SAT’s are dead - long live the teacher! Who came up with the idea in the first place? To have nation-wide exams for all children in a country? Every three years? Of course I know who came up with them, it is only a rhetorical question...

 

Although some people will be very upset (I heard few of them in the staff-room already), majority will be relieved. Those that are upset are mainly so because they just don’t know what to do otherwise! What is there to do then pass the test? How can you measure success unless it is through the test? Sorry, another set of rhetorical questions...

 

Mathematics has never been so boring since the National Curriculum and testing were introduced in England. I know, I have been reading about the history of mathematics education in England from 17th century to our days (gosh I am old), and everything I read was kind of interesting in some way; apart from when you get to the National Curriculum and the SATs.

 

To become a mathematics teachers you really need to love maths. You also need to love working in a secondary school - it’s one of the subjects that everyone loves to hate, so if you hated it too there would be no balance! Very few maths teachers are not good. Or they don’t want to be good. It’s just that some that appear not to be good are not passionate. But would you be passionate about the work in which you have almost no say? So scraping tests will stop those teachers teaching to the test. Maybe they discover there is some passion left in them after all.

 

And of course we want to measure achievement in some way. It would be a strange kind of world in which everyone is treated equally and given opportunities to listen to any lesson they like, learn about things they are interested in, and then go and  become - I don’t know - passionate about something. How, when, and by whom do you measure achievement then?

 

No, no, let’s measure things properly. Let’s have ticking the boxes, lists of things to learn (without any connections by the way), heads of departments obsessed by percentages of pass marks. Let’s bread generations obsessed by materialism, who want to have speedy cars and big houses, for whom celebrity is everything, who are going to need maths devoid of meaning - maths which is used only to make and spend the money... And this is for those who succeed. The others don’t even need to know what they need maths for. They just need to pass the test.

 

Ok I agree, I sound like a bitter old woman. Well I am! Born all the way back in the 17th century, when mathematics was part of magical discovery of the world and of us.