Maths syllabus needs to add up

SY’RAI JOSEPH, nine, a student of Arima Girls’ Government School, on Tuesday emerged winner of the Arima Lions Mental Mathematics Olympiad III at the Arima West Government Primary School.

The overall winners were students of Arima Boys’ RC. In all, seven primary schools participated in the competition, including La Horquetta North Government, Optimum Primary, D’Abadie Government and Malabar Government.

Tristan Lebon of Arima Boys’ RC placed second and Elieseo Cozier of Malabar Government took third place. The Olympiad was the brainchild of director of Lion’s International and FCB’s special project resource Jennifer Armstrong-Khan, after she saw students were having trouble calculating numbers mentally. FCB was the main sponsor of the event.

“FCB normally has a Scrabble competition every year and one of the things I have realised with Scrabble is that the children didn’t know how to count continuously, because at the end of each Scrabble round you write down the marks. When they had to tally all of it, they had an issue with it,” she explained.

“Based on that I felt this would have been something good to get them accustomed, so by the time they reach standard five and form one at least they will know how to do that.” Armstrong-Khan said during the last Olympiad the children seemed rather timid and anxious. Some were not even aware of some of the questions which indicated that parts of the syllabus were not being taught. She said the questions were based on what was being taught and were well thought out before the Olympiad.

She said some teachers asked for a workshop and they were facilitated from November 2018 until this May, when FCB arranged four workshops for them. “We thought this would have helped the teachers to build the confidence of the students, and also make them more aware of the curriculum and the topics they are supposed to cover. We have been doing this to get the students of Arima up to scratch. “

Armstrong-Khan noted that some schools did much better than others, and several of the top scorers were from the same school, which was a clear indicator that not all schools were following the syllabus. “One of the students told one of the teachers that one of the questions asked was not covered in his school.

“However, other students knew the answer to the question, which means at least one school did not cover the curriculum, which is strange, because we are in promotion term.”