Posted on 06/10/2012 4:49:45 PM PDT by bruinbirdman
Children will be introduced to times tables, mental arithmetic and fractions in the first two years of school as part of a back-to-basics overhaul of the National Curriculum.
Ministers will this week announce key tasks pupils are expected to master at each age under wide-ranging plans to counter more than a decade of dumbing down in schools.
A draft mathematics curriculum suggests that five and six year-olds will be expected to count up to 100, recognise basic fractions and memorise the results of simple sums by the end of the first year of compulsory education.
In the second year, they will be required to know the two, five and 10 times tables, add and subtract two-digit numbers in their head and begin to use graphs.
The proposals are intended to ensure that children are given a proper grounding in the basics at a young age to prepare them for the demands of secondary education and beyond.
It represents a dramatic toughening up of standards demanded in English state schools in a move designed to benchmark lessons against those found in the world’s most advanced education systems, such as Singapore, Hong Kong and parts of the United States.
At age of nine, pupils should know all their times tables up to 12x12 and confidently work with numbers up to 10 million by the end of primary school, the Government said.
Currently, children only need to know up to 10x10 and familiarise themselves with numbers below 1,000 by the age of 11.
The disclosure is made as part of a sweeping overhaul of core subjects in primary schools, with the new curriculum expected to be introduced by 2014.
Under the proposals:
- Science lessons will place a greater emphasis on early physics and ensure children learn about the solar
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Improved math(s) instruction would merely be a bandaid glued over a mushy mess of gangrene.
It's impossible to make any school religiously neutral, since all schools have a NON-neutral religious worldview. At the moment the government sponsored religion in the government socialist-entitlement school is godless secularism.
It's impossible for government schools to respect the First Amendment Rights of the students, parents, and taxpayers, since by definition they establish a government sponsored religious worldview. ( see statement above). And...Since all schools must control speech, press, assembly, expression of religion, and all establish a religious worldview, when government schools do this they step all over the First Amendment Rights of the taxpayer ( who is forced to pay for it), the child, and the parent.
Government schools are not about to abandon godless secularism any time soon and establish a different religion, therefore, **all** children who attend government schools **will** learn to think and reason godlessly. They must just to cooperate in the godless classroom. How could it be otherwise?
Children who attend socialist-entitlement government schools risk learning that the voting mob has great power to give them tuition-free schooling. Hey! Why not use that voting mob to get **lots** of socialist goodies.
We didn’t have kindergarten but by the time I entered first grade my dad made sure I could say my times tables up to 12 x 12, correctly spell almost every four letter word invented and do two digit addition and subtraction in my head. Of course that was in the “olden days”. Perhaps someday we will have teachers all across the U.S. who can actually teach basic skills and parents who will take the time to begin the teaching process at home.
Too good!
Let’s see them return to guineas and florins! :-)
Any chance of this spreading across the pond?
One can hope.
English please, I don’t speak math.
Math is a language don’t you know?
I’m stunned.
This is a great math problem.
Let’s say an evil ideaology leaves Mecca around 700AD and travels west. When will it intersect with civilization?
cos(This) ?
I always say I taught myself to read by the time I was 5, in reality it was probably my mother who taught me,although I have no recollection of her doing so. I remember asking her how to pronounce certain words and asking many other questions also, probably it was a combination of her and me. I had a library card before I started first grade and used to have arguments with the librarian as to the suitability of the books I was checking out. Mostly science fiction, back in the early 20th century there were science fiction writers who wrote about cars, as if they were some magical flying carpet. The little library I frequented had lots of books from that time period. I found it fascinating that the authors imagined speeds in excess of 50MPH would be on the horizon soon!:)Ahhh, the good old days.
And as The people have spoken caught on, that mathematical expression is a pune, or play on words, of "cosign this"
“We say, The UN is a pile of crap.
They say, The UN are heaven incarnate.”
Speaking as an Englishman, I don’t know anyone here who would describe an organisation like the UN in the plural.
“Just kind of jars the ears when you hear it in conversation and when reading the newspapers”
Not as badly as ‘Just kind of’ jars my ears sir! :)
And what about the kids who got screwed by the previous experimenation? Who do they get to kill (or at least sue)?
Add and subtract two-digit numbers in their head? I swear that’s beyond half today’s American high school graduates.
At the age of 10, kids should start to learn algebra. Calculus by the age of 14.
My apologies that my colloquialism jars your ears.
But as someone who was visiting your fair Isle - I loved the Lake District by the way - you do treat your collective nouns differently than we do do you not? It didn’t upset me; just intrigued me.
I don’t know about the UN. I was making a joke. But I know I’ve seen the word ‘team’ followed by a verb in its plural form. Feel free to elaborate, and I was not trying to offend - just make a grammatical comparison.
The singular or plural verb for a collective noun in British English depends on the context — if you mean the team as a whole or the UN as a whole you would say the team is practicing or the UN is heaven incarnate. If you mean the team as referring to individuals, then the plural is used: the team are practising amongst themselves.
weren't you a little too young for that? :-P
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.