Good morning, class. Today’s subject: Why Johnny can’t math.
It’s a hot topic, driven by Canadian kids’ tumble down the international knowledge rankings.
Every three years, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development measures student performance in 65 industrialized countries, testing 15-year-olds in reading, science and math.
Canada has traditionally placed well above average, but over the past decade has been slipping back to the pack. Last fall’s results showed a knee-wobbling dip in math and science.
The drop in science is understandable, since Stephen Harper had all the biology teachers dragged onto the soccer field and shot in 2009. (No, just joking: In truth he had them rounded up and relocated to the Northern Gateway Construction/Re-education Camp No. 5 [formerly Jasper National Park]. They only get shot if they attempt to speak.)
But math? Why would our 15-year-olds fall back so badly — 13th out of 65, down from 10th in 2009 and seventh in 2006 — in math? Dunno, but the Canadian numbers were glum everywhere but Quebec, which bucked the trend and would have ranked as the eighth-mathiest country in the world were it independent (oh, here we go again).
Reaction has been mildly panicked. Former deputy prime minister John Manley was quoted as saying Canada’s results were “on the scale of a national emergency.” Some blamed a bad curriculum, others a lack of instruction. Others cite culture.
In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell argued that certain Asian countries consistently outrank the rest of the world at math because they are influenced by wet-rice farming, in which there is a direct link between crop yield and exacting, unrelenting toil every day of the year.
Western farming, on the other hand, has for centuries been a seasonal affair: plant in the spring, tend the crops over summer, harvest in the fall and spend the winter curling, playing hockey and appearing in Tim Hortons commercials. (Here, I paraphrase.)
In essence, Gladwell argues that rice farming taught Asians dogged persistence in problem solving. “Working hard is what successful people do, and the genius formed in the rice paddies is that hard work gave those in the fields a way to find meaning in the midst of great uncertainty and poverty. That lesson has served Asians well in many endeavors but rarely so perfectly as in the case of mathematics.”
But wait! Others say there’s more to success than simply putting in the hours.
Maclean’s magazine just ran a story pointing out that Canadian kids spend more time in math class than they did a decade ago, and in fact spend more time in math class than anyone else in the western world. “More classroom time is pointless if the curriculum isn’t up to par,” it said.
Maclean’s cited a University of Chicago study that found students benefit from longer school days only if they go to schools that are safe and well-disciplined. If the school is bad, the curriculum is lousy, the teacher is picking flies out of his beard and the kids are eating glue and staring out the window, it doesn’t matter how much time they spend in the classroom, they’re not going to learn. (Again, I paraphrase.)
If there is any comfort to be found in the math-testing results, it’s that they do fit in nicely with the media pattern of reporting on Today’s Youth. Whenever you read the phrase Today’s Youth, you can be pretty sure it comes with a tone of disapproval, the connotation being that the young are like JPEG photos, a poor imitation of what came before, losing quality with each generation. (Typical headline — Today’s Youth: Pampered Incompetents or Threat to Our Security?)
For some of us, it’s reassuring to conjure up images of feral teens roaming the streets, twerking, Snapchatting, knocking over liquor stores and ignoring their math homework.
Never mind that despite the downward trend, Canadian students still place well in the OECD rankings, tying for seventh in reading, 10th in science, 13th in math.
Never mind that your own grasp of numeracy is more tenuous than you would like to admit. An isosceles triangle is not one with five sides. Pythagorean theorem does not hold that “we’re here for a good time, not a long time.” When a math problem says “a northbound car travelling 87 km/h meets a southbound car going 12 km/h,” the solution is not “fix the Colwood Crawl.”
And never mind that we have been fretting this way for a long time. Why Johnny Can’t Read was a famous book by American readability expert Rudolf Flesch. It was written in 1955.
