As a recently retired teacher, having served DECS for 45 years, I have watched in despair as our students’ basic number facts have declined each year for decades.
As both a student in the 60s and as a beginning teacher, the favoured method, including explicit teaching strategies, was to incorporate the rote learning of times tables into daily mathematics lessons.
Over the years, I have written many letters to the editor about this important issue, exhorting education departments to arrest this decline.
To read that the Grattan Institute education program director Jordana Hunter has called upon governments to “stamp out faddish, but unproven math teaching methods, based on games”, and explicitly teach step-by-step techniques, including rote learning the times tables, was vindication of what many classroom practitioners have been advocating for years.
I acknowledge and admire the range of skills today’s students have: technology, problem-solving, critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity, when compared to my education in the 1960s and 1970s, but a continuing fall in numeracy skills has required attention and correction
A consistent, methodical and proven approach should be required for some skills, even though it has been deemed by some modern educational theorists as being outdated, rather than student learning being an experiment to check the veracity of a new fad or trend.
Ian Macgowan, Ceduna
Country ambulance crew vacancies
I share the worry felt by both the Ambulance Employees Association and their members at the number of unfilled ambulance shifts across our state, with 136 vacant over one week.
The reality that some regional communities may often be left without ambulance coverage is deeply troubling.
Country patients deserve the same access to timely emergency care as those living in metropolitan areas.
I want to acknowledge the tireless efforts of our volunteer ambulance officers and career paramedics who continually go above and beyond to keep our communities safe.
Their dedication is remarkable, but it should not come at the cost of exhaustion or burnout.
It is time that more respect is shown to our volunteer ambulance officers.
They are qualified, experienced, dedicated …and local – they know the roads and they know each other, which matters in a crisis.
Premier Malinauskas must act with more urgency to address rural workforce shortages in health to guarantee that every South Australian, no matter their postcode, can expect the same standard of healthcare when they need it most.
Penny Pratt, shadow minister for regional health services
