people struggle with.
If a new phone costs £900 in cash, or £40/month for three years, should you save up for it or get it on the contract?
If a £50k student loan, at 5% pa interest, for a liberal arts degree, leads to you earning £3k more per year than without the degree, is it worth spending most of your life in debt to pay for three years on the piss?
Plenty of examples of human nature valuing gratification now over higher value in the future.
Should we cut taxes now, or spend the money ensuring that public buildings are better maintained?
Should we aim to pass an unpolluted environment onto future generations, even if it increases prices for us now?
But be prepared to accept that if people are capable of making them, those calculations can also go the other way to the way that you (I assume) want them to. It may be that a lot of the expense and effort expended in decarbonising (especially from a UK perspective) isn't worth the predicted benefit, and merely leaves us with less financial headroom to mitigate any future climate changes.
It may be that but many many economists have done the calculation and found that it isn't. In fact, they have shown pretty clearly that the costs of dealing with the effects of climate change are far, far higher than mitigation methods.
Perhaps, but their calculations will be based on a whole world effort, not based on the UK paying a heavy price to cut its already very low emissions even lower, whilst most of the rest of the world continues unabated.
Their work will also have been publicised more due to its conclusions according with the current global consensus. There are a lot of scientists, many of great repute, who dispute the current climate science consensus completely. A recent 'declaration' from this group is something that I've heard of but not read. My point in mentioning this is that dissenting voices from the global consensus are often ignored or ridiculed.
Show me those scientists of great repute who (a) believe we shouldn't be taking radical action to reduce GHG pollution emissions and (b) are not funded by the oil lobby.
As for the impact of the UK, I think the arguments are even stronger for us. For a start, due to being a long thin island, a disproportionate amount of our population lives close to sea level, whether the coast or tidal rivers. Secondly, the UK has a fantastic scientific base, so our people are more likely to respond to the incentives and come up with technology that will make decarbonization easier. Thirdly, we have disproportionate cultural impact, so our example will have an outsized influence on the rest of the world following us.
There are apparently 1400 signatories - I am sure many will be connected commercially with oil and gas - and many more won't be.
You can perhaps show me scientists on the climate emergency side of the argument who do not benefit from patronage by the corporations, NGOs, Governments, and supranational Governing organisations promoting the current climate consensus.
If something can’t be challenged critically, then it’s a religion rather than a science. The whole point of science is continuous questioning and critique of our knowledge.
Some areas of ‘science’, such as the climate stuff and a lot of what we saw during the pandemic, do veer towards religion more than is healthy. That doesn’t mean that idiots spouting rubbish should always have a platform, but is does mean that there should be a process by which a ‘consensus’ should be able to be challenged using the scientific method.
Funding sources for research, are of course a significant factor in such ‘consensus’ positions arising in the first place, as is - especially in the US - the tendency for lobby groups to try and use ‘science’ to push a position advantageous to themselves.
Having only just read the 'declaration' - or at least the summary of it, I think it probably reflects my own view fairly accurately:
Natural as well as anthropogenic factors cause warming
The geological archive reveals that Earth’s climate has varied as long as the planet has existed, with natural cold and warm phases. The Little Ice Age ended as recently as 1850. Therefore, it is no surprise that we now are experiencing a period of warming.
Warming is far slower than predicted
The world has warmed significantly less than predicted by IPCC on the basis of modeled anthropogenic forcing. The gap between the real world and the modeled world tells us that we are far from understanding climate change.
Climate policy relies on inadequate models
Climate models have many shortcomings and are not remotely plausible as global policy tools. They blow up the effect of greenhouse gases such as CO2. In addition, they ignore the fact that enriching the atmosphere with CO2 is beneficial.
CO2 is plant food, the basis of all life on Earth
CO2 is not a pollutant. It is essential to all life on Earth. Photosynthesis is a blessing. More CO2 is beneficial for nature, greening the Earth: additional CO2 in the air has promoted growth in global plant biomass. It is also good for agriculture, increasing the yields of crops worldwide.
Global warming has not increased natural disasters
There is no statistical evidence that global warming is intensifying hurricanes, floods, droughts and suchlike natural disasters, or making them more frequent. However, there is ample evidence that CO2-mitigation measures are as damaging as they are costly.
Climate policy must respect scientific and economic realities
There is no climate emergency. Therefore, there is no cause for panic and alarm. We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050. If better approaches emerge, and they certainly will, we have ample time to reflect and re-adapt. The aim of global policy should be ‘prosperity for all’ by providing reliable and affordable energy at all times. In a prosperous society men and women are well educated, birthrates are low and people care about their environment.
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
A surprising number of younger shop staff panic if you hand them cash rather than tapping your card. A noticeable number struggle with working out change. Heaven knows how they would have coped with the idiotic Pounds, Shillings and Pence of Imperial Britain
Basic arithmetic is in decline.
The ability to do mental arithmetic and guesstimate answers (to double check calculators etc) is a long lamented, diminished skill. It’s also fairly different to what most people here were talking if in terms of maths.
I use it all the time - an instinctive “is that even the right magnitude?”
But then again, I work with computers full time. Which are brilliant at generating a very exact, completely wrong answer.
Totally agree with that. I'd add that it's vital to know the difference between precision and accuracy; something people get wrong all the time (including myself, at times).
Something can be very precise but also utterly inaccurate; whilst something can be fairly imprecise but also accurate.
As an example, if you want to sanity-check a calculation you could use pi at 3.1 That is imprecise but fairly accurate for the purposes. If you set pi at 5.3421342, that is precise, but very inaccurate.
22/7 is a much better approximation for pi and, ideally, everyone knows their times tables will enough that they can handle the divide by seven.
One significant figure (π=3) is good enough for a sense check on an order of magnitude basis, and is only 4.5% away from the actual figure.
Mr. G, they might be right. But the fact many of them agree constitutes no proof whatsoever. Science isn't democracy.
The amusement of the worst winter in a century a few years occurring after the 'we'll need to show kids snow in museums because the climate will warm so much' prediction was entertaining. But not something that added weight to the pro-warming side.
