I have been making a serious attempt to understand this “back to the basics” thing about public education that has been getting so much ink in the last few weeks.
The term “back to basics” has been around for a while. U.K. prime minister John Major used it in 1993 to describe a return to previously held values of decency. In the 1970s, it had a more explicit meaning with a piece in the New York Times of March 1975: “The style and tone of the churches have undergone a major adjustment, gradually turning toward a ‘back-to-basics’ approach.”
Now it seems the back-to-basics terminology is being employed by people who have a legitimate concern, not about decency and the tone of 21st-century education, but about how math is or is not being taught in our schools.
According to a National Post article, the Western and Northern Canadian Protocol, a common curricular framework initiated in 1995 and revised in 2006 and used to develop curriculum in all western provinces, may be at the back-to-basics heart of the math furor.
University of Winnipeg math professor Anna Stokke and two of her colleagues knew there was “a huge problem” about grade-school students not being taught how to do vertical addition, carry or borrow numbers, or knowing their multiplication tables.
Manitoba has introduced a “back to basics” revised math curriculum for kindergarten to Grade 8, requiring students to learn times tables; have automatic recall of answers to basic problems such as 30-5=25, known as math “facts,” and standard algorithms for key math operations — and perform them without using a calculator.
As travellers to Mexico will know, it is not uncommon to come across seven- to 10-year-old children who can add, subtract, divide and multiply in their heads, calculate the exchange rate, give you the correct change in pesos, all the while negotiating prices in English.
I’m glad that Manitoba is reminding teachers that this fundamental stuff is not beyond Canadian children as well.
If some teacher somewhere has stopped teaching essential arithmetic, I don’t understand why.
What I do understand is that simply learning this stuff by rote, by memorization, is not teaching kids anything about how math works.
Teaching students multiple strategies in problem-solving needs to strike an appropriate balance between students’ basic math skills and conceptual understanding and problem-solving ability, which will enable kids to move on up though the grades to math-centric places those little Mexican whiz kids will never have the opportunity to visit. Several provinces now are planning to create mathematics education advisory committees that will update high-school math courses and work with university faculties of education to improve teacher training in math — a good thing in a world where an exponentially increasing knowledge of managing numerical calculation is the difference between a good job and no job.
I had always been told: “Geoff, you are just not a math student.”
Maybe that’s why, as a classroom supervisor, nothing frosted me more than to hear a high-school math teacher describe kids in his or her class as “just not math students.” I upset a few people by responding as politely as I could: “Be careful that you are not telling me you are just not a math teacher — your job is to find a path for them to understand math and even enjoy it.”
“We’re not going back to ‘kill and drill,’ that’s not what we’re trying to accomplish here,” said Manitoba’s Education Minister Nancy Allan in a recent interview, “but there has to be a basic foundation in regards to adding and subtracting and memorizing math facts [and] knowing how to do math at an early age.”
Twenty-first century education is not about moving back into some adult-nostalgia-driven “back-to-basics simple stuff I understand” framework of thinking — it is about not losing sight of math’s essential origins.
As with progress in any field of learning, it’s about finding a balance.
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
