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Anorak News | Quarter Masters

Quarter Masters

by | 26th, September 2003

‘IF Saddam Hussein has two weapons of mass destruction and it takes three men working at 100% efficiency 45 minutes to prime and load them, how long before we are all dead? Show workings.

If you can read this, you can be a teacher

So far it taken hundreds of man-hours to find a definitive answer to that question, although anyone who wrote “This is Bollox” on their question papers will be given an A* grade.

But it’s not supposing we are finding this simple sum so hard to solve, given that, according to the front page of the Telegraph, a quarter of maths teachers are ‘unqualified’.

The story goes that over 800,000 secondary school students are being taught maths by teachers who don’t even have an A-level in the discipline.

They do, though, have their own calculators and most likely rulers too, two of the Government’s key stage requirements for anyone wishing to embark on a career as an educator.

Depending on your understanding of maths, it’s brighter or darker news in the Independent, where the paper reports that one in five lessons are taken by teachers who have no formal training in their subject.

That’s 20%! Which means that a magnificent 80% are qualified to teach the popular media studies course at the University of Central Ealing.

And that has to be good news for everyone…’



Posted: 26th, September 2003 | In: Broadsheets Comment | TrackBack | Permalink