On Mr. Sandpit's religion point: religious thinking is a priori. They have a conclusion and work from there. Scientific thinking is/should be a posteriori - the conclusion follows the evidence rather than preceding it. Occasionally weather (often dramatically bad) is used by news to 'support' the theory of man-made global warming. But what possible weather/climatic event has ever or could be used the other way? When global temperatures defied the Delphic pronouncements of many and plateaued that was not mentioned very much.
[I may or may not have some unexpected free time this morning...]
Does no one get the fun of chucking lumps of lithium, sodium etc in a sink of water anymore ?
Half the fun of a chemistry lesson was the things that shouldn't have been happening. I recall that the bunsen burners fitted on the water taps, so you would see jets of water shoot across the classroom when the teacher's back was turned. There was always someone setting something on fire, be it the desk, blazers, school books, or bags. Magnesium ribbon was our absolute favourite for burning, a fair amount of that got pocketed.
I always remember a chemistry lesson where a substitute teacher had us doing an experiment which involved heating some gunk in a test tube, and within about 5 minutes or so about half the class had managed to break their test tube. It wasn't even deliberate with us messing around to her annoy her, just carelessness. She must have been glad to get home that day.
Our "end of term experiment" was feeding the gas taps into a washing up liquid / water mix and then setting fire to the bubbles on their way up. Many an eyebrow lost.
The competent were allowed to partake in some "special" experiments during free periods, although one did go a bit wrong and the whole classroom had to be evacuated when the fume cupboard was insufficient to contain an attempt to make some explosive or another.
There were also complaints about the Nitrogen Triiodide sprinkles, which made amusing crackles when trodden on, but ate away at the soles of shoes and the chemistry lab floor.
We all survived.
You're not a real science teacher until you have triggered the fire alarm to cause a whole-school evacuation.
My post yesterday where I complained about the lack of curiosity about stuff got me thinking of what might be useful to students between 16 and 18 and it isn't just the lack of science knowledge. The following is probably bollocks but:
When I was doing my A levels I had to do one lesson a week of English. I hated English and as far as I was concerned it was no use to me whatsoever. Just a wasted hour. In my 20s I was sent on a report writing course. It was fantastic. A real eye opener, although you guys may not think so reading my posts. That course was genuinely fun and would have been really useful to me earlier.
The converse is almost certainly true for humanities with regard to the lack of understanding of science and maths. As I said I am gob smacked by the lack of curiosity in science and it should be fun.
So how about stuff that is really interesting post 16 on subjects that they are not doing that is fun and opens their mind.
Because society is risk averse and science lessons are "dangerous". Chemistry labs used to be full of acids, alkalis, carcinogens and toxic substances. Physics labs deal with high voltage electricity, radioactive substances, lasers, etc. Biology might have toxins or animal diseases or animals that bite, sting or attack.
So it has all been banned or relegated to teacher demonstrations. My kids found science lessons amongst the most boring because it was largely demonstrations by the teacher of risk assessments that took up most of the lesson. When I was at school, science lessons were the highlight of my day and the slight danger that existed just added to the interest.
BTW - one of my kids, after escaping the school system, eventually got a PhD in Analytical Chemistry
Since yesterday I have been thinking more about stuff that I am shocked that people without a science background just accept that they really shouldn't. I mentioned yesterday the odd properties of water eg why do ice cubes float, why when you are wet do you feel cold, etc and it reminded me of others. Here are a couple that crop up all the time for me:
a) Relative velocity. The number of times you hear statements like the spacecrafts in orbit docked at 17,500 mph or it landed on the asteroid at a speed of 25,000 mph. If it did it would be one hell of an insurance claim.
b) Never questioning why there appears to be no gravity in a space station orbiting the earth. Why do they think that happens. Do they think there is no gravity just a short distance from the earths surface?
As I said yesterday the list is near infinite and I would have thought these were interesting questions.
Finally I was shocked to find that a relative of mine who was head of geography at a school and obviously with a geography degree and who obviously knew about the effects of water on climate had not a clue about the specific heat properties of water. Why had he never asked 'Why?'
"Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house"
"The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning, while those other subjects merely require scholarship."
- Robert Heinlein (via Lazarus Long)
That Heinlein quote is nonsense. And as an history and philosophy graduate I know the answers to kjh's questions.
LOL no doubt, but how do you propose we do history or philosophy without reasoning?
SIASL is boring as hell anyway.
We are managing perfectly well without "reasoning" (see the govt for details) and history can seemingly only be viewed by those using rose-tinted glasses. Since Heaven cannot scientifically proven to exist, philosophy is no longer required since we know that there are no angels dancing on the head of a pin.
My post yesterday where I complained about the lack of curiosity about stuff got me thinking of what might be useful to students between 16 and 18 and it isn't just the lack of science knowledge. The following is probably bollocks but:
When I was doing my A levels I had to do one lesson a week of English. I hated English and as far as I was concerned it was no use to me whatsoever. Just a wasted hour. In my 20s I was sent on a report writing course. It was fantastic. A real eye opener, although you guys may not think so reading my posts. That course was genuinely fun and would have been really useful to me earlier.
The converse is almost certainly true for humanities with regard to the lack of understanding of science and maths. As I said I am gob smacked by the lack of curiosity in science and it should be fun.
So how about stuff that is really interesting post 16 on subjects that they are not doing that is fun and opens their mind.
Because society is risk averse and science lessons are "dangerous". Chemistry labs used to be full of acids, alkalis, carcinogens and toxic substances. Physics labs deal with high voltage electricity, radioactive substances, lasers, etc. Biology might have toxins or animal diseases or animals that bite, sting or attack.
So it has all been banned or relegated to teacher demonstrations. My kids found science lessons amongst the most boring because it was largely demonstrations by the teacher of risk assessments that took up most of the lesson. When I was at school, science lessons were the highlight of my day and the slight danger that existed just added to the interest.
