Back to school
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Thank you for downloading this week's More or Less podcast. Here's Tim Harford.
Hello and welcome to More or Less, the programme that does for dodgy numbers what the Spanish Inquisition did for religious pluralism. You didn't expect that, did you? This week we unpick statistics on disability and on immigration and we ask what's happening to primary school maths. And we'll try to work out what the world population would be today if the First World War had never happened. Not easy. In fact, it's hard even to figure out what the war did to the world's population back then.
One of the paradoxes of the Great War is that the bloodiest, most murderous war in history produced a totally unexpected and unplanned improvement in the standard of living and in the life expectancy of the civilian population.
But first, as the nation's school children get used to being back in the classroom after their long summer break, we've decided to take a closer look at what they'll be learning there. Most parents simply wouldn't recognise the way their children are being taught mathematics in primary school, although the current methods were introduced through the National Numeracy Strategy in 1999. They're not compulsory, but they were recommended and are widely used. I spoke to Laurie Jacks, until recently mathematics coordinator at a primary school and now an independent mathematics consultant.
Ideally we want all children to have an efficient method of calculating but at some points along the way children aren't quite ready to move on and just learn a process and actually what we have now is our children who understand the process and not just know how to do it for a short time and then it gets pushed into the back of their memory and ultimately lost in adulthood.
The basic idea is, first, to teach children that there's more than one way to skin a cat when it comes to sums, and second, to give children a way to calculate intuitively in their heads before moving on to more formal pen and paper methods. Laurie Jacks thinks that schoolchildren cope very well with the new methods, but we were interested to see how adults would take to them. we assembled a panel of loyal listeners, each of whom had responded to our request last week for people who felt that primary school maths had simply passed them by. We had a huge response, with some very moving stories. For those to whom we've not had a chance to reply, we apologise. Then we asked Rob Easterway, the author of a new book, Maths for Mums and Dads, to explain the new methods.
The grid method for long multiplication and the chunking method for doing long division. And so Rob and our four brave souls gathered together in central London.
My name's Jo. I've come from Essex. All my life I've been absolutely petrified of maths, particularly long division. Hi, I'm Andy from South London. I quite liked maths at primary school actually. I liked times tables and things like that when you could sing along to it. But then I've sort of avoided it because it's any more complicated than that. It was scary. Hello, I'm Clare Murray. I live in Norfolk and I've always been bad at maths. Ever since I was about 10 and failed my exam, I got 1% because I just did my name right. I didn't do anything. I was lost, completely lost. Maybe I'll learn something today. I'm Charlotte from London and I'm the proud possessor of an unclassified in maths O-level. So this is my equivalent of bungee jumping.
Rob began by explaining the grid method for long multiplication. It starts with what Rob calls an array, which is basically a bunch of dots gathered together in the shape of a rectangle.
This is a picture of a crate of bottles you can just have between yourself and yourself. We've got a couple. The starting point for multiplication these days is actually to start with an array and just do dots in an array. You could obviously count them, but very quickly you realise, well, actually there's my tables involved here, seven rows of eights, seven eights. 56 and that's how to start with a multiplication now let's do 7 times 14 we could actually do that as an array so you're going to end up with this array of 7 dots 7 rows and 14 dots now you could count those up but can you see that you can actually split this box of dots up so that
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–4:20
2
What will primary school children be learning in 'new' maths lessons?
4:20–15:41
3
How do teachers explain the grid method for long multiplication?
15:41–23:13
4
What is chunking and how is long division taught to children today?
23:13–27:59