Times Tables, Tabled?

Dr. Wendy Ghiora – Posting #112 – September 3, 2012

 

In an article entitled: The 'Ugly Sisters' of the teaching unions want to hold our children back,

By Kathy Gyngell (PUBLISHED: 11 June 2012), we learn that the United States isn’t the only country replete with forces trying to “dumb down” our public educational system. Chris Keates,  Secretary General of the British Teacher’s Union, claims that teaching children to recite poetry or their times tables off by heart will ‘shackle teachers’ discretion’.  Sound familiar?

Ms. Keates was responding to Britain’s Secretary of Education, Michel Gove’s long awaited and much needed reform proposals for primary school education. “When the ugly sisters of the teachers unions (Chris Keates and Mary Bousted) have their say it is always negative, never positive. It is always why not, never how to,” according to Kathy Gyngell.

Michael Gove’s proposed reforms for the primary school curriculum are actually pretty basic.

If expectations of both teachers and pupils hadn’t fallen so low, they would not even be newsworthy.  

“If you look at the small print what Mr. Gove is demanding is not much by good private primary standards.  He is simply aspiring for children to know their times tables up to 12 by the time they are nine; to be able to add, subtract, multiply and divide decimals such as 32.4 or 4.78 by the end of primary school; to be able to learn and recite by heart from the age of 5. He also wants children to start learning foreign languages in primary schools and to reintroduce Latin.”

So far, I really like this guy. I’m waiting for “the other shoe to drop,” to see why anyone would oppose Mr. Gove’s efforts.  Ah, but I digress . . .

According to the article, precious little is currently demanded or expected.  For example the current times table ‘target’ is just to 10 by Year Six. Worse, because the target only has to be met by then no one gets unduly alarmed if the children do not begin to master them in the years before.  Wow! This mirrors the current practice in The United States.

 

This brings us to the biggest obstacle these basic reforms face and which is why they have been so long in coming, despite ever worsening literacy and numeracy standards. The article goes on to describe how ‘traditional’ reforms do not ‘sit well’ with the teaching practices that teachers have been trained in and indoctrinated into. That is why learning number facts for addition is still beyond many schools. It is why the idea of achieving automatic recall runs headlong into the sacred ‘number line’ which requires kids to count on their fingers.

The dilemma – or even tragedy – for Michael Gove is that to counter this culture he has to be prescriptive (which must go against his liberal principles) to get rid of the ideologically hidebound prescriptions that exist.   He has to break the practices of progressive education both in teacher training and in the classroom.

Parents will tell you that poetry recitation in state primaries currently does not exist. Yet at top private prep schools like Westminster boys learn to recite from the age of 7, in front of the school assembly as well as the class. 

This part hit home for me. Now that I think about it, my favorite teacher was my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Lewis. She was my favorite for many reasons, mostly because of the simulations she created for various subjects we were studying. For example, when we studied the U.S. Postal System, she had a simulated Post Office right in our classroom. The unit included letter writing, buying stamps, and mail delivery. Just think about how many different subject areas that encompasses. I also, just recalled, she was the only teacher that ever had us memorize and recite poetry in front of the class. It was scary at first, but we grew to love it, and what a grand confidence booster it was! How many of you had a teacher require memorized recitations?

“Learning how to speak publicly and confidently with good enough diction to be understood makes all the difference in a child’s life. One of the reasons for East Side Young Leaders’ Academy’s success in getting their boys from the east end of London into public school is that every child learns to declaim or recite by heart from day one, whether or not he can yet read or write. The confidence of these boys is a joy to watch,” Ms. Gyngell informs us.

But for the average state primary school child there is no such chance, unless they are lucky enough to go to Sunday school. Not even a sheet of poetry comes home from the flagship primaries. Their teachers claim there is no time in their overfilled curriculum. Sound familiar to anyone?  At one of these schools when the ‘topic’ was ‘fairy tales’ did the teacher turn to Hans Christian Anderson or to Grimm’s fairy tales – or even to the Oxford book of children’s verse?  No. She put Walt Disney’s The Little Mermaid in the class video machine for the afternoon while she did some record keeping and administrative work during teaching time. This is the practice of many teachers here as well!

So what hope is there for these reforms happening? Will Britain or the United States ever catch up with the rest of the world educationally? Fifteen-year-olds in the U.S. ranked 25th among peers from 34 countries on the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment.  The basics, such as times-tables are fundamental. Of course the students must first understand what multiplication actually means and how it works. Once they grasp this concept, memorization just makes their future math studies not only possible, but a whole lot easier.

Teachers claiming there is no time to teach multiplication tables, or to include recitation, yet have time to show cartoons, in my humble opinion, may be  in the wrong profession.