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soapboxgirl:

we need Mr Laws back! Gove is a complete idiot

spiz:

I know a few people who have visited colleges and universities in China.   The common report is that Chinese education is about 90% theory and only 10% practical, despite state of the art facilities for learning.    The curriculum managers out there don't trust the students to work independently or think for themselves - the students learn by rote what the teachers tell them.

Are these the standards Gove wants to re-establish in England and Wales?

I continue be amused at the way people keep slagging off Chinese education for their methods not their results.

Can people not get their heads around the idea that what they are doing, even if it would never appeal to OFSTED, actually works better than what we do? Obviously, there is more to learning than rote memorisation but no education system ever failed because its students knew too much. We seem to have gone to such an extreme that we can't seem to even acknowledge that there is even a balance to be struck, let alone consider the possibility that a country at the other end of the spectrum might actually have struck it better than we have.

shalteir:

Apologies, OldAndrew, that was not what you were getting at.

Any chance you can answer what I was getting at, i.e. how you cope with questions like that if your times tables aren't up to scratch?

 No I can't.I agree with your point.

In curiosity, I put your question on a search engine, like many students do, in the "modern way to solve problems", and was amazed to see it come up on a page.

I don't have your maths expertise, but do have Ad Dip in Ed (maths), at primary level I  taught maths to a deep level of understanding for KS2. Pre NC, about 100% of my Y4 knew their tables by Easter, and applied this confidently to the work in hand. Not many years ago, few Y6 I've taught on supply had that same knowledge of tables, (but the last few years corrections have been made to expectations).  

I very much remember, summer term, after doing multiplication, the class did a school assembly on the subject, and individuals in the low ability group challenged the audience to  produce two numbers between 11 and 19, then promptly without written aid, multiplied these mentally. The top group created maybe 20+ ways to solve a multiplication of TU x TU eg 21 x 25. To this day, I think most Y6 would be hard pressed to do that in class let alone live in front of a whole audience.