SCHOOL ARITHMETIC.

Auckland Star, Volume XLVIII, Issue 155, 30 June 1917, Page 4

SCHOOL ARITHMETIC.

METHODS OF TEACHING. CONDEMNED BY INSPECTOR. An indictment of the methods of teaching arithmetic in some of the schools was made by Mr. W. Burnside, M.A.. inspector of schools, at the conference of inspectors and teachers yesterday afternoon. Some teachers, he said, confined themselves to numbers below 20 and taught the subject wholly by concrete methods. Under these so-called modern methods they found children who had been for eighteen months struggling with the numbers 8, 10, or 12. He visited a school some time ago where the first class was learning the number S, and the teacher was dissatisfied, with the progress made. When he (the speaker) asked them if they could count to 10, 20, or 50, or add 5 and 5, and so on, they were literally climbing over the forms to answer. These pupils were being starved. He knew of a number of children who before going to school could count up to 100 and add little sums such as two and two or five and five, yet these children after a year or of schooling were still busy with the number 10, and this despite all the aids that human ingenuity could devise in the way of beads, buttons, sticks, and stones, pictures and coloured chalk. It seemed to him that the more aids and devices they used in teaching numbers the slower the progress. Concrete methods, he said, were employed in teaching savages and backward children, and were employed during the Stone Age. In modern civilisation the transition from concrete to abstract came at a very early stage in a child's school life, and the exclusive use of concrete methods merely tended to retard that transition. If no better results could be obtained from the numerous concrete devices now in use then by ill means let us return to the old-fash-ioned method of forty years ago when concrete and abstract went hand in hand —methods which were certainly founded on true psychological principles. Compared with Montessori methods the methods of forty years ago were certainly old-fashioned, and it was the duty of all, theorists and faddists included, to endeavour to make Montessori methods suitable to local conditions.. Continuing, he expressed the opinion that too much time was taken in setting out the work in Standards 3 and 4. He instanced the following sum: —'If 8 men reap 16 acres in 3 days, working 10 hours a day. bow many days will 3 men take to reap 64 acres, working 10 2-3 hours per day." "I worked one of these sums," he said, 'Tjv the unitary method. -I used several sticks of chalk, filled the blackboard, and the exposition lasted twenty minutes. By using a tabulated form and the fractional method the sum could be done in three minutes, and in your head in about fifty seconds. This is the first and last time," be concluded, amidst laughter. "I have used the unitary method for compound proportion sums."