Róisín Garvey (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Niall Collins, to the House. It is great that we have Science Week and that we have a discussion around STEM. I have a degree in maths, physics and computers and I have always been one of the few women in the room, whether it was doing honours maths or studying maths and physics in college. I still have huge concerns around that gender inequality and we are still failing in that. I did not get my degree today or yesterday but my son is studying energy engineering and there is one girl in his class of 20. We are still failing when it comes to gender equality because we all know for a fact that women are equally as good at maths, physics and the sciences as men are. There is something seriously wrong there and it does not start at third level.

If we are serious about changing it, we will have to look back to primary and secondary school level. The leaving certificate choices that students make strongly dictate what they study in college and one will often see that girls have to fight hard to prove they are good enough for honours maths whereas it is almost presumed that boys will do honours maths and that if they do badly they might be forced to go back to pass maths. That is still the case so we have a lot of work to do on that. It has to be reiterated that women are just as good at maths, physics and the sciences as men and boys are. We have to keep reminding people of that. We have to remind our children, including our daughters, sons, nephews and nieces of that and not make assumptions because we have been reared in a patriarchy and we need to work hard to debunk those myths.

Science Week is an important week and lots of things are happening. The website is www.sfi.ieif one wants to find out about all the things that are going on. Another thing outside of the gender issue, which is huge, is that the way we teach maths and the sciences can sometimes fail to be interactive. For too long, book companies have been leading how we teach. Book companies are not teachers and they are not facing the students in front of us. I was involved in starting a Steiner school where we did not have books. The kids created their own books through discovery and experimentation and it definitely removed the dictatorship of the workbook to decide how things would be taught.

As a teacher I know that you have to look at the pupils who are in front of you on the day and if the way you teach is not working, you have to change the way you teach because you cannot change the pupils and the way they learn. Interaction and interactive maths teaching are missing there. I was, for instance, teaching area and volume in my last school, which is two and three-dimensional maths, yet we have no three-dimensional shapes or objects in the maths room. You have to try to borrow them from the science room, which is not always easy. For years teachers have been teaching volume in two dimensions, which is ridiculous. I used to walk in with a basketball and tell the students we would try to figure out how much leather it takes to make a basketball. That is something real and tangible. We also tried to figure out the width of a tyre for doing Formula One racing and I did Pythagoras's theorem on the wall of the handball alley in the school. That kind of learning is real and tangible.

People have wondered for years why we are doing maths. We should not be teaching maths without talking about the applications of it, otherwise the student does not know why he or she is learning it. There is a myth that one is either good at maths or bad at it, which is not true. Anybody can be good at maths if he or she is taught in the right way.That is something else we feel, when we see only half of our mathematics teachers are qualified mathematics teachers.

In my training in NUI Galway as a mathematics teacher, I substituted in schools for a couple of years. I found the training very idealistic and based on a presumption that everybody behaved the same way and learnt the same way in the classroom. We have to get with the reality that children are different and learn in different ways. We cannot just teach everything in the one way. We have a huge piece of work to do on teacher training and methodology. I was able to engage with pupils who would have thought they were bad at mathematics, but then I started talking about it being used in carpentry if you wanted to build an A-frame roof or if you wanted to make clothing. There are so many applications, and mathematics is brilliant. It is something we should be allowed enjoy as opposed to people being either really good at it or really bad at it. There is this division which means that those who are good at mathematics do science stuff and those who are not good at mathematics do art and home economics. That is the kind of thing we have been doing for years. We need to push further, especially for girls, and get them to think when they are going into senior cycle, to look at the science subjects and say they can do this and they are just as good as the lads at mathematics and physics. We need to look at the fact nothing seems to have changed in the figures.

I know as a country we have a good education system but I think perhaps teachers need better course development. We teach mathematics in the primary school curriculum for a given amount of time, but how we teach it is questionable as well. There is so much on-paper, flat, boring learning when mathematics is a very alive, interactive thing which can be taught in very different ways. The book companies need to be pushed back. It is not fair they dictate how things are taught. The teachers need to be more creative in how they teach to engage pupils. Everybody can be good at mathematics and physics. It was only when I went to third level and did mathematics and physics that I saw the real applications of them, although I had done them in the leaving certificate, . It opened up a whole other world to me that I wish had been opened up to me in secondary school. I always felt like a freak in secondary school for loving mathematics. I do not know if I was brilliant at it but I just really enjoyed it. That should be allowed and it is okay as a teacher to show you enjoy mathematics.

We have some work to do there right back to primary and secondary levels. It is important for the Minister, Deputy Harris, and the Minister of State, Deputy Collins, to engage with the Minister, Deputy Foley on looking at the curriculum, how we teach subjects and making them more real for children. Everything is 3D and has gone digital now for children, but I am talking about being hands-on, that you learn with your head, heart and hands. It is not about the head all the time. We need to bring in the heart and the hands, the real applications and how amazing mathematics is in real life. It was originally a philosophy but we have lost that. The beginning of mathematics was a philosophy which was used for problem solving and helping to deal with mental problems, but we have lost all that. I look forward to these science weeks and looking more into the philosophy of mathematics and its real, practical uses.