Unless handlers of schools and the education system engage the services of qualified Mathematics teachers and expose them to universal modern tools, the incidence of mass failure in the subject will continue, Mathematical Association of Nigeria has said.
President, MAN, Prof. Uche Agwagah, who stated this on Tuesday in Asaba, Delta State, while answering questions from journalists at the Annual National Conference and Golden Jubilee celebration/Award, said acute lack of qualified teachers in the subject had been responsible for the cntinuous mass failure among pupils in the subject.
According to Uche, it has been observed that teachers are the bane of the subject, resulting in poor performance of students. She said some of the teachers of the subject were not qualified, while the qualified ones lacked the technicalities to handle the subject. Worse still,he said, some parents had also been discouraging their children from showing interest in the subject.
Agwagah said MAN, as a body,had devised a strategy that would make it easy to teach and comprehend Mathematics as a core subject, by engaging relevant Maths teachers across board.
“But the teachers cannot be relevant in the scheme of things if they are just localized and continue to apply some old tools and materials in their day-to-day teaching,” she said.
Earlier in her welcome address, Agwagah had said her tenure in the association had spelt out a two-point agenda to build a national secretariat for MAN after 50 years of existence, and to provide the type of education that would ensure that teachers met the challenges of the 21st Century knowledge-based society.
