The Minister of Education, Prof Jane Naana Opoku Agyemang, has charged the country’s teachers to demystify mathematics, as the 2016 annual educational sector review revealed that students continued to perform poorly in the subject.
Addressing participants at this year’s national education annual sector review, Prof Opoku Agyemang said schools and other stakeholders needed to find innovative ways to make the teaching of mathematics lively, simple, and easy for students to understand and overcome the fear many have of it.
“Part of the key lays in making the subject relevant and making our education relevant to our needs. Here we are in this room, I see shapes but we never see them in our textbooks. They will draw something abstract as if it has nothing to do with your life. … For a seamstress or a carpenter, a very important tool is a tape measure; it’s a mathematical instrument – where is it in our maths textbooks? The carpenter’s 2×4, the mason’s five-inch block… but I think that we can all do better, we can all learn, we can take the fear of the subject out,” she stated.
The minister also urged the participants to guard against acts that could compromise the effectiveness of exams conducted by the West Africa Examination Council (WAEC).
“All the effort we put in, it paid off. Some didn’t even know the kids were writing their BECE, it came and it left and I am hopeful that even as our investigations go on as I told you the previous time that no teacher would be found culpable, we are the adults and no parents would be found culpable. It is not the JHS child who finds his way into all the levels [to cheat in exams], it is the adults. So, when we are talking about moral education and so on, we should preach at ourselves, we should begin with us, we like to think it’s all about the children and I think it’s a tragedy for a child to know that the parent compromised something for the child to be in the secondary school. You are not going to be in that school forever; you will leave and where will you go?” Prof Opoku Agyemang asked.
Source: Ghana/ClassFMonline.com/91.3FM
