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.

ps - I would still be working out how to represent that if it wasn't for google !

That's a thought - I would like to see how computers would have functioned in roman numerals .

I guess that proves that Romans were empirical (hah - not supposed to be a pun on empire !) in that they did things they knew worked, didn't work them out from first principals. Engineers and not scientists !

The point is - nothing wrong with learning about roman numerals, and how that related to the people who used them (right up to the 1700s in parish registers for example). BUT the place for them is not in the maths curriculum as they do very little to enhance maths and are actually a huge emcumberance.

Sorry, I'm useless and didn't answer your specific question.

I am not talking about 'challenging' children. 'challenge' is positive, IMO.

If you have a child who has good mathematical ability but poor visual memory, what purpose does it serve to have them jump through hoops memorizing the shapes of roman numerals in order to do maths? All that will happen is the poor child gets marked down as a bad mathematician when he or she is perfectly able.

It's like if you see a child write that 2+1=3, and the 3 is backwards - you could mark that wrong (as my teachers did), but it's better to differentiate between two separate aspects of the task. The child is understanding arithmetic correctly. They could give the right answer orally. But they're getting the notation wrong. If these things are blurred together, it helps no-one.

XXLXLXCSMII

is not a valid input apparently :)

I do completely agree with your ideals ... I'm right with you.

What I'd want to see is some playing around with numerals, but also the recognition that for some children, that's going to be not so much challenging, stretching and exciting, but actually debilitating.

if Gove had the benefit of listening to the range of opinions he might find if he swung by MN sometime

he would have to be clever enough not to pick MichaelGove as a username :)

Computers can't function in roman numerals . And neither does it do it in decimals. That's why we have binary mathematics. It's all ons and offs in transistors.

Yes, I totally see all that, LRD. I suppose what I would think is that the syllabus ought to be composed so that it is not weighted in such a way that one could be so heavily penalised on a particular failing that you couldn't achieve a good result overall. And that there is nothing wrong with trying out something new and finding you're not, actually, very good at it.

Happens to us all eventually!

Hmm. It's all very thought-provoking.

And to be really boring. Computers don't do negatives with a - symbol either.

There are some parallels with grad/post grad teaching, by the way - aothough rather useless parallels given we're talking about a 10 year age gap, but anyway...

I taught creative writing and literature to a class of rather brilliant 20 year olds.

As a general rule, their grammar ranged from not terribly good to appalling, so (at their request) I taught them some of the more sophisticated basics.

There were one or two people there who would just never, ever, ever going to correctly deploy a gerund. It just was not going to happen. And that was OK! They accepted that they weren't great at grammar, and were quite determiend that it wouldn't impact their writing (after all, that's what editors are for).

The one whose grammar was the worst has now managed to get a column in the Independent . I am unbelievably proud of her. And she was the one who always did grumpily badly in the grammar bits, but made everyone laugh with her short stories.

Yes, that's what I'm getting at, it would be important to make the syllabus carefully balanced.

I think it can be really good for bright children to be given something to struggle with - I can imagine this work with numerals firing someone's interest or imagination and getting them to have more of a feeling for numbers.

I get the impression Gove thinks all children who are bright are bright in the same way, and all children who are average or below average should be trailing along behind the bright ones, doing the same sort of work at a less good level. I just don't think it actually works like that - people are more different from each other than that.

It is a really interesting idea, though.

Computers can't function in roman numerals

I would like to see them try. Can you imagine how the programmers face would look trying to figure out the algorithms ?

I wonder how many kids (or adults come to that) realise that the phones and gadgets all work on binary, or have any idea what the means ?

jodie I would have no clue what a gerund is!

My grammar is perfectly servicable and I can correct my undergrads when I need to do so, but I never know the names.

That's lovely about your student and her story, though.

And no, I don't really know what that anecdote illustrated, either - other than that perhaps it's a good thing to learn, early, that if you're just no good at all on a particular subject it doesn't make for overall failure. . .

It was a nice anecdote!

Gerund

I wouldn't've bothered teaching that level of grammar had it not been a creative writing class . I feel fairly strongly that if you're learning to be a writer then you need your tools, just as a carpenter needs his.

I love the picture.

Why 'hmm' at creative writing class?

I just have a block on the names for them. I could look them up, I suppose.

Oh, I was rolling my eyes at the irony of someone studying writing and needing a swift lesson on semi-colons...damn the face, it always looks strangely aggressive!

Oh, I see.

throckenholt Isn't roman numerals just decimal? And to be really boring, I think it'd be simple to add another formatter flag to print out numbers in roman numerals. Most libraries have functions to easily print out numbers in hex, oct, bin and dec already. We need demands first though!

(A gerund is a form of a verb which functions as a noun, and therefore requires the possessive pronoun.

For instance, if I said "My grandmother disapproves of me talking to much", 'talking' is a gerundive form, and therefore instead of the pronoun 'me', it should be the possessive pronoun 'my', since 'talking' function as a noun.

So it would be "My grandmother disapproves of MY talking too much", in just the same was as if I had said "My grandmother disapproves of MY boyfriend."

Apologies if your gerund query was rhetorical )

so is a gerund using a verb as a noun ? I'll have to remember that.

And you may laugh heartily at the missing 'o' in 'too much'!!

Yes, that's it throcken.

However, it's not the kind of thing to get too het up about in general usage. Just one of the little things that will make an MA examiner purr and add 1% to your mark

throckenholt Isn't roman numerals just decimal? And to be really boring, I think it'd be simple to add another formatter flag to print out numbers in roman numerals. Most libraries have functions to easily print out numbers in hex, oct, bin and dec already. We need demands first though!

I meant how do you do the decimal point ? Yes it is base 10 - but seems to not have a decimal fraction form.

Oh, yes.

No, it wasn't rhetorical, I just don't know the names very well but I would know which is correct. If you can't do it in Latin you usually can't in English.