BTW - one of my kids, after escaping the school system, eventually got a PhD in Analytical Chemistry
Since yesterday I have been thinking more about stuff that I am shocked that people without a science background just accept that they really shouldn't. I mentioned yesterday the odd properties of water eg why do ice cubes float, why when you are wet do you feel cold, etc and it reminded me of others. Here are a couple that crop up all the time for me:
a) Relative velocity. The number of times you hear statements like the spacecrafts in orbit docked at 17,500 mph or it landed on the asteroid at a speed of 25,000 mph. If it did it would be one hell of an insurance claim.
b) Never questioning why there appears to be no gravity in a space station orbiting the earth. Why do they think that happens. Do they think there is no gravity just a short distance from the earths surface?
As I said yesterday the list is near infinite and I would have thought these were interesting questions.
Finally I was shocked to find that a relative of mine who was head of geography at a school and obviously with a geography degree and who obviously knew about the effects of water on climate had not a clue about the specific heat properties of water. Why had he never asked 'Why?'
"Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house"
"The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning, while those other subjects merely require scholarship."
- Robert Heinlein (via Lazarus Long)
That Heinlein quote is nonsense. And as an history and philosophy graduate I know the answers to kjh's questions.
LOL no doubt, but how do you propose we do history or philosophy without reasoning?
SIASL is boring as hell anyway.
We are managing perfectly well without "reasoning" (see the govt for details) and history can seemingly only be viewed by those using rose-tinted glasses. Since Heaven cannot scientifically proven to exist, philosophy is no longer required since we know that there are no angels dancing on the head of a pin.
Heaven definitely exists, I walked past it a couple of weeks ago…
Forgive me for ignoring the ad hominem rants, but I assume it is boilerplate teacher chat. The rest is good. It sounds from the header like fixing education for everyone requires radical reform. Simply making kids sit more maths classes prior to uni might just push more of them towards useful degrees and away from PPE. And the price of forgoing 2 years of some other qualification seems relatively small.
The practical maths appears to be the sort of thing that people struggle with.
If a new phone costs £900 in cash, or £40/month for three years, should you save up for it or get it on the contract?
If a £50k student loan, at 5% pa interest, for a liberal arts degree, leads to you earning £3k more per year than without the degree, is it worth spending most of your life in debt to pay for three years on the piss?
Plenty of examples of human nature valuing gratification now over higher value in the future.
Should we cut taxes now, or spend the money ensuring that public buildings are better maintained?
Should we aim to pass an unpolluted environment onto future generations, even if it increases prices for us now?
But be prepared to accept that if people are capable of making them, those calculations can also go the other way to the way that you (I assume) want them to. It may be that a lot of the expense and effort expended in decarbonising (especially from a UK perspective) isn't worth the predicted benefit, and merely leaves us with less financial headroom to mitigate any future climate changes.
It may be that but many many economists have done the calculation and found that it isn't. In fact, they have shown pretty clearly that the costs of dealing with the effects of climate change are far, far higher than mitigation methods.
Perhaps, but their calculations will be based on a whole world effort, not based on the UK paying a heavy price to cut its already very low emissions even lower, whilst most of the rest of the world continues unabated.
Their work will also have been publicised more due to its conclusions according with the current global consensus. There are a lot of scientists, many of great repute, who dispute the current climate science consensus completely. A recent 'declaration' from this group is something that I've heard of but not read. My point in mentioning this is that dissenting voices from the global consensus are often ignored or ridiculed.
Show me those scientists of great repute who (a) believe we shouldn't be taking radical action to reduce GHG pollution emissions and (b) are not funded by the oil lobby.
As for the impact of the UK, I think the arguments are even stronger for us. For a start, due to being a long thin island, a disproportionate amount of our population lives close to sea level, whether the coast or tidal rivers. Secondly, the UK has a fantastic scientific base, so our people are more likely to respond to the incentives and come up with technology that will make decarbonization easier. Thirdly, we have disproportionate cultural impact, so our example will have an outsized influence on the rest of the world following us.
There are apparently 1400 signatories - I am sure many will be connected commercially with oil and gas - and many more won't be.
You can perhaps show me scientists on the climate emergency side of the argument who do not benefit from patronage by the corporations, NGOs, Governments, and supranational Governing organisations promoting the current climate consensus.
If something can’t be challenged critically, then it’s a religion rather than a science. The whole point of science is continuous questioning and critique of our knowledge.
Some areas of ‘science’, such as the climate stuff and a lot of what we saw during the pandemic, do veer towards religion more than is healthy. That doesn’t mean that idiots spouting rubbish should always have a platform, but is does mean that there should be a process by which a ‘consensus’ should be able to be challenged using the scientific method.
Funding sources for research, are of course a significant factor in such ‘consensus’ positions arising in the first place, as is - especially in the US - the tendency for lobby groups to try and use ‘science’ to push a position advantageous to themselves.
This is the precisely the problem - we shouldn't allow people to "challenge" scientific (or political/economic) orthodoxy simply by assertion; it needs to be subjected to a quality of scrutiny the media are incapable of providing.
And it is doubly dangerous when the orthodoxy becomes accustomed to swatting away criticism because so much of it is palpable nonsense. Combined with the non-publication of negative results (already a serious problem in pharmaceutical research and extending elsewhere) and the whole system is undermined.
Does no one get the fun of chucking lumps of lithium, sodium etc in a sink of water anymore ?
Half the fun of a chemistry lesson was the things that shouldn't have been happening. I recall that the bunsen burners fitted on the water taps, so you would see jets of water shoot across the classroom when the teacher's back was turned. There was always someone setting something on fire, be it the desk, blazers, school books, or bags. Magnesium ribbon was our absolute favourite for burning, a fair amount of that got pocketed.
I always remember a chemistry lesson where a substitute teacher had us doing an experiment which involved heating some gunk in a test tube, and within about 5 minutes or so about half the class had managed to break their test tube. It wasn't even deliberate with us messing around to her annoy her, just carelessness. She must have been glad to get home that day.
Our "end of term experiment" was feeding the gas taps into a washing up liquid / water mix and then setting fire to the bubbles on their way up. Many an eyebrow lost.
The competent were allowed to partake in some "special" experiments during free periods, although one did go a bit wrong and the whole classroom had to be evacuated when the fume cupboard was insufficient to contain an attempt to make some explosive or another.
