Dispatches

I suppose it would be remiss of me not to comment on Dispatches on channel four. I thought the central premise of the show was sound.

• Primary children aren't very good at maths.

• If they're not good at maths at age ten, they'll have given up by they're fifteen.

• If they've given up by 15 they'll be poor when they become adults.

• This won't help them in the workplace.

• If they have children they won't be able to help them with maths, provide them with maths skills or encourage an enthusiasm for maths.

Simple, and it weren't so important it would be trite. But what I didn't feel the show did was take that premise on step further

• Adults become teachers.

• Teachers without maths skills or maths enthusiasm can't teach maths

• Teachers like this need to sort themselves out and they need help to sort themselves out
  

But how to help teachers become good teachers. This problem strikes me as quite simple but you have to firstly judge your audience-they's no reason becoming angry or self righteous about this issue, there's no reason why Primary teachers should be good at maths. If you leave school with a B in maths, go on and read English at University you can be a great teacher with poor maths skills.

Rightly or wrongly most of our teachers are working mothers, this is a simple fact. If we need to teach these professional working mothers better maths skills we need to make it easy for them. Currently we're not. They need to take six month long modules, often weekly or in the evening or at weekends so they're not being taken advantage of. The method of teaching needs to be in hour long chunks, ideally online so these can be learned when they want to be learned with clear links being made to methods of teaching and learning. These are professional earnest people who want to get better at their jobs, but they need help doing it and it needs to given to them in a way that's easy for them to digest or they'll carry on working hard in a pointless way misrepresenting a subject the children they care for need in the future for a good life.

It's complete madness it's not being made easy for primary teachers to learn maths and leaves another generation of children being exposed to poor maths teaching and leaves another generation of poorly trained teachers dreading the mandatory 50 minutes of numeracy each day.

And who on earth can engineer enjoyment in something they dread.