To think if you cannot add one half to one quarter you really should not be in teaching

[mrgrouper]

I am starting teacher training in September and so have joined some teacher training Facebook groups. We all have to pass professional skills tests in literacy and numeracy. The tests are pretty easy but there is a mental arithmetic test that a lot of trainees are panicking on. A woman has posted that she is doing the mock test and it claims one half plus one quarter is three quarters and she has no idea how the examiners had worked this out. She is not training to be a maths teacher but surely all teachers should know basic maths. I knew this stuff aged 7.

I seem to remember Arthur struggled with fractions.

(see - link to OP)

But he does know that a Q is always followed by a U

Yellow car...

I'm an HLTA and can confirm, sadly, that many teachers don't know the basics. Many years ago a teacher I supported regularly wrote the weekly spellings on the board incorrectly, for her year sixes to copy down! When eventually pulled up on it by the Head her response was, 'Spelling isn't that important, there's always Spellcheck.' Glad she never taught my three!

Sorry if this point has been made - I haven't read all 11 pages - but if someone can't even understand how 1/2 + 1/4 = 3/4 when they're actually given the answer it shows a lack of cognition and mental agility that would be worring for a teacher of any subject, never mind if they had to teach maths (at any level). How are they going to break down processes into steps and explain processes if they can't deal with such simple logic. I teach five-year-olds who would easily understand this concept.

sphere of diameter 'r' occupies about 1/2 the space of a cube radius 'r'

That's right. More precisely, the ratio between the volume of a sphere and the volume of the smallest cube that will exactly contain it is pi/6, or 0.52359... It's a handy GCSE exercise to show this.

As you say, it's a very surprising result: your intuition says is too small.

BUT figuring out the number of spheres of a given size you can fit in a box of a given size is hard. If you have a 10x10x10 box, you could fit 1000 spheres in there using only 52% of the volume (put in a layer of 100 spheres in a 10x10 grid, and then put a thin piece of paper on top of them, and do the same thing 10 times) but that's obviously not optimal.

After that it all gets rather subtle:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close-packing_of_equal_spheres

We are now teaching in Y6 what would a few years ago have been Y9 level.

Wow, I didn't realise that (I'm a bit out of the loop as my DCs are younger, and are now home educated). This isn't particularly relevant to the thread topic, but is that (the above quote I mean) going to be a good thing? Or is it going to create more pressure to cram more in, meaning there is even less time for the absolute basics to be really understood? I certainly found that my DD, who struggles with maths, would be rushed onto the next topic at school as soon as she'd vaguely understood it (but not, sadly, enough to actually keep the knowledge long term). Now she's home we've had a lot more time to really get the basics down - with a lot of hands on activities that I'm now using in my tuition of other home ed children - and her confidence is growing.

Sorry but not knowing that one half added to one quarter is three quarter is much more than 'just being rusty'. It is just crap. My DDs could correctly answer that question when they were 7/8.

This is basic, basic stuff.

One of DD's teachers at primary school was notorious for her bad spelling - but she just laughed it off "Oh I've always been rubbish at spelling".

Just not funny. It's part of your job fucking LEARN.

If a prospective primary school teacher doesn't have the basic skills possessed by 7/8 year olds, then they are a dead loss frankly and I would not want them teaching my DDs.

When DD was doing her A levels she had 2 or 3 friends who had applied to do a primary teaching course at uni. While DD and most of her friends were revising like crazy and stressed about exams so that they got their required grades for uni, those girls who applied to do a teaching degree were a lot more relaxed. Their grade offers were a lot lower, like Cs and Ds so they really didn't need to worry.

Nothing against them, they were perfectly nice girls who were good with kids and will probably be quite good at the job. But I did wonder at the time, and still do, why the requirements are set so low. It's not an easy job, far from it, I should think and carries a tremendous responsibility. A true profession and very important for society. And the starting salaries are not bad either.

So why on earth is the bar not set higher, why are universities not aiming to attract some of the brightest young people for such an important career? Can anyone explain?

So why on earth is the bar not set higher,

Because BEd courses aren't in a position to be picky.