There were also complaints about the Nitrogen Triiodide sprinkles, which made amusing crackles when trodden on, but ate away at the soles of shoes and the chemistry lab floor.
We all survived.
You're not a real science teacher until you have triggered the fire alarm to cause a whole-school evacuation.
Or shoot a thermometer through the roof by neglecting to remove the protective bung in the end of a Liebig condenser...
Forgive me for ignoring the ad hominem rants, but I assume it is boilerplate teacher chat. The rest is good. It sounds from the header like fixing education for everyone requires radical reform. Simply making kids sit more maths classes prior to uni might just push more of them towards useful degrees and away from PPE. And the price of forgoing 2 years of some other qualification seems relatively small.
The practical maths appears to be the sort of thing that people struggle with.
If a new phone costs £900 in cash, or £40/month for three years, should you save up for it or get it on the contract?
If a £50k student loan, at 5% pa interest, for a liberal arts degree, leads to you earning £3k more per year than without the degree, is it worth spending most of your life in debt to pay for three years on the piss?
Plenty of examples of human nature valuing gratification now over higher value in the future.
Should we cut taxes now, or spend the money ensuring that public buildings are better maintained?
Should we aim to pass an unpolluted environment onto future generations, even if it increases prices for us now?
But be prepared to accept that if people are capable of making them, those calculations can also go the other way to the way that you (I assume) want them to. It may be that a lot of the expense and effort expended in decarbonising (especially from a UK perspective) isn't worth the predicted benefit, and merely leaves us with less financial headroom to mitigate any future climate changes.
It may be that but many many economists have done the calculation and found that it isn't. In fact, they have shown pretty clearly that the costs of dealing with the effects of climate change are far, far higher than mitigation methods.
Perhaps, but their calculations will be based on a whole world effort, not based on the UK paying a heavy price to cut its already very low emissions even lower, whilst most of the rest of the world continues unabated.
Their work will also have been publicised more due to its conclusions according with the current global consensus. There are a lot of scientists, many of great repute, who dispute the current climate science consensus completely. A recent 'declaration' from this group is something that I've heard of but not read. My point in mentioning this is that dissenting voices from the global consensus are often ignored or ridiculed.
Show me those scientists of great repute who (a) believe we shouldn't be taking radical action to reduce GHG pollution emissions and (b) are not funded by the oil lobby.
As for the impact of the UK, I think the arguments are even stronger for us. For a start, due to being a long thin island, a disproportionate amount of our population lives close to sea level, whether the coast or tidal rivers. Secondly, the UK has a fantastic scientific base, so our people are more likely to respond to the incentives and come up with technology that will make decarbonization easier. Thirdly, we have disproportionate cultural impact, so our example will have an outsized influence on the rest of the world following us.
There are apparently 1400 signatories - I am sure many will be connected commercially with oil and gas - and many more won't be.
You can perhaps show me scientists on the climate emergency side of the argument who do not benefit from patronage by the corporations, NGOs, Governments, and supranational Governing organisations promoting the current climate consensus.
Signed by that arse and nutter Monckton which tells us what we need to know
I have just learned I am incapable of reasoning, but I can judge scientific models after the fact by their predictive power. 25 years ago the warmists were saying catastrophic change and the Moncktons were saying pooh pooh and nonsense. Last year I made money betting the UK would top 40 C. This winter the alps are green. Who was right?
You're a very intelligent poster - far too intelligent I would say than to dismiss a proposition on the basis that a fellow traveller is someone you don't respect. That's loopy.
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
A surprising number of younger shop staff panic if you hand them cash rather than tapping your card. A noticeable number struggle with working out change. Heaven knows how they would have coped with the idiotic Pounds, Shillings and Pence of Imperial Britain
Basic arithmetic is in decline.
The ability to do mental arithmetic and guesstimate answers (to double check calculators etc) is a long lamented, diminished skill. It’s also fairly different to what most people here were talking if in terms of maths.
I use it all the time - an instinctive “is that even the right magnitude?”
But then again, I work with computers full time. Which are brilliant at generating a very exact, completely wrong answer.
Totally agree with that. I'd add that it's vital to know the difference between precision and accuracy; something people get wrong all the time (including myself, at times).
Something can be very precise but also utterly inaccurate; whilst something can be fairly imprecise but also accurate.
As an example, if you want to sanity-check a calculation you could use pi at 3.1 That is imprecise but fairly accurate for the purposes. If you set pi at 5.3421342, that is precise, but very inaccurate.
22/7 is a much better approximation for pi and, ideally, everyone knows their times tables will enough that they can handle the divide by seven.
Whilst that is true, I'd argue it's too accurate for the stated purposes; a sanity check.
Say you have a circle of radius 7cm and you want to work out the area. You get 23.5cm^2. The 'correct' answer is 21.991xm^2 to 3 d.p. Multiplying 7 by 3.1 is easy in your head; you get 21.7; enough to show that the value of 23.5 is way off.
For a sanity check, 21.7 is a good enough answer for most purposes, and it is much quicker to do. More importantly, you are less likely to make mistakes.
Incidentally, a while ago I read a while back that NASA only ever uses up to 15 digits of pi in its calculations; any more is unnecessary.
"How many digits of pi would we need to calculate the circumference of a circle with a radius of 46 billion light years to an accuracy equal to the diameter of a hydrogen atom, the simplest atom? It turns out that 37 decimal places (38 digits, including the number 3 to the left of the decimal point) would be quite sufficient."
My post yesterday where I complained about the lack of curiosity about stuff got me thinking of what might be useful to students between 16 and 18 and it isn't just the lack of science knowledge. The following is probably bollocks but:
When I was doing my A levels I had to do one lesson a week of English. I hated English and as far as I was concerned it was no use to me whatsoever. Just a wasted hour. In my 20s I was sent on a report writing course. It was fantastic. A real eye opener, although you guys may not think so reading my posts. That course was genuinely fun and would have been really useful to me earlier.
The converse is almost certainly true for humanities with regard to the lack of understanding of science and maths. As I said I am gob smacked by the lack of curiosity in science and it should be fun.
