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Project Maths

doc_17

Hi all. I'm a Maths teacher and just had the first Project Maths inservice last week. I was just wondering what other teachers/mathematicians thought of it? I have some misgivings about it. First of is the removal of some of the more practical and student friendly topics, such as Vectors and Matrices (both being useful to engineers and scientists at 3rd) and some of the changes to Statistics in JCert. I am not in favour of dumbing down but I would get rid rid of some of the derivations of the 20 Formulae at LC Trig. Also it's the proof of the theorems that drive students away from JC HL which then means they do not go to LC HL. I would have made changes there. Any other teachers have any opinions on this. I have no problem with the formulae being in the tables as its about using them not learning them of by heart

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Chuchoter

Wow, I was just looking at the project maths thing. I did my junior cert at honors last year, and I think that was nearly easier than my exam. Its an absolute joke. I don't think the solution is make the course easier, its make the course shorter but cover things in more depth. Really go into why do things do what they do, why are numbers related to each other. Then you would have a really solid basis of understanding, not just rote memorization, for 3rd level. Thats the main difficulty I have with maths, even though I got an A, I can do the maths but I have no idea what I'm actually doing or why it works.

tautology

Like many others posting here, I'm not a Maths teacher. I'm going into my 4th year of a Physics course in UCC, so my opinions are going to be horribly skewed in favour of science and engineering applications.

Are they really getting rid of calculus entirely? Please tell me that's a joke!

In theory, calculus is retaught at third level, but it's taught in a completely different style to the Leaving Cert. I've learned new methods of tackling integrals, but the methods that remain solid in my mind are the ones I learned in school. I doubt I'd be as comfortable with calculus as I am if I hadn't been taught it for the Leaving Cert. I remember at the start of our course, the students who had studied Further Maths for the A-Levels had a distinct advantage over the Irish students, because they had a comfort with the new mathematics that we lacked.

If they do introduce this syllabus, it is absolutely essential that they provide an optional "Further Maths" subject. They've already simplified Leaving Cert Physics beyond belief. Many people who came into my course had an incredibly skewed view of Physics and were shocked to discover that at third level, you needed things like calculus and the ability to think if you wanted to do physics! If they introduce this syllabus, they're now also stripping students of the basic mathematical toolkit that acts like a comfort blanket in their first year.

It's a horrible idea that people could come out of school with an A1 in this Maths course, and then go on to do third level Mathematics or Applied Mathematics. They'd drop out like flies!

MathsManiac

tautology wrote: »

Are they really getting rid of calculus entirely? Please tell me that's a joke!

Who told you they were getting rid of calculus?

LeixlipRed

They're not getting rid of it at all. It's included in the syllabus but Calculus is not a named stream. Maybe that's where the confusion lies.

Michael Collins

MathsManiac wrote: »

Who told you they were getting rid of calculus?

Perhaps tautology is going on the sample papers released which are just based on the "strands" that have been developed so far - namely Strands 1 and 2, which don't include calculus. I'm guessing that will come in remaing 3 strands: Strand 3 - Numbers, Strand 4 - Algebra and Strand 5 - Functions, with calculus presumably coming in the later strand.

I'd say the Junior Cert is arguably more important. Currently only about 40% of students sit the higher level Junior Cert exam*. So it's fairly safe to say that's 60% who are not going be doing higher level leaving cert maths before you even start changing the LC syllabus.

There seems to be a section on improving the transisition from Primary Level to Junior Cert cycle as part of Project Maths' changing of the JC syllabus but so far all the emphasis seems to be on the Leaving Cert cycle.

*Compare this to 63% taking Higher English for example. Even Irish usually has a better higher level uptake than maths (although not by much, usually only a few percent at most)

MathsManiac

Michael Collins wrote: »

There seems to be a section on improving the transisition from Primary Level to Junior Cert cycle as part of Project Maths' changing of the JC syllabus but so far all the emphasis seems to be on the Leaving Cert cycle.

As far as I know, the Junior Certs and Leaving Certs started at the same time in September 2008. So the LCs are doing their exams this June, whereas the JCs have another year to go. That's probably why it's getting the attention now, especially since their sample paper came out. Presumably the JCs will get a sample paper next term some time.

Michael Collins wrote: »

*Compare this to 63% taking Higher English for example. Even Irish usually has a better higher level uptake than maths (although not by much, usually only a few percent at most)

Maths is well below Irish. According to the stats on the SEC website, last year Irish had 32% at higher level (14796 out of 45645) while maths was at 16.2% (8420 out of 51905). I think the next lowest after Irish is in the forties. It seems to me that higher level maths has always been pitched at the elite of the subject, whereas the higher level of everything else is pitched at the top half or so of the students. I'm not sure why this is, or whether it ought to be this way. 'Tis curious, is it not?

