Monday, 10 November 2014 00:00
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A ten-member committee appointed by Sri Lanka’s Ministry of Education to look into the mathematics education of the country has found that the uneven distribution of trained math teachers among the island’s schools is a cause of the poor performance of students in mathematics.
According to the committee, there is a shortage of 1,600 mathematics teachers in 1,400 schools while there is an excess of 2,000 mathematics teachers in some other schools. Most of the national schools and leading Provincial Council schools have an excess of mathematics teachers while rural schools are suffering from the shortage.
A survey conducted by the committee pointed out that 2,224 teachers who are not qualified to teach mathematics teach the subject in schools across the island. They mostly teach in classes from Grade 6 to 9, the committee noted. The committee says the distribution of mathematics teachers is not balanced and there is no systematic teacher transfer system.
Clearly mathematics, with other subjects such as English also failing to meet standards partially due to teacher shortages and unqualified teachers taking a stab at language lessons, is not the only casualty in a politicised system that has become so convoluted many have given up hope of fixing it.
Successive years have shown that Sri Lanka’s educators are failing at teaching math, resulting in a staggering 43% of students who sat the last Ordinary Level exams failing, and giving a glimpse at a much-larger problem.
The situation is so dire that even President Mahinda Rajapaksa has called for alternatives to equip these youth for the job market.
The low quality of math instruction in Sri Lankan schools, a decades-long battle over how math should be taught, and the general belief among educators that math is only important for some to learn, are partly to blame for this problem, experts say.
As with so much of Sri Lanka’s education crisis, the problem lies with teaching and the curriculum. The highly-skilled math students who could become teachers aren’t likely to join a profession in which performance-based pay is eschewed for degree- and seniority-based compensation; with prized skills, they earn more and gain greater job satisfaction in, say, the tech sector.
This leaves the nation’s classrooms to be staffed by aspiring teachers who are not as likely to have strong competency in math and even less likely to be well-trained to do so.
The fact that many teachers and principals think of mathematics as something that only some kids can learn – even though the rigours of reading instruction are just as difficult to master – also hampers efforts at math instruction. Montessori teachers, for example, ignore the need to show kids that numbers represent quantities. As a result, kids fall behind early and often.
Clearly, making Sri Lanka’s youth competent at math involves solving overarching problems that have hampered the country’s school education for decades. The Government has simply sought to overlook these issues by focusing on higher education to make Sri Lanka a ‘knowledge hub’ when in fact the transformation also has to happen at the root and mid-level.
Many experts have pointed out that developing skills at the university level is futile unless children are provided with a sound start at a school level. Mathematics is at the core of competent job skills and unless the Government can get its numbers in a row, the education sector will continue to lag behind.