So how about stuff that is really interesting post 16 on subjects that they are not doing that is fun and opens their mind.
Because society is risk averse and science lessons are "dangerous". Chemistry labs used to be full of acids, alkalis, carcinogens and toxic substances. Physics labs deal with high voltage electricity, radioactive substances, lasers, etc. Biology might have toxins or animal diseases or animals that bite, sting or attack.
So it has all been banned or relegated to teacher demonstrations. My kids found science lessons amongst the most boring because it was largely demonstrations by the teacher of risk assessments that took up most of the lesson. When I was at school, science lessons were the highlight of my day and the slight danger that existed just added to the interest.
BTW - one of my kids, after escaping the school system, eventually got a PhD in Analytical Chemistry
Since yesterday I have been thinking more about stuff that I am shocked that people without a science background just accept that they really shouldn't. I mentioned yesterday the odd properties of water eg why do ice cubes float, why when you are wet do you feel cold, etc and it reminded me of others. Here are a couple that crop up all the time for me:
a) Relative velocity. The number of times you hear statements like the spacecrafts in orbit docked at 17,500 mph or it landed on the asteroid at a speed of 25,000 mph. If it did it would be one hell of an insurance claim.
b) Never questioning why there appears to be no gravity in a space station orbiting the earth. Why do they think that happens. Do they think there is no gravity just a short distance from the earths surface?
As I said yesterday the list is near infinite and I would have thought these were interesting questions.
Finally I was shocked to find that a relative of mine who was head of geography at a school and obviously with a geography degree and who obviously knew about the effects of water on climate had not a clue about the specific heat properties of water. Why had he never asked 'Why?'
"Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house"
"The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning, while those other subjects merely require scholarship."
- Robert Heinlein (via Lazarus Long)
That Heinlein quote is nonsense. And as an history and philosophy graduate I know the answers to kjh's questions.
LOL no doubt, but how do you propose we do history or philosophy without reasoning?
SIASL is boring as hell anyway.
We are managing perfectly well without "reasoning" (see the govt for details) and history can seemingly only be viewed by those using rose-tinted glasses. Since Heaven cannot scientifically proven to exist, philosophy is no longer required since we know that there are no angels dancing on the head of a pin.
Heaven definitely exists, I walked past it a couple of weeks ago…
Forgive me for ignoring the ad hominem rants, but I assume it is boilerplate teacher chat. The rest is good. It sounds from the header like fixing education for everyone requires radical reform. Simply making kids sit more maths classes prior to uni might just push more of them towards useful degrees and away from PPE. And the price of forgoing 2 years of some other qualification seems relatively small.
The practical maths appears to be the sort of thing that people struggle with.
If a new phone costs £900 in cash, or £40/month for three years, should you save up for it or get it on the contract?
If a £50k student loan, at 5% pa interest, for a liberal arts degree, leads to you earning £3k more per year than without the degree, is it worth spending most of your life in debt to pay for three years on the piss?
Plenty of examples of human nature valuing gratification now over higher value in the future.
Should we cut taxes now, or spend the money ensuring that public buildings are better maintained?
Should we aim to pass an unpolluted environment onto future generations, even if it increases prices for us now?
But be prepared to accept that if people are capable of making them, those calculations can also go the other way to the way that you (I assume) want them to. It may be that a lot of the expense and effort expended in decarbonising (especially from a UK perspective) isn't worth the predicted benefit, and merely leaves us with less financial headroom to mitigate any future climate changes.
It may be that but many many economists have done the calculation and found that it isn't. In fact, they have shown pretty clearly that the costs of dealing with the effects of climate change are far, far higher than mitigation methods.
Perhaps, but their calculations will be based on a whole world effort, not based on the UK paying a heavy price to cut its already very low emissions even lower, whilst most of the rest of the world continues unabated.
Their work will also have been publicised more due to its conclusions according with the current global consensus. There are a lot of scientists, many of great repute, who dispute the current climate science consensus completely. A recent 'declaration' from this group is something that I've heard of but not read. My point in mentioning this is that dissenting voices from the global consensus are often ignored or ridiculed.
Show me those scientists of great repute who (a) believe we shouldn't be taking radical action to reduce GHG pollution emissions and (b) are not funded by the oil lobby.
As for the impact of the UK, I think the arguments are even stronger for us. For a start, due to being a long thin island, a disproportionate amount of our population lives close to sea level, whether the coast or tidal rivers. Secondly, the UK has a fantastic scientific base, so our people are more likely to respond to the incentives and come up with technology that will make decarbonization easier. Thirdly, we have disproportionate cultural impact, so our example will have an outsized influence on the rest of the world following us.
There are apparently 1400 signatories - I am sure many will be connected commercially with oil and gas - and many more won't be.
You can perhaps show me scientists on the climate emergency side of the argument who do not benefit from patronage by the corporations, NGOs, Governments, and supranational Governing organisations promoting the current climate consensus.
If something can’t be challenged critically, then it’s a religion rather than a science. The whole point of science is continuous questioning and critique of our knowledge.
Some areas of ‘science’, such as the climate stuff and a lot of what we saw during the pandemic, do veer towards religion more than is healthy. That doesn’t mean that idiots spouting rubbish should always have a platform, but is does mean that there should be a process by which a ‘consensus’ should be able to be challenged using the scientific method.
Funding sources for research, are of course a significant factor in such ‘consensus’ positions arising in the first place, as is - especially in the US - the tendency for lobby groups to try and use ‘science’ to push a position advantageous to themselves.
This is the precisely the problem - we shouldn't allow people to "challenge" scientific (or political/economic) orthodoxy simply by assertion; it needs to be subjected to a quality of scrutiny the media are incapable of providing.
And it is doubly dangerous when the orthodoxy becomes accustomed to swatting away criticism because so much of it is palpable nonsense. Combined with the non-publication of negative results (already a serious problem in pharmaceutical research and extending elsewhere) and the whole system is undermined.
So-called climate sceptics have given scepticism a bad name, because they haven't been sceptics at all. They've very credulously accepted every argument, however contrary to the known facts, illogical or self-contradictory, provided it agrees with their a priori position that global warning is not caused by fossil fuel combustion and isn't a problem.
