If your children and grandchildren are still attending school, you must not miss reading this!
Posted to The Age (3/12/2019) on 4/12/2019 (Not published by The Age)
Commenting on "'Alarm bells': Australian students falling behind in maths, science and reading"
https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/alarm-bells-australian-students-falling-behind-in-maths-science-and-reading-20191203-p53gho.html
A Brief Background
I was teaching in the tertiary education sector and adult learning centre for more than a decade. I want to find out why Australia seems to have the proverbial problems in literacy and numeracy
I am very grateful to the Principal and some teachers who accepted and entrusted me as a volunteer in my local primary school. After one and half years volunteering in a primary school, being asked to help students In Prep, Year 3, Year 4 and Year 5, mainly in maths and occasionally in English for the Preppies, I have a fair idea why our students from prep to tertiary education are experiencing degradation in standard and falling in ranking in PISA.
Australian Education System In Crisis
Australian education system is out of whack and needs immediate reform.
One Size Fits All - Wishful Thinking
The system has lost sight of what a school is about. Schools are NOT laboratory for social experiment. Getting rid of streaming is the biggest mistake. Having a mixture of students with vast difference in degree of competence and level of intelligence is hell for teachers trying to teach and monitor the students’ progress effectively. The teacher has to prepare different sets of lessons and exercises for different competence, and it is too laborious, time consuming for a class teacher to deal with.
The current mix of students is a socialistic approach, producing very average students. It unfairly chops down the smart tall poppies, and does not provide sufficient time to help the slow learners.
Teaching Style & Learning Style - Simplistic Ideals
Many training courses preparing future trainers talk about Teaching Style & Learning Style. Unfortunately, this is a very luxurious ideal, unless a teacher is dealing with 1-on-1 basis, or a group of like-minded, comparable competent students. There are about 20 to 25 students in a class, and it is extremely difficult for a teacher to vary the teaching style to satisfy the students' needs.
Instead of doing the rather impossible task, it may be easier to teach the students to learn the Teaching Style of the teacher.
Different subjects may require different learning styles. A teacher can advise the students to apply their learning style so that the students can explore the feasible or the best way to achieve best possible results.
Phonic System - That Does Not Sound Right
There are a lot of papers written and discussions about the pros and cons teaching English language using Phonic System. When I was a child in Malaysia, I learnt three dominant languages - Chinese (Mandarin), English and Malay (Bahasa), plus my mother-tongue Cantonese, and other dialects spoken by my neighbours and friends. Besides, Bahasa, none of the spoken languages and dialects were learnt by phonic system.
English language phonic system has so many rules and exceptions, and it is too much for anyone to master, not to mention the young children. On the contrary, Malay phonic system is so simple; each vowel has one sound except when "a" is at the end of the word, which is pronounced as "é", an additional vowel not found in English.
For example, the word "elephant" - the two e's have different sound, and "ant" of the last syllable "phant" is nothing close to the pronunciation of the insect "ant". I am not surprised that some people may spell it as "air-ly-fernt", while In Bahasa, it is simply spelt as "elifén"
Unlike many countries with high PISA score, Australia claims to be the melting pot of many cultures. I can assure the educationalists and authorities that poor spelling stems from English language spelling being the greatest pain in the universe to master. That may explain why the PISA score in English spelling has deteriorated.
Rote Learning - Remember It
Whether it was English or Mandarin, I had to sit for spelling and dictation tests. That brings me to the topic of Rote Learning, which is a memorization technique.
Students must remember the sequencing of maths operation, given by an acronym BODMAS.
A young child's brain is like a blank sheet of butcher paper. Similarly, when a humanoid robot with Artificial Intelligence (AI) capability is out of a production line, its brain is blank. Both brains need to be fed with knowledge, the foundation of all future well-being and development of respective individuals.
Unfortunately, many gurus just wipe the rote learning methodology slate clean, and swing to meaningful learning, associative learning, and active learning.
My mother-in-law in her early 90's is suffering from severe dementia. She cannot recognise her children and me. She was Chinese and English educated in her young days. Once in a blue moon, she becomes talkative, and can even reads many words in a Chinese book. She reads the book from top to bottom vertically and from left to right, the correct way to read a Chinese article in a book.
Long-tern memory does not fade away or erased easily, and it is important that useful knowledge and information must be read, fed, and stored early for retrieval in future use and undertaking.
If Google does not have a large repository of data and information, how can anyone ask Google for help?
Firm Foundation - Fast Track to a Sound Future
The stability and safety of a house or high-rise skyscraper rely on good and firm foundation. No wonder many people, including politicians, lack such foundation and therefore cannot conduct a decent conversation or debate which involves facts and knowledge. Many people become uptight and aggressive when they cannot understand what is going on or when they cannot express themselves clearly.
I have encountered Year 4 and Year 5 students who cannot "recite" the multiplication table. Worse still, some cannot add and subtract two single digit numbers mentally.
Students needs to read more books. A library is a repository of books, and a book is a repository of words or vocabulary. Only with good command of words, variation of meaningful sentences can be constructed, which will in turn make into phrases, paragraphs and eventually a passage or article.
Practice Makes Perfect - Do It
Many of us have heard about "Practice makes perfect", and yet how many people do not follow this adage, nor instil that into the younger generations. Any successful sports person, musician, race horse, and even investors need to spend hours each day practising repeatedly. Unfortunately, many expect miracles to happen to their children and students who hardly spend enough time practising and revising their school work.
Homework has been abolished because many parents, educationalists and psychologists reckon that school work is giving too much pressure to the students, and should be out of bound after school hours. If a Chinese school student in China spends 20 hours in maths and becomes a top student without mentally and psychologically damaged, I believe it is time to rethink the worth of homework.
I suggest bringing back homework and "drilling" them through repeated exercises in order to set the foundation right again in early childhood and primary education.
Maths - Use Proper Terminologies & Sequencing
Mathematics (maths in Australia, math in US), is in fact a language. It has syntax, and rules. It is therefore important to learn it properly from the beginning. Correct standard terminologies must be used and emphasised to avoid confusion. "Going back" to primary school is really a learning and challenging experience. I learn terms that I never heard of or used before.
While lengthy explanations may be skipped, I prefer certain concepts to be expounded in primary school years.
The curriculum is rather inefficient and ineffective. I find that some maths topics are repeated in consecutive years, some should be taught in a different logical sequence or even de-emphasized.
Fun and AIDA - The Key to Marketing Success
Whenever one has to deal with people to provide a service or sell a product, one has to learn about marketing. A teacher is a marketer in a class.
Marketing is about selling what the customers / clients want to buy. The students are the customers / clients.
The students may not want to buy the knowledge of a subject, but a good marketer can make them buy something else of their interest which eventually leads them to achieve the desire goal unknowingly.
AIDA stands for Awareness or Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. Curiosity kills the cat, and therefore maths tricks or visual demonstrations can be good way to create awareness and grab the students' attention. After all, a bit of fun is always good to please a crowd.
Although I am not a teacher-in-charge, I am very well liked by the students of the various classes I volunteered in. I run a quick session of maths tricks whenever possible before the end of the class, and they always enjoy it and want to learn more.
What's Next?
I have discussed with the Principal and suggested that I would like to help motivate and excite some students to get them to achieve better results. The Principal and a couple teachers have invited me back to volunteer next year.
My resolution for 2020 is to help students in science even in higher grades.
After all, there is no point to keep my knowledge and take it with me when I am 6-foot under. I like to share it now!
This blog is first published in my Facebook group SFC Education, Teaching, Learning.
Thank you for reading.
