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There is, I think, sufficient data to indicate that, for both students and teachers, math is the least popular subject in schools, and this has been true since before I went math education over 40 years ago.
After a life time in math that I have come to the conclusion that despite the improvements in our understanding of how children learn and new methods of teaching mathematics, students even after school with low math. To be clear, mathematics is the ability to reason with numbers and other mathematical concepts and includes number sense, business sense, computation, measurement, geometry, probability and statistics. Mathematics also requires that students have an intuitive or emotional sense of mathematics gives them the confidence to predict or calculate answers.
Many would argue that there is no emotional component to math, just obey the rules, get the right answer and move on. However, most adults have a strong emotional reaction to everything related to school mathematics; Unfortunately, these reactions are usually negative!
intellectually students meet the daily calculation (after all, they are rarely without a calculator), but many lack the emotional understanding that gives confidence predict and calculate the answers.
The problem does not lie directly with teachers, but more with how we recruit and train potential teachers. We have self-maintaining circuit; students do not enjoy math in school, graduate and go to college where they tend to avoid math courses. They recorded the teacher where they may or may not take a course on how to teach mathematics. Even if they take a course on teaching math missing value if participants have serious gaps in knowledge and understanding of mathematical concepts. It’s like a course on how to train basketball if you have no knowledge of the game and the skills involved.
student, totally unprepared to teach math, now leaves the teaching profession and the cycle continues.
The problems facing educational leaders, politicians and society in general is figuring where and how to break.
One possible solution that could deal with the problem fairly quickly, would be to have a series of seminars addressing both mathematical understanding and methods for specific topics or threads curriculum. After each course, participants were given a certificate to say they had been trained in the subject and were qualified to teach that topic. Over time, teachers would be fully qualified to teach mathematics.
This, as most of the solutions to the problems in education, would require the financial commitment of the government, education authorities, departments of education and time commitment from teachers.
At the same time math requirements for entry to teacher training could be made more stringent to ensure that students entering these programs will have a greater understanding of mathematics so as to ensure that the methods courses in mathematics will be more relevant and useful .
Until we improve the entrance qualifications of potential mathematics, mathematics will be badly taught, too many students will not reach the math skills needed to function in today’s society, and the work of teachers will not be given the respect it deserves.
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