Can anyone more familiar with current green policy tell me, why is imported biomass considered carbon neutral (if indeed it is considered carbon neutral) when within our borders, the effect is purely one of adding carbon? The absorption of CO2 by the biomass when it was grown is clearly calculated in the carbon neutrality. But with imports of goods from China, made by burning coal, the addition to the greenhouse effect is not included in our carbon figures.
Isn't that a flagrant contradiction, biasing us heavily in favour of importation and against domestic production?
It's illogical I agree, largely because it's inconsistent with how we account for imports with embedded carbon emissions where we ignore those and consider the carbon emissions post-importation.
It would be more logical to continue to treat Biomass as neutral (or near-neutral, there are still transportation related emissions to account for) but also take into account embedded emissions in other products. That will start to happen on an industrial level with the introduction of CBAM of course - whilst that is an EU initiative I expect the UK will need to copy it or facing losing the rest of its heavy industry. Or treat biomass as carbon positive if we continue to do likewise with other products.
But I suppose there is a degree of pragmatism about all this. Biomass is suitable for old coal plants so a useful transition fuel, a bit like the role gas has played more generally.
Thanks @TimS and @LostPassword for the responses. I think we're probably all agreed that this is a glitch, regardless of how important or otherwise we think it is. As seems the trend with such glitches, whoever is winning, it ain't the UK.
Since burning imported pellets is considered carbon neutral, no carbon sequestration technology is used (I assume), whereas if new coal power stations were to be built, they would have to include carbon capture as standard. So potentially burning coal would add less carbon to the atmosphere than imported biomass, at least from a UK perspective.
The main problem with taxing carbon on imports is that it would start an immediate, massive trade war.
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
A surprising number of younger shop staff panic if you hand them cash rather than tapping your card. A noticeable number struggle with working out change. Heaven knows how they would have coped with the idiotic Pounds, Shillings and Pence of Imperial Britain
Basic arithmetic is in decline.
The ability to do mental arithmetic and guesstimate answers (to double check calculators etc) is a long lamented, diminished skill. It’s also fairly different to what most people here were talking if in terms of maths.
I use it all the time - an instinctive “is that even the right magnitude?”
But then again, I work with computers full time. Which are brilliant at generating a very exact, completely wrong answer.
Totally agree with that. I'd add that it's vital to know the difference between precision and accuracy; something people get wrong all the time (including myself, at times).
Something can be very precise but also utterly inaccurate; whilst something can be fairly imprecise but also accurate.
As an example, if you want to sanity-check a calculation you could use pi at 3.1 That is imprecise but fairly accurate for the purposes. If you set pi at 5.3421342, that is precise, but very inaccurate.
22/7 is a much better approximation for pi and, ideally, everyone knows their times tables will enough that they can handle the divide by seven.
Whilst that is true, I'd argue it's too accurate for the stated purposes; a sanity check.
Say you have a circle of radius 7cm and you want to work out the area. You get 23.5cm^2. The 'correct' answer is 21.991xm^2 to 3 d.p. Multiplying 7 by 3.1 is easy in your head; you get 21.7; enough to show that the value of 23.5 is way off.
For a sanity check, 21.7 is a good enough answer for most purposes, and it is much quicker to do. More importantly, you are less likely to make mistakes.
Incidentally, a while ago I read a while back that NASA only ever uses up to 15 digits of pi in its calculations; any more is unnecessary.
"How many digits of pi would we need to calculate the circumference of a circle with a radius of 46 billion light years to an accuracy equal to the diameter of a hydrogen atom, the simplest atom? It turns out that 37 decimal places (38 digits, including the number 3 to the left of the decimal point) would be quite sufficient."
Even professional mathematicians don’t remember more than a few digits of π
Comments
The reality is that GCSE maths is not particularly complex. If you fail at it, it's because the teaching profession has failed to build the foundation in previous years and/or adults around you have never pushed you to keep working at something when you find it hard.
I am disappointed.
It filled in gaps such as the Italian Renaissance or slavery that weren’t studied in History to any specific level. I found it was most useful during sixth form where those who were studying Sciences and Maths etc were in Divisions where they would weight it towards arts and humanities and those studying humanities were given more of a scientific weighting to try and ensure everyone had a more rounded education even if there was no A-level or GCSE at the end of it.
I presume that this cannot be rolled out generally due to resources but it was possibly the “subject”/class I still feel i learnt most from and have benefitted from in the rest of my life.
Stop sniggering at the back.
But given how laggardly we collectively are at things that really ought to be uncontroversial, like getting thermal insulation of buildings up to a uniformly good standard, I know which way the cognitive bias is probably going.
It would be fun and probably the teachers would learn a lot more, let alone the students.
The incessant tinkering with the primary curriculum has, in the experience of my wife and her fellow teachers, been unquestionably deleterious.
And I've given before the example of the dogmatic insistence on phonics to the exclusion of other literacy teaching methods.
Which is definitely Gove.
(Edit ... you also seem to suggest that it's possible for hatred to be insane and rational ?)
So it has all been banned or relegated to teacher demonstrations. My kids found science lessons amongst the most boring because it was largely demonstrations by the teacher of risk assessments that took up most of the lesson. When I was at school, science lessons were the highlight of my day and the slight danger that existed just added to the interest.
BTW - one of my kids, after escaping the school system, eventually got a PhD in Analytical Chemistry "Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house"
"The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning, while those other subjects merely require scholarship."
- Robert Heinlein (via Lazarus Long)
It wouldn’t be too difficult for the Foreign Office to assemble a guide to healthcare or education systems, in the G20 countries, the top 20 countries by GDP/capita, and any known outliers, looking at what is seen to work well, and what is seen as working badly, around the world.
So, we know that Singapore and Estonia (!) top the international PISA rankings for education. What’s good and bad about the education systems in those countries? https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pisa-scores-by-country
Clearly those doing the sciences will not need the extra maths and can look at stuff that improves their lives in other ways. The non scientist can be engaged by the interesting stuff that sneaks in the extra maths they need. I suspect anyone who has not got arithmetic by this stage isn't going to get it. Stats, probability, logic which are the other useful skills to non scientists can be sneaked in to the fun stuff. Eg the gravity issue in orbiting bodies could have the gravity equation introduced (which is simple and there is no need to go into any detail) and from that introduce the impact of the power of 2 (and then of course 3) which is useful.
