I FEAR the Reverend John Cameron's memory may be faulty if he claims that arithmetic was the first of the Highers he sat (Letters, August 31). Unlike maths, there has never been a Higher Arithmetic – only Ordinary Grade. It's a popular spot check for recruiters looking through resumés.
In the old St David's Primary School on Johnstone's Howwood Road, the school was always last in Strathclyde Council's pecking order for materials, and usually got everyone else's cast-offs. So old were some books, converting any "shop"-based questions in pounds, shillings and pence over to decimal was part of the exercise.
I was caught out by my teacher Mr Logue one morning (it was always "maths" in the morning) surreptitiously doing the football league tables questions I'd discovered towards the end of one book instead of the ones I was supposed to. With an eye for the main chance, Mr Logue told the rest of the class to turn to these instead: what had been the usual scene of torpor (no one liked doing sums) suddenly became a frenzy of activity as everyone sought to discover the winners of the various league problems, with the occasional shouts of triumph as someone spotted the "trick" to a particular question which meant that someone other than expected had won that league.
Of course, none was based on actual past league tables, but the novelty of English or Scottish leagues with names like Third Lanark and Accrington Stanley (which no one had heard of – both dead before we were born) spurred us to unlock the mysteries to each, including the realisation that Heart of Midlothian was Hearts' "Sunday" name.
In secondary school, such innovation was not for the time-serving maths and arithmetic teachers we were foisted with: "because I say so!" the raison d'être with scant regard to demonstrating the point of it – with the BASIC programming age in full swing and x+y=z now being routine (excuse the computing pun), this was unforgivable. In fact, every single subject I was ever taught I can pin a direct correlation to the level of enthusiasm the teacher showed in their subject and my own. Which is probably why although I dropped the compulsory Home Economics after two years, my potato and leek soup still remains the best in all Scotland.
Mark Boyle,
15 Linn Park Gardens, Johnstone.
STEWART J Mitchell (Letters, August 31) claims "it is truly tragic that ... the only way to acquire such a grounding and treasure for life ...is to expend a fortune on independent schools".
This is nonsense.
As I have pointed out previously on these pages, my eldest grandson – who was the wholly state-educated product of Dunblane High School maths department – has just entered his final year at Harvard (educator of many US Presidents), where he is studying pure maths on a scholarship.
He attributes his success at Harvard to the peerless grounding in maths/arithmetic and the like he received from his maths teachers at Dunblane High School where his parents expended nary a cent on tuition costs, except indirectly through their taxes.
Brian Donald,
8 School Mews, Menstrie.
OBJECTING to indoctrination into one viewpoint is not the same as prescribing indoctrination into the opposite view.
David Tollick (Letters, August 30) is therefore wrong to suggest that I want schools to produce “numerate climate change sceptics” – I never said anything about any particular view on climate change. He is correct, though, that I want kids to be numerate.
Richard Lucas,
Leader of the Scottish Family Party,
272 Bath Street, Glasgow.
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