Madam, - Your Editorials are notoriously careful in their language. How disappointing, then, that Editorial of August 13th you should speak of 5,000 "failing maths" in this year's Leaving Certificate.
Nobody failed maths. No student can fail a subject in their Leaving Cert. Failure is a figment of media thinking. You were in the august company of your education correspondent Seán Flynn in his front-page report, of RTÉ news all day and of the many other newspapers who used pre-1980 slang for grades E, F and N/G in the Leaving Cert.
The Department of Education was very enlightened in abolishing the categories of Fail, Pass and Honours in the 1970s. Other public bodies, such as third-level colleges, have yet to follow suit. A student who gets a B in maths and fails to get an A of which he/she is capable does worse than a student who only gets an F only because he or she was not capable of getting an E.
Unfortunately this loose language about maths grades sets alight an annual stake-burning hysteria on results day. Even the Minister for Education was dazzled by the flames this year and now talks about 30 per cent of students doing Higher Course maths. He pins his hopes on the incoming Project Maths programme with its emphasis on practical applications. It would be better to create a new subject, maths applications, and rename the current applied maths accurately as "mechanics". Worryingly, recent reports from the UK (Reform Group) and the US suggest that where maths is made more relevant to the "real world" the result is a dumbing down of standards.
It is a time for holding one's nerve. Higher level maths participation in 2008 is not significantly different from the annual rates since 2003. Numbers peaked in 2005, but they are bound to ebb and flow with a changing population. This year's picture gets brighter when we celebrate diversity and stop stigmatising our children as Leaving Cert failures. - Yours, etc,
MICHAEL BRENNAN, Department of Computing, Maths and Physics, Waterford Institute of Technology.