me and one of my gorgeous work buddies went to 2 maths professional development day this week lead by charles lovitt. the current trend in the teaching of mathematics to get kids understanding what numbers are, problem solving, logical reasoning and using their common sense. sounds good hey? but it wasn't always the way 'good' maths teachers taught. there used to be a far bigger focus on simply getting the right answer, even if the kid had no idea why it was right. there's also a far bigger focus these days on helping kids enjoy maths and feel successful. reasearch shows there's a huge correlation between how kids feel about maths and their success rate. no teachers wants to set a kid up to fail.

most maths teachers these days would say they embrace and teach according to the new philosophy. but it's interesting how much old school philosophy is held onto and percieved as foundational, essential and 'obvious'.

for instance everyone knows that the area of a circle (pi r2) is taught in year 8. if it wasn't taught in year 8 the teacher would be considered irresponsible, ignorant and maybe even lazy. among the teaching world it is 'common sense' that pi r2 is taught in y8.

'fair enough' i thought and then charles lovitt asked us why? who decided it should be taught in year 8 and what were their reasons.

interestingly enough the maths curriculum that our current curriculum is based on was written in 1913. the purpose of the curriculum was to 'weed' out incompetence so that only around 15% of kids would succeed and make it through the curriculum and be able to get into the university of new south wales. the curriculum had failure purposefully built into it to ensure mathematics remained an elitest subject. pi r2 was originally taught to 16 year olds but too many of them could understand it at that age so it was pushed down to 13 so that more would fail and drop out.

so we have good responible teachers who really want their kids to succeed, teaching stuff which is beyond their students because of 'common sense.'

what else am I taking for granted today as 'common sense'?