High marks

As detailed by Newsday’s lead story yesterday, Thomas performed the rare feat of attaining a distinction in the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CESC) examination. He is possibly the youngest person ever to do so. The examination he sat is usually done by students five years his senior.

“All the hard work paid off,” Thomas said. He is an inspiration to all and his teachers and parents much also be congratulated. The child’s achievement is all the more laudable because he swam against the tide. According to the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC), students did not perform as well as they did last year in mathematics. The pass rate fell sharply from 57 percent to 44 percent. The additional mathematics pass rate also dropped from 72 percent to 67 percent.

Thomas joins the ranks of our many mathematics prodigies.

Last year, Kiran Christian Dyaanand, 12, also sat the CSEC examination in mathematics and passed.

He followed in the footsteps of his mom, Dr Tricia-Lee Dyaanand, who had sat the General Certificate of Education O’Level mathematics examination in Form Two while she was a student at St Joseph’s Convent, San Fernando, decades ago.

This country also has a good record when it comes to performance at the International Mathematical Olympiad, which is the world championship mathematics competition for school students. Over the past 25 years, TT has won two silver medals, five bronze medals and 23 honourable mentions. Prasanna Ramakrishnan, a student of the International School of Port-of-Spain, last year won a silver medal and has the rare distinction of having appeared five times at the Olympiad.

Though mathematics has a reputation for being esoteric, it is not at risk of becoming an unpopular subject.

According to CXC, mathematics continues to have the highest subscription rate of any CSEC subject with 92,529 entries this year. That’s more than twice the population of our capital city. Because it is based almost entirely on impartial formulations and systems, mathematics is regarded as the perfect tool to foster discipline and to develop logical skills. Yet, there is increasing worry that not enough is being done to foster wider areas of inquiry which are crucial in supplementing the overall education picture.

Indeed, outside of mathematics, concern has been raised over other aspects of this year’s results.

Overall, performance was down, with a decline in the pass rate from 68 per cent to 66 per cent. While the pass rate for English A rose from 60 percent last year to 67 percent this year, the English B (literature) pass rate fell from 77 percent to 62 percent. It is safe to say that while more students are competent in the technical aspects of language, fewer students are mastering the cognitive, social and practical aspects of how a society uses language forms.

Though it is important to give credit where credit is due, it is also true to say that the emphasis on pass marks and on student placement sometimes borders on the obsessive.

The bitter disappointment in relation to the placement of our Olympians this month arguably reflects this social pattern of a myopic focus on rankings over substance. We regard our students as disappointments if they fail to rank, forgetting the goal of education is to finish the race, not just to medal. Education is supposed to be about substance, not just form.

We must strike a balance between praise and reward while acknowledging the fact that results alone do not determine a student’s fate.

Mathematician Euclid once said the laws of nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God. But we are all masters of our own fates. Education – in both its academic and practical modes – is the tool that allows us to fulfil our potential.