Michael Collins

MathsManiac wrote: »

As far as I know, the Junior Certs and Leaving Certs started at the same time in September 2008. So the LCs are doing their exams this June, whereas the JCs have another year to go. That's probably why it's getting the attention now, especially since their sample paper came out. Presumably the JCs will get a sample paper next term some time.

Yeah, hopefully. I suppose you can't change the JC syllabus without changing the LC syllabus too.

Maths is well below Irish. According to the stats on the SEC website, last year Irish had 32% at higher level (14796 out of 45645) while maths was at 16.2% (8420 out of 51905). I think the next lowest after Irish is in the forties. It seems to me that higher level maths has always been pitched at the elite of the subject, whereas the higher level of everything else is pitched at the top half or so of the students. I'm not sure why this is, or whether it ought to be this way. 'Tis curious, is it not?

That's for the Leaving Cert, the figures I gave above were for the Junior Cert. It definately is curious. Was this always the case? I was under the impression the drop off of LC Higher Level maths numbers has been a developing trend in the last few decades or so?

MathsManiac

Michael Collins wrote: »

That's for the Leaving Cert, the figures I gave above were for the Junior Cert. It definately is curious. Was this always the case? I was under the impression the drop off of LC Higher Level maths numbers has been a developing trend in the last few decades or so?

Sorry - I misunderstood.

Anyway, I think the last decade or so has seen the best ever levels of uptake at higher level maths, not that you'd believe it from the media coverage. (This is the Leaving Cert I'm talking about, by the way.)

On the last year of the previous syllabus (1993), it was 11.2%, according to the 2005 Chief Examiner's report for maths. So, even at 16.2% last year, it's still about 45% higher than it was 16 years previously! I think 18.9% in 2005 was the peak.

In dem good old days of the early 90's, I used to be a teacher, and my recollection is that that rate of just over 10% had been pretty much the tradition for a long time. I don't know where you'd get data to confirm or refute that vague recollection.

[Deleted User]

Having looked at the Project Maths exam paper from Monday, the standard looks considerably lower than for the normal exam. (Not that the normal exam looked difficult at all this year).

Anybody else agree?

LeixlipRed

Haven't seen them. You got links?

rebel girl 15

LeixlipRed wrote: »

Haven't seen them. You got links?

Its only paper 2 that is different, so I have the three projects maths ones first and the old syllabus scond

PM Higher level Higher level

PM Ordinary Level Ordinary level

PM Foundation Level Foundation level

smiles302

I'm not a maths teacher, and while I do think statistics on the project maths paper look quite easy, is any one taking it in context?

The kids taking the project maths paper for leaving cert didn't take it for the junior cert? I really don't understand why they would start it that way... Surely it would have made sense to change the junior cert and then wait until those junior cert were in leaving cert to change the leaving cert...

It would be unfair to expect the project maths leaving cert to tackle "leaving cert standard" probability and stats having never seen it before. The best you could hope for is to teach them the junior cert level and make a couple of the other questions trickier to balance out the paper.

I don't understand why they changed the curriculum this way. The leaving cert was already a three year course forced into two years, which in reality turns into a year and a half as most teachers need to give time to revise right before and after the mocks, even just to calm people down.
Couldn't they have introduced social maths? Put the statistics into Geography?

Isn't the whole point of CSPE to teach students to be informed citizens? Would that not be the perfect place to try out statistics?

Project maths might help some people understand and like maths better than they do now, but it will have lost everything that makes students love maths and consider going into maths/physics/engineering at the moment.

Just my two cents.

[Deleted User]

smiles302 wrote: »

I don't understand why they changed the curriculum this way. The leaving cert was already a three year course forced into two years,.

Are you joking? Did it originally start off as 3 years? Because in 2001, of the subjects I did, I would have happily called it a one year course, with physics maybe needing 2 years. Of course then they cut out half the physics syllabus.

Interesting to see people discussing the statistics, I was wondering what the takeup on applied maths was. 1,333 in 2009, compared to 51000 doing general maths :eek:
I think maths should be more understandable, but the standard just cannot be dropped. I'm also not sure bonus points is the way forward, you can't just give bonus points based on different talents.
In any case, an excellent article on the subject of maths teaching:
http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

smiles302

bluewolf wrote: »

Are you joking? Did it originally start off as 3 years? Because in 2001, of the subjects I did, I would have happily called it a one year course, with physics maybe needing 2 years. Of course then they cut out half the physics syllabus.

It was designed as a three year course. I don't know if it was ever taught over three years.

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

schtroumpf94

smiles302 wrote: »

It was designed as a three year course. I don't know if it was ever taught over three years.

