(*MATHS is clearly in trouble – but language skills are not adding up either!)
The pass rate for Barbadians in CXC mathematics has been below 36 per cent in the last three years and below 50 per cent in the preceding seven, says Winston Cumberbatch, who is president of ConquerMaths Caribbean.
Alarming! Now, you know you can’t believe everything you hear, but quite a few people say that teachers of maths and music are not the most patient and tend to run only with what students bring.
If tellers of tales out of school are to be believed, maths teachers rank at the top or very near there among those who punish children for “not knowing” and music teachers are among the quickest to bar students from the subject. Tough measures, some think.
Maths teachers cannot as easily get students to take another subject option, but it seems that music teachers quickly (sometimes roughly and rudely) weed out any students whose ability does not initially seem noteworthy. I hear these things.
All the same, maths success seems difficult to achieve in most places.
Look, I barely know that two and two are four, so let me move on to what not too many people pay sustained attention to: the unsatisfactory state of language use.
Not long ago, a UWI Cave Hill report noted that, among students, “inadequate English language proficiency is a real problem as well as one of long standing”.
The same document quoted former Prime Minister Owen Arthur as saying that “the use of English is in severe peril” and that “correct spelling is gravely unpopular”.
Although we have these occasional rumblings of disquiet about the situation, this matter has not evoked an appropriate level of national anxiety.
A friend of mine was recently telling me that his efforts to get others to improve the level of their communication often meet with the response, “Wuh you cuh understand me, right?”
No interest in clarity, precision, power, effect or commanding self-presentation among these products of the school system in Little England.
What are we to do?
One of the main difficulties in developing a serious interest in English language proficiency in the Caribbean is the belief of many that they already use what teachers are trying to teach them.
Teachers, of course, know that that isn’t so; yet they often proceed as though students know that they are learning a variety of English that is radically different from the variety that they normally use – the spoiler being the fact that there are many similarities in vocabulary. But there are major (and many) divergences in grammar and other aspects of usage.
The “normal” language (vernacular) of our people, though English-based, differs substantially from what is called Standard English – the English that is required for formal communication and classroom activities.
So our teaching efforts have to start with a philosophical underpinning that is rooted in an understanding of the nature of the Caribbean/Barbadian language situation.
A deep appreciation (not a disparaging of “home” language) of the difference between the vernacular and Standard English must be fostered.
And lots of thought is required in determining the input, transfer and output engagements that would accomplish proficiency in language in our particular context.
The situation calls for far more than drilling children in traditional grammar.
It certainly requires better than testing children on decontextualized bits of grammar and usage (à la Common Entrance and certain sections of CXC English exams) – on which not a few operate successfully, only to fall down when they have to produce continuous prose writing.
To what extent have we examined the importance of teacher modelling of Standard English usage in both speech and writing?
How much attention have we paid to extensive leisure reading as a potent input? Hasn’t the school system, instead, been an accomplice in the narrowing of personal reading and in the creation of a largely aliterate society?
Proficient language use also requires more than practice in genre writing.
How much close-to-authentic practice do students get in producing Standard English?
Have we put great focus on real communication, majoring not only on Standard English orthodoxy but on stylistic aspects as critical to accomplishing effects in receivers?
We have allowed English language proficiency, about which we from time to time say we are deeply concerned, to be, really, a back-burner issue.
•?Sherwyn Walters is a writer who became a teacher, a song analyst, a broadcaster and an editor.