And that brings me to another of my bug bears: Why people don't understand or even ask why sparrows can stand on thin legs, cats don't die when they fall off the roof and fleas can jump so high - the power of 3. Maths can be interesting.
It's an essential element of teaching, and more difficult to import into an overcrowded curriculum.
Half the fun of science lessons, was the unexpected result, and the (perceived) risk that we might end up blowing up or setting fire to the classroom!
The only video we got was the interaction of fluorine and water, 10% was teacher demonstrations and 90% was practical for the students.
A point I'd stress when it comes to schools. In this country we have a parallel system - the independent sector - whereby children from advantaged backgrounds are filtered off and advantaged further by access to influential networks and having double the amount per pupil invested in their education. Most of the establishment went through this alternative system and use it for their own children. This is a stumbling block to transforming the mainstream sector - an underappreciated one imo. The problem rarely gets addressed with anything more thoughtful than "well if state schools were better people wouldn't go private".
Their work will also have been publicised more due to its conclusions according with the current global consensus. There are a lot of scientists, many of great repute, who dispute the current climate science consensus completely. A recent 'declaration' from this group is something that I've heard of but not read. My point in mentioning this is that dissenting voices from the global consensus are often ignored or ridiculed.
The older I get the more amazed I am that anything works at all.
In anticipation of their GCSEs, and in an effort to help, I took Maths GCSE about four years ago. My older child did Foundation Maths paper and my youngest the Higher Paper.
If anyone gets a 9 grade for maths GCSE deserves a shake of the hand; it's very challenging.
My youngest got an 8 (same as me - bah - but I console myself that she had face-to-face teaching while I only did a correspondence course. She counters that she had 8 other subjects to study while I only 1 because she's cheeky like that).
Ironically the department recognises the problem as it has had several initiatives aimed at reducing teacher workload.
I don't fault Gove's enthusiasm - and indeed many, including ydoethur, originally had positive expectations.
If your parents won't allow you out on your own until you are 53, what's one supposed to do?
Isn't that a flagrant contradiction, biasing us heavily in favour of importation and against domestic production?
The average person I suspect leads a very boring life (although they are probably happy with it). There are quite a few here that lead more interesting lives and some who lead extraordinary lives eg @Leon , @Dura_Ace to name but two.
That said, a large number of 40-somethings of Indian origin are CEOs of Western companies, is there a reason for this in the Indian (middle-class) education system, or is it simply a numbers game and there’s a billion Indians?
But that discussion is totally absent from most Western countries, replaced instead with constant tinkering and the latest faddish education methods.
I would genuinely love to know what happens in Estonia though. I just found that they’re at the top of the PISA rankings as I researched my post here. Do they teach excessively to the PISA criteria, to try and game the ranking at the expense of other things, or do they do something genuinely innovative and enlightening?
Every system has its stupidities, but that doesn't invalidate the general case.
I said, however, that it had limited value to understanding the problems it apparently seeks to address, or describe, as it was a polemic. Polemics have their place but don't necessarily help us to understand, in this case, the state of the education system.
Is all.
Not the same thing for a lot of folk.
As for the impact of the UK, I think the arguments are even stronger for us. For a start, due to being a long thin island, a disproportionate amount of our population lives close to sea level, whether the coast or tidal rivers. Secondly, the UK has a fantastic scientific base, so our people are more likely to respond to the incentives and come up with technology that will make decarbonization easier. Thirdly, we have disproportionate cultural impact, so our example will have an outsized influence on the rest of the world following us.
The UK's 1st Division was, until recently, commanded by a French 2*. Luckily GB News never realised.
It would be more logical to continue to treat Biomass as neutral (or near-neutral, there are still transportation related emissions to account for) but also take into account embedded emissions in other products. That will start to happen on an industrial level with the introduction of CBAM of course - whilst that is an EU initiative I expect the UK will need to copy it or facing losing the rest of its heavy industry. Or treat biomass as carbon positive if we continue to do likewise with other products.
But I suppose there is a degree of pragmatism about all this. Biomass is suitable for old coal plants so a useful transition fuel, a bit like the role gas has played more generally.
However, it's still an indefensible contradiction, and if we're including calculations of carbon sequestered offshore in our positive column, we should be including calculations of carbon released offshore in our negative column - which would lead to a lot more on-shoring of industry and energy production, where we can do it in a more environmentally responsible way, and with no global transportation or (in the case of gas) carbon intensive processes like LNG production.
The world of work, and life generally, is about to undergo fundamental change with the advent of AI.
Change is upon us.
What should schools be teaching as a consequence?
Why should teaching end at 18? Why should what we are taught then be still relevant and suitable in 30 years time?
What parts of our workforce need upskilling the most? A one size fits all approach is not appropriate.
PS I approve of more maths, whatever that actually means? More numeracy? More quantum field theory? But what does the country and the economy actually need?
We should take a leaf out of the Americans' book and just do the one.
It's possible that academic rigour for the top 10/20% has fallen off a bit. But at the same time, far fewer pupils leave school (or college) with no education, training or qualifications than was the case decades ago. The lowest achievers and the middle achievers leave school with higher education standards than was the case 30/40 years ago. There's a debate to be had about whether that's true of the high achievers, though - but it's a complex debate that would involve scrutiny of the standards of individual A levels.
You'll note from @ydoethur 's previous accounts, for example, that he was a high performing teacher.
I use it all the time - an instinctive “is that even the right magnitude?”
But then again, I work with computers full time. Which are brilliant at generating a very exact, completely wrong answer.
10^9 is a million, isn’t it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZY6d6jrq-0&t=62s
Similar philosophy to Finnish education, I think ? Which also has excellent outcomes.
To say that it is not relevant to the discussion is like saying that a lack of knowledge of the alphabet and how to read should be no impediment to writing a letter ...