Really? I thought you needed three Bs in decent subjects for a BEd. You certainly did at our local ex HE college Uni a couple of years ago when DD's friends were applying.

Actually just checked and it's a BA in Primary Education with QTS, so same thing presumably. 320 UCAS points wanted.

Actually just checked and it's a BA in Primary Education with QTS, so same thing presumably. 320 UCAS points wanted.

There are plenty at 280 quoted.

The 320 quoted by the first place that I found is hardly rigorous: it has the get-ut clause of "As long as you have a minimum of two A Levels (or equivalent), there is no maximum number of qualifications that we will accept UCAS points from. This includes additional qualifications such as the Welsh Baccalaureate and Certificate of Personal Effectiveness (CoPE), AS levels that haven’t been continued to A2, and General Studies AS/A2 awards."

No one on my daughters Teacher Training course had basic GCSE, A level, or IB results.

ohdear where did she train? What course was this?

To do ITT you need Cs in English and Maths minimum, and a 2:2 plus A levels. Depending on your course these requirements become more stringent, but these are the very lowest requirements.

No one on my daughters Teacher Training course had basic GCSE, A level, or IB results

What do you mean by 'basic' ? I'm not quite sure I understand your statement.

OK, I'm looking at Edge Hill. It says you need two Bs in your 320 points.

Scary, I'm not sure why it's important but even so I won't say where she was because of where we live and how identifying it would be. I've recently name changed for a reason. But I will say that she was at one of the best rated uni's for her choice of subject. Getting in wasn't easy for her or any of the other students and they certainly had more than the basic UCAS points required.

Which course? She did her primary school teacher training and is now a few weeks away from a masters in a Special Ed subject after working for a few years before going back to studying.

Soren, you know - a very basic pass with something like a Grade C. The kind of pass that would make you wonder what went wrong on the day if there were no extenuating circumstances to explain it beforehand.

The real worry is she decided to post her ignorance on FB.... That's not clever

ohdear because it they have people doing ITT without Cs in English and Maths then it is doing so without the knowledge of the OFSTED that covers teacher training. I can't believe there is a teacher training course that has people on it without a minimum of Cs. I was led to believe this was a fixed non-negotiable requirement regardless of route.

hauxb001 or you could see it as she posted it in a group of fellow students, peers, asking for some support in helping her prepare for the numeracy tests.

One if whom has them decided to make fun of her by posting in another forum whi h has then gone on to ridicule and belittle her.

We have no idea of the background of this person. We have no idea if she can do the majority of maths but struggles with some parts - it is possible.

I retrained at 30 to be a teacher I was young for my course. She may well have not done maths for 20 odd years. She is prepping now for the start of a course in Sept.

It is a fundamental part of maths but comparing her to students who have worked on fractions recently is not fair. Yes she can use time to help that example but it would help with others.

I know able mathematicians who all have small areas where things don't click naturally as the rest of the subject does.

As I have said previously I hope the OP offered her some help rather than the ridicule she showed on here. A simple explanation could have helped her out which is what teaching is fundamentally about.

Wouldn't help. Excuse typos.

Scary. I I've confused you. It was probably the gin I had last night. So to try and explain again in the cold light of day - no one on my daughters course had passed their exams with a very basic grade C. They had all passed with grades much higher than that.

ohdear phew. I had visions of some dreadful underground ITT collective peddalling forged certificates.

and a request for parents to start teaching their kids times tables now!

Wow did they mean by rote?

Maybe part of the problem is the GCSE teaching in the first place. Teaching to the test and all that - so the second you've put your pen down you willingly forget it all (unless you actually enjoyed the subject to begin with). So in that sense it's not surprising that someone could've scraped the all important C grade, but now has no clue how to do any of it years later.

TBH even in my top rated, pushy grammar school, there was a lot of 'teaching to the test' in many subjects. I remember myself and friends being told, after asking genuinely relevant questions, 'no, it's not on the syllabus'. Actually maths was the only class at school where that didn't happen, and we were encouraged to broaden our investigations beyond the syllabus. Even in years 7-9, it was all about those end of year exams.