NONTOBEKO MTSHALI
THE SUBJECTS high school pupils choose are based on what career path they plan to pursue. Or at least that should be the case but is often not.
Subject choice becomes a problem when pupils have to take a future career into account while also considering what subjects they excel in – subjects that will ensure they are able to pass matric.
Schools get their matric pass rate targets from the education districts and provincial education departments and schools are under pressure to meet these targets.
When Grade 9 pupils pick their subjects, it’s common for them to be encouraged and sometimes even pressured by their teachers and principals to pick subjects they are likely to pass and not necessarily the ones they need to pursue for their future career options.
Maths Literacy, which has taken a lot of flak for being a “useless” subject, is a subject pupils have been taking because they are forced to if they want to pass.
During the Mail & Guardian Critical Thinking Forum in Joburg recently, education practitioners agreed that pupils were being pushed to take “unchallenging subjects to achieve good pass rates”, as Equal Education’s Lukhanyo Mangona put it.
“Children take Maths Lit because they think they’ll pass, not necessarily because it’s easy,” said president of the Professional Educators Union Maggie Makgoba.
In an interview with The Star, Mokgaba said that on paper, Maths Lit was a sound concept.
She said the subject was founded because it was essential to have some mathematical ability to get through modern life.
”Even a soccer star needs to be literate in maths. Maths Lit was meant to address the fact that all of us need to be (maths) literate,” she said.
Mokgaba said another problem was that most people considered the traditional academic route of going to university as the only viable option for post-school education and training.
“The academic route is not for everybody. We still need technical people like electrical engineers and technicians who can pursue their studies at FET colleges. Maths Lit is suitable for such people who don’t need pure maths,” she said.
Mokgaba said many pupils had problems with maths because often teacher were not properly trained on how to teach the subject.
”The biggest challenge is that because of the shortage of maths teachers, maths has been demonised as a difficult subject,” she said.
Mokgaba said on the other hand, high school maths teachers often complained that instead of teaching pupils senior grade maths, they found they were teaching work that should have been covered in lower grades.
“If you don’t have the basic skills to do pure maths you can’t learn in high school. You need to grasp maths in the foundation phase,” she said.
An additional problem was that there weren’t enough qualified maths teachers.
A research report by the Centre of Development and Enterprise (CDE) titled The Quantity and Quality of South Africa’s Teachers, found that the teacher training system needs to produce about 15 000 more teachers a year than it does at present, particularly in scarce subjects such as maths, science, commerce and technology.
The report, which was published in September, went on to say that many of the teachers who taught those subjects weren’t teaching them well “partly because many of them have been badly trained”.
Mokgaba said the issue of pupils being forced to take Maths Lit because of low maths pass rates was worsened by the fact that pupils were assessed on their aptitudes only when they left school, either in Grade 9 or 12.
She said external assessments should be introduced after each phase – Grade 3 and Grade 6– and in Grade 9 and Grade 12.
“If, in Grade 3, we do an external assessment, we’ll be able to see if you’ve learnt what you needed to in the formative years.
‘‘If we do this at the end of the different phases, parents will know that if their child is in a particular grade they should be able to read at a certain level and do maths at this level,” she said.
“We only look at the pupil’s skills in Grade 12 and before then we don’t know what they know.
‘‘The current system pushes pupils to Grade 12 and only after the pupils fail, do they consider going to FET [Further Education and Training] colleges,” she said.