Our country’s plummeting aptitude with numbers not only permeates our school system right up to university level, but also is apparent in Government circles. Last week’s Budget could be seen as a consequence of a government with a history of being either unable or unwilling to do some basic arithmetic.

Maybe it’s time for all of our school maths textbooks to have their examples updated. Instead of problems involving euro and cent, we’ll have ones involving billions of euro. Problems like: “What’s the compound interest on €85bn over seven-and-a-half years at 5.83 per cent interest?” Or how about: “Brian buys a bank for €1bn and sells it for 6 cent. Calculate the percentage loss.”

Last February, the Engineers Ireland Report on mathematics education at second level identified a trend over the last 10 years towards learning things off by heart as being at the root of our deteriorating maths standards. “Engineers Ireland is concerned at the extent to which ‘rote learning’ is a teaching mechanism at second level for mathematical subjects rather than ‘learning by understanding’.”

As a maths teacher, I subscribe to the credo that if you don’t understand it, don’t bother learning it. Or at least find someone to try to explain it to you first before committing it to memory.

I’ve been fortunate in having had a succession of brilliant maths teachers, none more so than Dr Sara McMurry, whom I encountered during my physics degree in Trinity. Sara taught me most of the “difficult” maths-heavy courses such as quantum mechanics. She has the rare ability of being able to effortlessly carve through mathematical jungles, rendering them comprehensible to the diligent student.

Her latest textbook, Maths as a Language, has just been launched. Dr McMurry was prompted to write Maths as a Language after her increasingly frustrating experience of trying to teach surprisingly basic concepts to aspiring first-year physicists. Sara recognised a need for a book that explains simple, yet crucial, maths concepts that have been neglected, buried or mishandled by the secondary school system.

Read the full article on http://www.independent.ie