I'm going into TY now, and we're starting Leaving Cert Maths this year. We'll be doing the Honours course over three years...as is always the case in my school.

sipstrassi

smiles302 wrote: »

Put the statistics into Geography?

Isn't the whole point of CSPE to teach students to be informed citizens? Would that not be the perfect place to try out statistics?

Feel a bit disgruntled by the statistics bashing as I'm studying towards a degree in maths/stats (and am biased ) but geography??? Really? Statistics is much more than just census and population. Bayesian statistics are used by companies like Microsoft to make their software more 'intelligent'. Medical statistics are vitally important for drug companies. And so much more. And they all involve calculations, formulae, graphing etc. etc.

(Must go back and look at geography! Didn't do it in second level. Did get 100% in LC maths though!)

Richard Cranium

I'm really not convinced by the anti- Project Maths arguments at all. People are losing the rag everywhere because vectors and integration and stuff like that (I'm not sure of the exact details and I'm too lazy to check) are being taken off the course, but I really don't think this will do any damage.

The amount of vectors in Leaving Cert HL isn't huge, and the questions in the exams themselves are so formulaic and repetitive that you could answer it reasonably well without really understanding anything about vectors at all (I may or may not have done this myself:rolleyes:). Mechanics at third level is (so I'm told) very similar to Leaving Cert Applied Maths. I didn't do Applied Maths, but in my experience the people who did were the ones who knew how to approach vectors when we first faced them in college. This will be no great loss, as far as I can see.

Same goes for matrices (AFAIK they are being taken off too). If anything, LC matrices were a hindrance to me- there wasn't a huge amount of time in 5th/6th year to explain the concept properly, and it was only when I did Linear Algebra in 1st year that I properly figured out what they were, what they could do, and how to use them. We covered everything taught at LC level in about a week or two anyway.

As for integration, I admit that I'm glad to have done it before facing it in college, but there were people in my calculus class who had never seen it before and they seem to have fared ok in the exams. In any case, if you go on to do a maths-intensive degree at third level, it is generally taught from first prinicples anyway, so it'll just be another thing to learn. That's what you do in college.

Personally, I think the extra statistical element is a good thing too. As with other parts of the current curriculum, the probability and statistics section can be rote learned without being understood to any significant degree. I certainly would like to have been taught the new stats section instead of the old one.

I don't think the Project Maths paper is any easier than the normal one. I had a look at it and I found some of the parts to be quite challenging actually. It's different all right, but I wouldn't say that it's much easier than the formulaic and predictable standard paper (which itself has a very easy Part A to every question, and generally a manageable Part

. Being perfectly honest, in general the people I see condemning Project Maths are themselves strong mathematicians, many of whom will find any maths exam easy. I get the impression that a lot of people are annoyed that their subject is being sullied by having some of the pure maths sections removed more than anything else.

I got a B2 in HL maths in 2009, and I did very well in 1st year Maths Science in UCC this year. I don't think that doing Project Maths would have made third level maths much more difficult for me. I'm sure I'm very much in the minority in my opinions here, but I feel like I need to voice the opinion of some who doesn't feel particularly confident in their mathematical abilities (despite still studying the subject). I don't think grades are being artificially raised at all.

Aoi

When I first heard about bonus points for maths I was in support of the idea but with the change in syllabus to make the maths course more "user friendly" (not exactly easier), I'm not so sure.

Project maths was supposed to increase the uptake of higher level maths, I'm open to correction, as is the bonus points. Both of them seem to give the impression that maths is hard and rather than encourage students to take it up, I think it will do the opposite if anything.

I admit, I am rather biased as I really enjoyed the (occasional) challenge that came with honours maths. I did the leaving cert this year & was a little disappointed that the paper was quite easy, I felt a bit cheated, after the work I put in. That said, I was extremely happy with my result.

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

[Deleted User]

The main thing I don't like about project maths is that knowledge of vectors and calculus were both assumed, and both used everywhere, in my first year of undergrad maths.

They shouldn't be removed. Extra stats might be fine for some, but I think in a subject called mathematics, you would expect to be taught the main mathematical tools for understanding our world, not just the ones that are easiest to 'get'.

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

Eliot Rosewater

I actually think calculus is very important, and can be a useful tool in understanding the world. I was watching a TED video on society collapse by Jared Diamond yesterday, for instance, and he made reference to the rate of change of a thing (he specifically said "first and second derivative"). Mr Diamond wasn't using actual mathematics; he was just using the concept.

Even for those who won't go on to use it directly, I think mathematics is important because it develops a logical and methodical way of thinking that is highly beneficial.

MathsManiac

Sigh.

Let's get one thing clear at least. Calculus is NOT being removed from the syllabus, as anyone who bothers to actually read the syllabus will see.

There is still differential calculus on the ordinary level syllabus, and there is still both differential and integral calculus on the higher level.

