Vocal Voices

Except in 'Education, Education, Education'.

UK countries have dropped out of the top 20 for the first time ever when compared to other nations. For the seventh largest global economy that has to be of some concern.

There are concerns, of course, thet the tests are flawed, and they may be right. There is evidence that some countries teach to the test, which is a bit of a cheat. If pupils are given a good grounding in a subject that should not be necessary. and there's the rub.

This link: http://www.oecd.org/pisa/test/ leads to six sample questions. Have a go, and remember that these are being answered by 15 yr-olds, those about to take GCSE. Take a good look at what the UK scored for each question.

Are you shocked? I am. Only 3% of our puils could work out a simple average speed. Maths my @r5e, these are simple arithmetic.

I am amazed, Frank.

As you say, this is just plain arithmetic.

Something is drastically wrong with the education system in this country.

When I think of the way I was taught back in the thirties, and the way all that information and method of working has
remained with me all through my life, I just don't understand why there was any need to change things.
Why change something if it's working satisfactorily?

I made one silly mistake, so got one wrong, but realised it as soon as I'd submitted it They are pretty basic questions, so it is worrying They look more like 11 plus questions than for 15/16 year olds

I saw the piece on education in Korea and just cannot believe it can be good for children to be restricted to four hours sleep.

Well I knocked those off, taking longer because I thought I must be missing something, it seemed too easy
This would definitely all be stuff we had well covered at junior school

I don't think anyone here was suggesting the Korean way Pederito, but I guess there must be things in amongst it to learn from.

Yes, I got them all correct. Had to think about them, though.

Agree they are basically "simple arithmetic" ...... I wonder, however, whether the English pupils found the "comprehension" element of the questions difficult?

My personal opinion is that Helen the Cyclist looks far too smug and should be banned from the road.

Like Aggers has said, it is simple arithmatic. I could do these when I was eleven years old. I only started school in 1939 but I remember having to learn our tables up to 12 by heart. No calculators, everthing done long hand. Even when we were later taught how to use a slide rule, our teacher said we had to do a rough calculation to make sure we had the decimal point in the correct place.

To think, when the metric system got introduced it's supporters said that we'd all get better at maths..
I got them all but was a bit cautious about the revolving door; I thought it might be a trick question but it wasn't.
16 year olds should be able to knock those questions off with no problems, I would have thought.

If you watch programmes like "Educating Yorkshire" or read stories of teenagers literally bullied to death by their class mates at secondary school, you begin to understand why though. Gobby, disruptive children in the classroom and no effective sanctions to stop their behaviour, which disrupts the education of those wanting to learn.

eta - I found I recently that my old primary school had done badly with OFSTED, and that lessons were frequently being disrupted by bad behaviour. This was puzzling to me because although it is an ex-pit village, bad behaviour had never been that bad before. This week I've been told that our local council has been dumping 'problem' families in the village. Great. This is not taken account of by any OFSTED measures, but it should be.

Some of us remember having to do 12 =1, 3 of them = 1, 220 of them = 1, 8 of them = 1, or we could even go 1760 = 1.

We also had 12 = 1, 20 of them = 1, or even 240 of them = 1.

And 16 =1, 14 of them = 1, 8 of them = 1, 20 of them = 1, or 2240 of them =1.

We were working in those units from the day we entered primary school, none of this 10 x 10 for everything, and no calculators. No wonder we became comfortable with numbers.

ROFL, I wondered what the 'eck you were going on about, WM - then the penny suddenly dropped !

That's a 1d, not a 1p, of course ...