Teach Roman Numerals in Primary Maths: Gove

[noblegiraffe]

A story in The Guardian today has a charity expressing concerns about Michael Gove's plans for a new numeracy curriculum in primary school.

Among other things, the classically educated minister with a Latin obsession has decided that primary school children really need to be able to read Roman numerals up to 1000.

Baffling. I can't say it gives me any confidence about the quality of the rest of it.

Didn't do it at school and it was always a bugger when working out dates on tv shows or monuments! I taught DS the numerals recently because he was asking me so I thought it was about time I learned. I'll never be Mary Beard now. If only I was taught them in primary school, who knows what I'd be doing now?

Soup it absolutely is maths. It's a great way of practising arithmetic.

IX is ten minus one, therefore it's nine.

it is an ok way of doing some very limited basic arithmetic - but bloody awful way of doing anything more than that. Maybe that would be a useful exercise - to get kids to think about how numbers work, what they are for and which systems work best. Could be a good lead into base work - other cultures have used base 12, based 16 etc in the past - what was good and bad about those.

Some cultures today still only have numbers up to 2 or 3 - thinking about that and how it impacts of life is interesting. All great stuff - but no space for it in our current curriculum.

Jodie, when you read all the comments about the poor numeracy of current school kids, that a lot are leaving school without the basic skills to function an an average job, don't you think that's more of a pressing problem to be addressed than adding something largely irrelevant to the primary curriculum when they should be acquiring these skills?

I get kids in secondary all the time who can't tell the time, don't know how many days or weeks there are in a year. They get confused about there not being 100 minutes in an hour. That's a problem, not the ability to decipher the year on the end credits of a TV programme.

Gunz that really begs the question: why on earth is the BBC giving something like copyright dates in Roman numerals?

I agree, it's not a great way of doing basic arithmetic and it's only going to confuse those that need practice with basic arithmetic.

Sometimes with more able sets in secondary I might do a bit on Roman numerals, Babylonian numbers, Egyptian numbers, because it's interesting and I love the history of maths. But not if there isn't time because they need to finish fractions or percentages or something useful.

I suppose I just think that if you base the curriculum around the worst performing pupils in the worst performing schools, then that doesn't tend to the needs and development of the remainder - and does a tremendous disservice, actually, to very many children, and reinforces a kind of perception of assumed low attainment and low achievement. (Although I do obviously see your point, and clearly the government should be focusing on addressing why so many children enter secondary education lacking basic literacy and numeracy skills).

I guess I just feel rather despondent, looking back to my own primary school days (state primary with most of the pupils from the local authority housing estate where it was based), when we would all have cheerfully been doing roman numerals at about aged 9. I guess not all, of course, but certainly it was expected that we could achieve things that weren't the absolute basics. Are we on an inexorable slide backwards?

I cannot believe I am sounding like a defender of Ghastly Gove. I think I need more coffee.

I get kids in secondary all the time who can't tell the time, don't know how many days or weeks there are in a year. They get confused about there not being 100 minutes in an hour. That's a problem, not the ability to decipher the year on the end credits of a TV programme.

That is not a problem, that is a disaster, and entirely avoidable (surely ?).

I actually think it would be useful to pupil's mental arithmetic skills, learning Roman numbers, though not sure what age it would suit, around 9 perhaps? The use of different bases is good for mental agility.

The fact that Gove likes it is enough to put me off though

One could achieve the same by learning old British counting- yan, tan, tethera etc- really... what have the Romans ever done for us in UK?

Noble - why the bbc use them is another subject entirely that i cannot answer. The point however is that roman numerals are widely used on periodicals, copyrights (documents, films etc) buildings etc, they are harder to forge as well i suppose is partly the attraction. But it is important that children at least by the time they leave secondary school, know the roman numerals up to 1000.

jodie, I'm very sorry my dear pal, but I'm kind of with the others on this one :)! It's a massively overstretched curriculm as it is, and by cramming it with so many things, children are losing the basics. Of course, they should know the numbers of the clock face, 50, and 100, but numbers up to 1000? I think that would take a long time to learn and confuse an awful lot of other things. That is in the actual maths curriculum I am talking about. Now that schools have been freed up a bit in terms of the topics they cover rather than that wretched QCA bollocks I had to teach 10 years ago, then including it in a topic about Romans might be a bit more fun. And that doesn't mean I only approve of teaching children only useful things they will need in the world of work what work though?

It's the prescriptiveness of Gove that many teachers can't stand - he knows fuck all about education and learning.

I don't think I know Roman numerals up to 1000 by the way. I can't see that it has ever held me back academically and professionally.

It's all right Ariel!

