Project Maths is not the answer to tough question
IT is widely accepted that there is a crisis in school-level maths, from early primary school up, including unqualified teachers, students leaving school innumerate, under-challenged students, and low numbers taking higher-level Leaving Certificate maths, not to mention the low standard of maths among many of those students who actually do get an honour.
Many readers may be aware of Project Maths, either through their own children or professionally. It was set up to address this crisis and is essentially the new maths for our schools.
One possibly welcome feature is that it eliminates all choice from Leaving Cert Maths and attempts to ask exam questions that are âunseenâ, thereby stopping the cherry-picking of easy predictable questions and reducing the regurgitation without understanding that is currently rife.
That said, Project Maths is, in my view, a retrograde move. The main reason is that the proposed syllabus constitutes a major dumbing down of the current syllabus, as well as a sea-change in emphasis.
There are five strands â one of which is classical geometry (which disappeared from the syllabus 40-plus years ago), and another is probability and statistics, the content of which has been at least doubled. The syllabus is a complete distortion of the mathematics that is required to equip our students for a third-level study of the subject.
What disappears under Project Maths is most material on calculus, a lot of differentiation, almost all integration, as well as all vectors, all matrices, discrete maths and much more.
This material is the bread and butter of engineers, scientists, economists, financiers, computer scientists and, not least, statisticians. Yes, it is difficult, but almost every country exposes their students to the intellectual training and rigour of calculus at second level; soon our students will not know the integral of cosine.
The universities assume familiarity with this material in first-year maths classes: the impact will be to force the dumbing down of first-year university courses, not just in maths but also physics, applied maths, mechanics etc, thereby, for example, pushing topics such as Laplace Transforms, vector analysis and PDEs much later into the curriculum.
Today some of our best students have difficulty sustaining an algebraic calculation over a few lines; the new syllabus reduces the amount of time spent doing detailed calculations even further.
Do the engineering professional bodies realise the extent to which this runs counter to their stated goals? I wonder would they prefer for our Leaving Certificate students be well-versed in theorems of Euclid and conditional probabilities or in simple integration, vectors and matrices?
Another matter of concern is that Project Maths is very resource-intensive. It is more hands-on and uses lots of âlaboratoryâ equipment that will be needed in every school (for example, students will be throwing dice to learn about probability). It will also require the retraining of most maths teachers.
Even if it results in higher participation rates, at what cost in terms of content and standards? Surely there are better ways to spend any additional funding of mathematics. The Government would do well to incentivise maths teaching as a career, as in other countries. The attitudes of students would change with a proper rewards system (such as bonus points, compulsory questions and so on).
Project Maths is not the answer to most of the problems mentioned above. It is seriously misguided and it will be very damaging in the long run.
* Dr Eugene Gath, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Limerick