The syllabus is here:
http://www.ncca.ie/en/Curriculum_and_Assessment/Post-Primary_Education/Review_of_Mathematics/Project_Maths/LC_str1-5_sep10_ex12.pdf

It seems to me that what's changing is that the emphasis is moving from being able to aimlessly differentiate or integrate gazillions of weird and wonderful functions to actually apply the skills a bit more often in a meaningful way.

And the removal of vectors could hardly be described as taking one of the hard bits off. My students never had any great trouble with it. The problem with it as it stands in the old course is that it doesn't get sufficiently well developed to do anything really useful with it, as it wasn't well integrated with the other topics. To solve this problem would have involved expanding the course, so I can understand why they decided to drop it. If you can't do it right, then don't do it at all, and spend your time developing something else properly. Second level students only ever get to see vectors doing something useful in applied maths, and there's no reason why they can't continue to live a long and happy life on that syllabus.

FoxT

MathsManiac - I agree with you about vectors, and in fact I would use the same argument to justify removal of matrices from the Leaving Cert course as well - neither are sufficiently well developed to the point where the student can do anything meaningful.

Looking at the paper 2 sample, I like the focus on being able to read, interpret, and understand statistical distributions - and I would welcome this. Overall though, many of the questions look very, very basic.

I am an engineer myself, not a math expert but v. interested in math etc. and doing hons LC maths with my kids at home. I find it striking that my kids have
- no 'feel' for the subject. When they work through a problem & get an answer - no idea if it right, wrong, or even in the ballpark.
- no liking for the subject. (They find subjects like business & geography interesting for example, but not math)

I believe that the rot starts at primary school level. There is insufficient value/emphasis placed on math at that stage and I think it is unrealistic to get teens to engage with the subject if they have not had a rewarding & pleasurable experience of it as children.

- FoxT

[Deleted User]

I'm not sure what the aims of the curriculum are. My opinion would be that if the goal is simply to boost uptake of mathematics, particularly at higher level, and possibly increase the numeracy of the general population, Project Maths may succeed, but if the goal of reforming the course is to encourage more students to study maths at third level, then I feel a better approach would have been to develop the concepts further, particularly vectors.

In Mathematics in Trinity, statistics is only compulsory for one semester, so I don't feel increasing the amount of it in the Leaving Certificate serves this need.

MathsManiac

FoxT wrote: »

I believe that the rot starts at primary school level. There is insufficient value/emphasis placed on math at that stage and I think it is unrealistic to get teens to engage with the subject if they have not had a rewarding & pleasurable experience of it as children.

- FoxT

Is it any wonder, when so many primary school teachers have significant difficulties themselves with mathematics?

I think it's completely mad that you only need an ordinary level D3 to get into primary teaching.

The typical entrant to primary teaching these days is a reasonably intelligent person, scoring CAO points in the high 400s at least. Yet only a minority of these have done higher maths.

Higher level maths (C3 at least, and that's the rock bottom in my view) should be an entry requirement to primary teaching. There might then be some hope for the future.

rainbow kirby

MathsManiac wrote: »

Is it any wonder, when so many primary school teachers have significant difficulties themselves with mathematics?

I think it's completely mad that you only need an ordinary level D3 to get into primary teaching.

The typical entrant to primary teaching these days is a reasonably intelligent person, scoring CAO points in the high 400s at least. Yet only a minority of these have done higher maths.

Higher level maths (C3 at least, and that's the rock bottom in my view) should be an entry requirement to primary teaching. There might then be some hope for the future.

I very much agree with this. There are far too many primary teachers who are scared of the subject, and will pass that fear on to their students at a very early age.

doc_17

One month into this new Project Maths with the first years and it sucks a**!!!!

caffrey

I agree with most about this being WAAAYY too easy. And for those who think that its not then I ask...what does it take for a person to get an A1 in French, say,

i) Excellent Oral and listening skills
ii) Excellent comprehension
iii) Excellent grammar

will this person who gets an A1 in french be well set up for french at 3rd level?
yes!!

Will a person who gets an A1 in project maths?
Not necessarily.

The new emphasis is on "everyday" maths. That is not what HL LC maths is supposed to be, that is what OL should be. Which is the way all courses should be structured, french OL should be enough for you to get by on in france on holiday. Same with german, italian etc. The likes of physics, chemistry, biology, geography, metal work etc etc should and do have a similar setup where students do HL to understand the more advanced concepts.

The information needed for a student to advance to the next level of education in a chosen subject does not change from year to year just because students are not doing as well. What goes along with this is the fact that the students are not more stupid year on year. Irish people are not genetically getting more stupid. Something is happening in their education which means that they aren't as good as previous students. It has steadily been happening over the last 20 years. So, instead of tackling the real problem, it is ignored!!