When Maths Becomes A “Subject Straight From The Gates Of Hell”

We are here again; massive failure by our students in the 2018 WASSCE Math results. I guess it didn’t come as a surprise to many because students’ poor performance in Mathematics in both the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) and the West Africa Secondary School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) is as though how true the needle is to the pole. It is an annual ritual, but of course, this year's failure has seen 15.4% increment from that in 2017, and probably that is why it is getting everyone talking much.

The dream of 193,882 students getting into the various tertiary institutions in the country is automatically shattered, and for the ramification for our country, it is well known to us all. I am, therefore, not here to lecture you on that. Every year we ask the same question, “What is wrong?”, and this year is no exception. The question is coming in, and the regulators are the focus of the media – they need to tell us what went wrong. But for now, they said they would have to investigate first what the cause is. I find that ridiculous anyway. This is an old age problem, and we don't need any investigations to unveil the reason. If the Ministry of Education (MoE) is now going to investigate before identifying the cause, then you wonder what intervention they put in place to mitigate the mass failure of students when this has been a trend.

That’s by the way, my focus is not about MoE, but the mess we see our students in every year once the BECE or WASSCE results are out – the mass failure in Mathematics. Mathematics as a subject is a problem for many such that, someone thought probably the word “problematic" itself is an amalgamation of the words problem and mathematics. Just before writing this article, I read a tweet by someone saying Math actually “is a subject straight from the gates of hell." Do a survey by asking our students if they agree with this tweet or not and you are going to get a huge number responding in the affirmative. That tells what the cause of the failure is in the BECE and WASSCE – students’ perception about the subject. It is the number one hated subject by many despite its relevance in our daily lives. People have spent countless years re-writing Mathematics paper, but their efforts were a dead loss. So just like others, I am also asking; “What is wrong?”

There are many views, suggesting answers to the question and the majority of them seem to be shifting the blame on the students. Emphatically, people suggest it was the laziness of the students that resulted in their failure. However, if you are someone that have been analyzing the data, more especially comparing them with the other nations that Ghana takes the WASSCE alongside with, you will agree with me that the problem isn’t one we can only put the blame on the students and then go to sleep. I find it difficult to accept that a lazy student will pass all subjects with good grades and fail only Mathematics. If you see the results of a lazy student too, you will know that that student had been indeed sluggish. But what we see over the years is that our students pass other subjects well and fail in Mathematics. That can’t be a mark of lazy students.

It is apparent that you can’t give yourself wholly to something that you don’t like or find interesting. Our students haven’t shied the truth away from us – they always tell us they don’t like Mathematics. Just like somebody said, they believe “Math is a subject from the gates of hell." As this is the perception of many students, we then have on the table the primary cause of the problem – students’ lack of interest in the subject. What we need to be asking ourselves is why our students don’t have the interest in the subject.

If you can recall how you were taught Mathematics way back in the primary school, you will side with me that Mathematics hasn’t been simplified in our classrooms. Every opportunity most teachers have to stand before their students to teach Math, they make things complex for their students. I am a teacher, and I have noticed that the majority of our teachers, more especially in the basic schools, are good with the Math content, but very deficient when it comes to delivery or pedagogy. Such teachers end up teaching themselves in the classroom because they have no idea how to help their students understand the concept they are trying to convey. The situation has been like that over the years. But Math topics are interwoven – one concept leads to or explains another and, therefore, once a concept is not grasped in a particular topic, it tells how other topics that built on that topic would never be understood.

Math will not be seen as a “subject from the gates of hell” if teachers ensure their handling of the subject is the one that causes the children to ask when next they will have a Math lesson. Math is not taught in isolation. Teachers must begin to explore how to get their students’ interest in the subject aroused. When the best teaching and learning material is combined with the right teaching method and the concepts are well demystified by making them part of the students’ daily lives, students will begin to see Math probably as a ‘subject from the gates of heaven.' This is important for us to change the current narrative.

That aside, while we have one group having content mastery, but lacks the delivery skills, there is another group with no content proficiency in the first place. There is no way such teachers can help students connect to the subject when they (the teachers) themselves aren't related to it. There are a good number of teachers when it comes to Mathematics they will confide in you that they have no idea how to go about a particular topic. It is for this reason that the School-based Instruction (SBI) was introduced for teachers to do peer teaching, but some of them will not seek for help even from a colleague let alone bringing it up for discussion at SBI meetings. They consider asking for help as a way of exposing their weakness to their colleagues. They, therefore, either ignore the topic or go and stand before the students and teach the wrong thing. Once that is done, the child picks the wrong thing forever.

What do we have to do? Our colleges of education (CoE) must review their training of teachers. I have ever published an article on how teachers are being undertrained in our CoE. I will, therefore, make no further attempt to elaborate on this. As the National Council for Tertiary Education (NCTE) told us, I hope the new reform going on in the CoE will address the problem from the point of training. Besides, we may have to assign teachers who have both the content and pedagogy prowess to handle only Math in our schools. A primary school can have three designated Math teachers with refined mastery in both content and delivery teaching the subject.

Notwithstanding, MoE and Ghana Education Service (GES) must begin to invest in re-training their employees (teachers) occasionally. Suffice to say, the education sector is the only one you don’t see the employer having in-service training for its workers. If teachers are to teach to capture their students’ interest, partly, they will need the teaching and learning materials (TLMs) and MoE and GES must invest in Math TLMs as well. Education is evolving with new approaches to teaching emerging. Helping equip teachers with some of these contemporary skills could to some extent save us the embarrassing failure we see in the BECE and the WASSCE.

The Writer:
Divine K. Kpe
Educator, Education Advocate and Writer
[email protected]
Twitter: @Divsone