Minnie’s Musings

This may be another post where I change my mind half way through…

Former candidate for the second to top job, Bridget Phillipson can now focus her attention back on the job in hand and model the hard work and concentration she would like to see from students throughout the land by actually running the Department of Education.

A focused Secretary of State for Education who stays in the job for more than five minutes is a novel concept these days. One could even say that numerous incumbents have been modelling the current trend for flight over fight in teaching whereby recruitment and retention has become a national crisis.

But she is here to stay and the two things that I have so far picked up on from the curriculum review – which has already plummeted from the news agenda as another manhunt is launched for another couple of blokes mistakenly released because another prison guard didn’t pay attention in primary Maths – are quite good ideas.

Item one is teaching students about mortgages. This is a thoroughly good idea. Primarily because it involves compound interest. Around 30 years ago, Best Beloved calculated 23 years of compound interest by hand. It took him most of a Tuesday afternoon*. I quote this at my students as an example of why knowing the compound interest formula is a useful thing. If I have not had coffee of a morning I may leave this useful anecdote aside and let them beetle away without said formula for 20 minutes or so…

Item two of which I approve is teaching students critical awareness in relation to the Internet and social media. About time. Because we desperately need our young people to become sceptical consumers of online hogwash, rather than gullible fools who swallow tripe wholesale. In the Maths classroom we deal with this in a half hour or so, looking for bias in data collection strategies.

If I were in charge I would make the separate Statistics GCSE the third compulsory paper in Maths and spend more time on interpretation and misrepresentation of data. Particularly for those doing Foundation where there isn’t enough content to warrant three 1.5 hour papers and but there is a need for more on statistics (and compound interest, loans, taxation, personal finance… but I digress).

And if I need to make my point any more clearly (which I shouldn’t need to but will anyway), I am forever reminded of the early days of the Pandemic – before frightened teenagers were cut loose and sent home. Over and over and over again, I and other colleagues urged students to get their news from trusted outlets. Because doom mongers and conspiracy theorists are the quickest off the mark in a crisis.

* In defence of BB, he likes a year on year calculation as it allows him to see the minutiae of our debt slowly shrinking as time creeps onward at its own petty pace, like a snail.