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Report says initial teacher programs are ‘failing’ prospective maths teachers, but experts question paper
A group of teacher education experts have questioned a Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) paper that argues that beginning teachers are not being trained in evidence-based teaching practices for mathematics.
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To be clear I am with Dr. Fahey. Mathematics, like a language, is a man-made system for us to make sense of the world around us in a quantification sense. We always learn a new language by mimicking what a native speaker speaks. We learn mathematics in the first place by following how the existing theory and method have established. (The wheel has been invented 5000 years ago and there is no need to ask a secondary student to invent a wheel again until he/she someday may become a scientist then perhaps for inventing a new type of wheel!) Students would not be able to benefit from an inquiry-based approach until they have built up themselves to a certain point. It would be a PhD student’s primary learning mode with an inquiry-based approach to learn mathematics NOT for a secondary school student. Also in my biased view that, often when those educators emphasize the student led/inquiry-based approach for learning/teaching mathematics at secondary school, implicitly it is actually an excuse for them to hide their incapability/fear of understanding the real beauty/intricacy of mathematics.
John Xie (a former secondary school math teacher, a current accredited statistician admitted by Statistical Society of Australia)
If we expect our secondary school students receiving a high quality math education, we should have the high quality math teachers available in the first place. By having a close look of the question of proof of 0.43 (last decimal digit recurring) equals 13/30 at the top of this article, it is found that the working details of the proof have not been presented in a precisely mathematically correct way (e.g., x = 0.433333 is not the same as x = 0.43 (last decimal digit recurring); hence, it is at least a bad practice in a math proof to write things like x = 0.433333 => 10x = 4.333333). What an ironic picture accompanied an article talking about the concerns of the quality of the prospective math teachers!