Wholesale Jerseys Free Shipping pvpzr0sa

fd9je6mn

By Sharmain GraingerA Commission of Inquiry (COI) may very well be on the way to ascertain why Guyana’s performance in Mathematics at the National Grade Six Assessment (NGSA) is wanting. It has been made clear that this situation has been inThe word Maths, along with mathematical symbols, written on a green chalkboardexistence for a number of years.This troubling development has been gaining the highest possible national attention,Boston Celtics Jerseys, and with good reason too.You see, ideally, in order for a person to matriculate or be deemed an acceptable candidate for higher education or even the world of work for that matter he or she is expected to have passes in two or three subject areas in addition to English and Mathematics.NGSA is administered at the primary level and requires that pupils complete assessments in the core subject areas of Mathematics, English, Science and Social Studies. It can therefore be deduced that if pupils are not able to grasp concepts at the primary level they certainly are not prepared for what will be taught at the secondary and tertiary levels.While the Ministry of Education has not made public a full comparative analysis of the results of the past few years, the NGSA Mathematics results that have been realised since the A Partnership for National Unity and Alliance for Change (APNU+AFC) Government assumed power have been worrying enough to warrant keen attention.And keen attention is just what was forthcoming when Cabinet met during the past week.At a post Cabinet press briefing on Thursday, Minister of State, Mr. Joseph Harmon, said, “Our concern has been the results of NGSA particularly as it relates to Mathematics.”He revealed that poor performance in Mathematics has been viewed as so important that Cabinet spent almost four hours deliberating on it Tuesday.The spotlight was essentially on Minister of Education, Dr. Rupert Roopnaraine, and a team of technical officers who accompanied him to brief Cabinet on the Mathematics performance and help plot the way forward.The officials have admitted to Cabinet that it was long recognised that there were some troubles associated with the national assessment. It was for this very reason that the Ministry for the first time this year contracted the services of the Caribbean Examination Council (CXC) to help conduct the NGSA assessment which was conducted on April 27 and April 28. A total of 14,386 candidates were assessed.And Harmon divulged Thursday that the support from CXC, in the view of the Education Ministry, saw a radical difference when compared to what was used previously. In Harmon’s words “this exposed, even more, the weaknesses of the Ministry of Education’s approach to this particular subject of Mathematics.”He disclosed that Cabinet was advised that the new CXC-approach required pupils to reason more rather than just “repeating by rote”.“So that inability to analyse and to reason exposed in an even greater detail the failure which has occurred in our system,” according to the Minister of State.Moreover, Cabinet considered the situation to be one of national importance and has accepted that it requires urgent attention. Of course the need for appropriate solutions was also discussed at Cabinet.Understandably the technical staffers of the Education Ministry have their work cut out for them as they are the ones who are being called upon to institute measures to remedy the daunting Mathematics performance.At the recent sitting of Cabinet a number of actions were suggested including immediate moves by the Education Ministry to assess the school system to identify the cause(s) of the problem.The development of short-term remedial measures was also suggested to help address the problem in the interim.Now one of the most interesting suggestions that Cabinet heard was the possibility of retaining teachers past the prescribed age of retirement. It was recommended that the Ministry develop a method of best practice to guide the Ministry to identify areas where resources are required and to facilitate the recruitment of retired teachers to provide assistance to the system.According to Harmon, “We had a very long discussion on the retirement age for teachers since it was felt that the age at which teachers are retiring is the age when they are on top of their game.”Cabinet has considered that once teachers retire from the Government system they are quickly “snapped up” by the private school system. “That is something which as a Government we need to pay careful attention to,” said Harmon, as he disclosed that Cabinet has mandated the Minister of Education to “sit with his technical officers and staff of his Ministry to come up with a plan by next week as to how we are going to deal with this particular situation.”Now the fact that Government is looking to retired teachers to help address the problems seems to suggest that there is not complete faith in the young teachers in the system, those who graduate annually from the country’s teachers’ training college, to fix the existing challenge.Could it be that the teachers in the system are not well trained? Are they not well equipped to deliver numeracy lessons? Or are the majority of our children simply not capable of retaining mathematical concepts as presented by teachers in the system?A COI I’m sure could shed some light.But the Mathematics shortcoming is only one among a gamut of challenges that exist within the public education system. Government has laudably accepted that there are many other situations in the Ministry of Education including the delivery of education which is already the subject of an inquiry that is ongoing across the country.