The cross-border aspects - international aviation, shipping, exports and imports - were put into a "too difficult to deal with right now," pile early on in climate negotiations, but the rest of it has proved difficult enough that they've never been returned to.
Often campaigners will work out national carbon accounts based on consumption, rather than production, and in those figures countries like the UK (which import a lot) have higher emissions, and countries like China (which export a lot) consequently lower emissions. This also provides some context to the argument that the UK shouldn't do anything until China does, when a chunk of their emissions are to provide consumer goods for our population.
Remembering also that the time this was all first being discussed - the early 90s - encouraging international trade was seen as a good thing in itself, so the context would have been hostile to anything that would have discouraged international trade.
So, yes, it's all a bit of a mess and there are lots of contradictions. It's quite hard to get compromises between large numbers of countries that aren't messy.
Going back a decade or more would be even worse. The winter is mild, but taking shoes and socks off in the street would be bloody awful.
The Security Service of Ukraine has seized the property of former Minister of Education and Science Dmytro Tabachnyk, who is suspected of high treason. The total amount of seized assets exceeds $2 million, reported the press service of the SBU on January 9.
https://mobile.twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1612406643987202048
People who think that they don't need any extra 'life lessons'; who consider that they already know everything they need to know, are IMO dangerous, for they try to fit the world into their incomplete and stunted world view.
The problem is not 'exceptionally naive' people who need 'extra life lessons'. The problem is people who do not think they are naive and therefore don't try to learn more from life. They think they already have all the answers.
I always remember a chemistry lesson where a substitute teacher had us doing an experiment which involved heating some gunk in a test tube, and within about 5 minutes or so about half the class had managed to break their test tube. It wasn't even deliberate with us messing around to her annoy her, just carelessness. She must have been glad to get home that day.
Something can be very precise but also utterly inaccurate; whilst something can be fairly imprecise but also accurate.
As an example, if you want to sanity-check a calculation you could use pi at 3.1 That is imprecise but fairly accurate for the purposes. If you set pi at 5.3421342, that is precise, but very inaccurate.
That's created all sorts of challenges; motivation, morale and how to assess when O Levels were originally aimed at the top 20 percent of the attainment range, CSEs at the next forty percent and GCSEs are still supposed to map onto them.
But there's no doubt that people lower down the scale leave education knowing a lot more than they used to.
Here's the climate declaration website:
https://clintel.org/world-climate-declaration/
You can perhaps show me scientists on the climate emergency side of the argument who do not benefit from patronage by the corporations, NGOs, Governments, and supranational Governing organisations promoting the current climate consensus.
You say "many more won't be" paid by oil companies. Go on then, give some examples.
SIASL is boring as hell anyway.
Yes, it was attacked for being more middle class. Than schools with no middle class kids going to them….
*A substantial number of local parents decided that free education meant they could afford a fuck ton of private tuition.
Some areas of ‘science’, such as the climate stuff and a lot of what we saw during the pandemic, do veer towards religion more than is healthy. That doesn’t mean that idiots spouting rubbish should always have a platform, but is does mean that there should be a process by which a ‘consensus’ should be able to be challenged using the scientific method.
Funding sources for research, are of course a significant factor in such ‘consensus’ positions arising in the first place, as is - especially in the US - the tendency for lobby groups to try and use ‘science’ to push a position advantageous to themselves.
For example, I could have done with learning a lot more about statistics!
I have just learned I am incapable of reasoning, but I can judge scientific models after the fact by their predictive power. 25 years ago the warmists were saying catastrophic change and the Moncktons were saying pooh pooh and nonsense. Last year I made money betting the UK would top 40 C. This winter the alps are green. Who was right?
Since burning imported pellets is considered carbon neutral, no carbon sequestration technology is used (I assume), whereas if new coal power stations were to be built, they would have to include carbon capture as standard. So potentially burning coal would add less carbon to the atmosphere than imported biomass, at least from a UK perspective.
The competent were allowed to partake in some "special" experiments during free periods, although one did go a bit wrong and the whole classroom had to be evacuated when the fume cupboard was insufficient to contain an attempt to make some explosive or another.
There were also complaints about the Nitrogen Triiodide sprinkles, which made amusing crackles when trodden on, but ate away at the soles of shoes and the chemistry lab floor.
We all survived.
The amusement of the worst winter in a century a few years occurring after the 'we'll need to show kids snow in museums because the climate will warm so much' prediction was entertaining. But not something that added weight to the pro-warming side.
On Mr. Sandpit's religion point: religious thinking is a priori. They have a conclusion and work from there. Scientific thinking is/should be a posteriori - the conclusion follows the evidence rather than preceding it. Occasionally weather (often dramatically bad) is used by news to 'support' the theory of man-made global warming. But what possible weather/climatic event has ever or could be used the other way? When global temperatures defied the Delphic pronouncements of many and plateaued that was not mentioned very much.
[I may or may not have some unexpected free time this morning...]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven_(nightclub)
And it is doubly dangerous when the orthodoxy becomes accustomed to swatting away criticism because so much of it is palpable nonsense. Combined with the non-publication of negative results (already a serious problem in pharmaceutical research and extending elsewhere) and the whole system is undermined.
Say you have a circle of radius 7cm and you want to work out the area. You get 23.5cm^2. The 'correct' answer is 21.991xm^2 to 3 d.p. Multiplying 7 by 3.1 is easy in your head; you get 21.7; enough to show that the value of 23.5 is way off.
For a sanity check, 21.7 is a good enough answer for most purposes, and it is much quicker to do. More importantly, you are less likely to make mistakes.
Incidentally, a while ago I read a while back that NASA only ever uses up to 15 digits of pi in its calculations; any more is unnecessary.
Edit: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2016/3/16/how-many-decimals-of-pi-do-we-really-need/
"How many digits of pi would we need to calculate the circumference of a circle with a radius of 46 billion light years to an accuracy equal to the diameter of a hydrogen atom, the simplest atom? It turns out that 37 decimal places (38 digits, including the number 3 to the left of the decimal point) would be quite sufficient."
https://youtube.com/watch?v=RprY3UmmQfk