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Is there any sort of proposed lower limit to the bonus points? Surely that’ll encourage people who are borderline honours / pass ability to stick with the honours scheme because "sure even if I get a D1/D2 I’ll still get a few extra points". They’ll go on to college with big gaps in their maths. Or worse, even fail at the leaving cert level.
People who want to do science / maths related courses in college are going to do them anyhow regardless of bonus points.
Instead of bonus points, how about actually giving schools money (and a flying car for all! :P) so that they can do all their science experiments? I did Physics and Chemistry for my Leaving. We did the parallelogram law in Physics and Chemistry we did a few titrations. All the other experiments were "lets pretend" because the school hadn’t the money.
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I completely agree. The way Maths and to some extent Physics is taught at Irish secondary schools is a complete joke.
They introduce subjects like trigonometry, calculus, matrices and complex numbers without in any way explaining how they apply to things in the real world.
I remember some friends from school who did mechanical engineering in college and wished that the maths teacher had told them they needed to know about calculus to be able to do mechanics properly. The college wasted loads of time and money re-teaching the entire class second level maths.
It is a complete joke. You can’t do a lot of traditional trades without this knowledge either.
Show teenagers how to draw a line on the screen with integration and tell them that is how their PlayStation 3 draws a zillion triangles a second and they’ll be hooked (well OK, maybe not all of them).
EDIT – Spelling and Grammar :oops:
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All the other experiments were "lets pretend" because the school hadn’t the money.[/quote:57cb3c2d7c]
Or were terrified of being sued if something went wrong – our teacher was always giving out about the school not letting him do any chemistry experiment because they were deemed too dangerous by the board of management.
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yes I was interviewed by a guy from the Sunday Tribune about it.
To be honest I suspect Havok are looking for more than problem solving skills for their hires are they are very high end particular skill sets they need.
given the falling numbers in some technical courses and the falling entry points over the past few years I can see how they might have some problems recruiting these skills.
not sure it is the facult of the ‘unions’ in the schools however.
What struck me about the discussion that has been going on over the past few weeks is the low number of maths teachers in secondary schools who are actually qualified in maths.
Aphra.
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What struck me about the discussion that has been going on over the past few weeks is the low number of maths teachers in secondary schools who are actually qualified in maths.
[/quote:a0a11111db]:shock:
Is a qualification in the subject you are going to be educating generations of young people in not a mandatory requirement?
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The problem with properly qualified secondary teachers is probably caused by a number of factors. Some possibilities may be:
AFAIK you need to have a degree in a subject you are teaching at secondary school to be qualified to teach it. This means a teacher with a degree or masters degree in physics would not be officially qualified to teach Mathematics, but probably quite capable of teaching Maths to second level students to a very high standard.
It is very difficult to fire under performing or bad teachers.
We have nothing like OFSTED in this country to make sure schools make the grade. This is partly due to union resistance.
Schools having no money and putting unqualified teachers on because they can’t afford it any other way.
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"There aren’t enough skilled graduates."
Often translates to:
"We can’t get the skilled graduates as cheaply as we want them."Its simple supply and demand.
So, when a company complains about one, its very hard to be sure they aren’t complaining about the other.
Not speaking about any particular company, but the games industry believes it has a right to highly skilled graduates that will kill themselves working, and for less pay than they’d get elsewhere.
People aren’t stupid. If there are well paid jobs and good careers in an area, people will eventually gravitate towards them. Maybe the perception was that a career in finance or law or real estate was a better bet than tech/science in Ireland. It probably was, at least for a while, and you can’t really blame the schools or colleges (and their union overlords (???)) for that.
Ireland could certainly do a better job at educating people, and encouraging them into maths, science, etc. There are problems that need to be addressed and some of the points raised about graduate quality are fair.
But I’m not sure that slating the quality of graduates available in this country in the press is a particularly constructive way to deal with the situation.
Talking about the interesting and wonderful jobs available, with the competitive international salaries they have, and the lack of suitably applicants, might have a better effect.
Because the jobs and interesting and wonderful, with great salaries – right?
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