Copyright thespinoff
Specialists across the country say the rewritten primary curriculum sets wildly unrealistic goals, leaving both teachers and learners overwhelmed, writes Catherine McGregor in today’s extract from The Bulletin. To receive The Bulletin in full each weekday, sign up here. ‘More political than educational’ The government’s latest overhaul of the primary maths curriculum has triggered an unusually united backlash from academics and teachers. In an open letter published this week, 44 maths experts warned the newly rewritten curriculum seemed “more political than educational”, “unfair to teachers” and “potentially damaging to learners”, Newsroom’s Laura Walters reports. They said it contained multiple errors and an “unrealistic number of learning objectives”, including 86 for Year 1 students alone – almost three times the previous number and far beyond comparable international curricula. The letter followed an earlier rewrite of the maths curriculum already introduced this year, making this the third iteration in as many years. Support for the experts’ concerns has poured in from within classrooms. Principals Federation president Leanne Otene told RNZ’s John Gerritsen her members were “past being disappointed, past being even surprised”, adding: “The words that are coming through in my emails are ‘disgusted’, ‘just absolutely ridiculous’. It’s now to the point where it’s like ‘you’re ruining our education’. We’ve lost total trust.” A fuller, more difficult syllabus While the education ministry has described the new maths document as merely an “update”, some say it is effectively a new curriculum. Maths education lecturers David Pomeroy and Lisa Darragh wrote in The Conversation that the new, new curriculum is “more difficult and more full. There is now a longer list of maths procedures and vocabulary to be memorised at each year of school.” Under the update, children are expected to learn content years earlier than before – for example, Year 6 pupils calculating with rational numbers previously taught in Year 8. Teachers told Newsroom that while the 2003 curriculum had lacked ambition, that had been remedied through the recent versions; this latest one, they said, went too far in the opposite direction. On Morning Report, education minister Erica Stanford dismissed the maths experts’ open letter as “a bit silly”, saying the changes drew on teacher feedback and “a little bit of international benchmarking”. She claimed to have heard from many academics and principals who “love” the new curriculum. The view from the classroom For teachers, the rewrite feels like deja vu. In The Post, maths teacher and researcher Tom Pearce described “the mood of staff rooms” as the darkest he’s seen in his 15-year career. Pearce accused the government of “pulling the rug out from under the profession” with its repeated curriculum rewrites, noting that maths teachers had already retrained for the curriculum introduced earlier this year. Now, “teachers will have to waste precious time and energy grappling with yet another rewrite.” Pearce argued the curriculum had abandoned the principles that underpin mathematical thinking. “Gone is any focus on the conceptual understandings or big ideas that students should develop. The application of skills and knowledge is nowhere to be found. Problem solving is out, as is the ability to communicate, reason, justify or explain mathematically,” he wrote. “If the initial rewrite wound back the clock to the 1993 curriculum, these changes take it back to 1893.” Wider discontent across subjects The maths controversy coincided with the release on Wednesday of new draft curriculums for science, social sciences, languages, technology, the arts and physical education. Educators in these fields told RNZ the documents were narrow, old-fashioned and euro-centric. On Tuesday, several subject associations went so far as to publish last-ditch open letters calling for the release to be paused. Despite the widespread criticism, Stanford remained defiant, insisting detractors were reacting prematurely. “When [arts educators] see the curriculum, I’m sure they’re going to be very embarrassed because there is so much te ao Māori and culture and language throughout every single curriculum area, so much more than there was before,” she told Morning Report. “I think these people just need to sit down, have a look at the new curriculum, unpack it, and then make comment.”