What on earth is the correlation, then, between children apparently being increasingly incapable of learning anything but the absolute bare minimum, and the ever-improving results at GCSE and A level?

Though I agree with everything you say about teaching to the lowest ability impoverishes the rest.

It's very odd is it not?

Standards are getting ever higher though. Don't you forget that.

This makes me cross - learning symbols is disproporionately hard for some children. There's no need to make it part of maths and disadvantage them further. Any child who's struggled with visual memory is going to have to do this stupid exercise for no good reason.

I don't know numerals up to 1000, and I have Latin A Level and regularly use roman numerals in my day-to-day work. Every time I type them into google and get it to translate. I appear to survive.

It is a stupid idea of Gove's (tautology?)

I suspect one of the reasons I feel so strongly about this is that I seem to keep getting into furious pub rows with a pal of mine who's basically a communist, and would like to see everything in life and society - education, earnings, job progression, etc. - brought down to a level that everyone could attain, and therefore no-one is 'unequal', and no-one is better (higher earning, of a higher standing by virtue of their profession, or particularly better educated) than anyone else.

I cannot get my head round it, really. And I hate Gove and I long for the next general election so I can exercise my democratic right to boot those creatures out of office - but...oh, well. I have already made my point very badly, so I won't bother making it even worse by making it badly all over again

But jodie, isn't this also about being discriminating about what the method of teaching is doing?

Your mate wants to see everything equal - but Gove wants to pretend all children have equal skills in everything and learn everything equally, so a child who is good at understanding the concept of, say, multiplication should only get better if you give him roman numerals to do it with. But what if that child who's cracked multiplication has a block on visual memory and doesn't learn the shapes well?

Then you're holding back a child who might be a promising mathematician, in order to teach something that, later on, isn't going to be relevant.

It seems like a perfect way of penalizing children with unequal abilities.

^^ genuine confusion, not that horrid snarky kind!

If you have a class of primary school children, some of them will be completely tone deaf, going purely by statistics. You don't therefore not teach music because it's penalizing those who are simply never going to 'get it'. You teach it anyway, and they all join in, or try to, and (ideally) those who are not going to play the recorder solo in the Christmas play will instead be able to show off their amazing design skills and help with the set (or some other skill).

Surely it's the same for maths- and indeed all subjects?

Presumably, then, Jodie, your friend would like to live in a house that anybody could build, ban surgery, because not everyone can learn how to do it, pretty much get rid of any technology.....

Yes, but you need to understand tones in order to do music.

I do not believe you need to learn roman numerals to do maths. That's what I'm getting at.

It's an unnecessary skill he's wanting to bring in there. It's like saying, why not learn French, but transliterated into the Greek alphabet - sure, it might be interesting for some children and could potentially teach interesting things about phonics. But you feel for the children whose natural aptitude for French is held back because they can't get their heads around the Greek alphabet.

That's my thought, anyway.

Rusty, believe me, all of these arguments and more have been deployed by me - not with any success, because he will never change his mind. Even though he owns his own house and drives a spendy car, but never mind all that, eh?!

What on earth is the correlation, then, between children apparently being increasingly incapable of learning anything but the absolute bare minimum, and the ever-improving results at GCSE and A level? confused

Good question. One of other of them must be not quite right. Or maybe both.

Somone who declares themself a Communist nowadays does it purely as an affectation.

And you tell him that from me!

Jodie,

I learned Roman numerals in primary school - along with how to calculate and write numbers in all bases from binary up to decimal, also in hexadecimal (as I am old enough for both binary and hexadecimal to have been useful in computer programming). This was in a small village primary with no specific academic aspirations...

HOWEVER this was before the National curriculum. I happened to have a maths-and-art obsessed teacher. We did maths, reading, writing, and art. I did no science, history, geography, design technology, certainly no foreign language and definitely no ICT (no computer in the school). No RE at all. We did a certain amount of drama, plenty of wet afternoons singing round the piano and some people did some PE (I did more maths, especially in the pollen season, as a poorly-controlled asthmatic).

The primary curriculum is now very crowded. On the one hand, it exposes every child to a wide variety of subjects and lays a foundation of basic skills in them. On the other hand, it restricts the time available to go into some areas in great depth.... I was lucky, as I was good at maths and benefitted from the huge focus on it. For a child who might have excelled in science or history or DT or sport, mine would have been a much less satisfactory primary education...

Hmm. All this is very interesting...

I suppose it would be best to wait and see what other proposals lie alongside this Roman Numerals stuff, in order to see the context of it all.

For a start, you can be sure that the Guardian has identified the most contentious and un-Guardianesque item in the entire paper

therockenholt I agree. This really does need examining, because you can't have both.