Can We Count On Maths?

Would you like a hot dog? The Aboriginal man, who was on his first visit to a city and to whom the question was addressed, looked amazed and then responded, “Can I come and have a look?”. He soon discovered that ‘hot dogs’ were not what his grasp of English and the mental picture it had conjured up – of a cooked canine – had led him to believe. A rather relieved young man enjoyed his first ‘hot dog’. An amusing incident at the time, but how often do the words used in Aboriginal schools – particularly in maths lessons – evoke mental pictures or concepts that differ markedly from those of children who grow up speaking English and with a conceptual view of the world related to the western system of knowledge? What is perhaps even more alarming is that teachers are often unaware that this is happening, and when the child fails to act intelligently in certain situations the teacher often despairs and then gives up trying to teach maths effectively and concentrates on teaching ‘sums’, at which Aboriginal children, with their strong aural and visual memories, gain some measure of success. But such an approach, though measurable in school, fails to equip a child to operate mathematically in the real world where, for example, we meet our subtraction operations not clothed in the language of ‘take away’ and certainly never ‘minus’ but in comments like: “Red Cravats scored 32 and Waratahs finished 6 goals behind them,” or “Nhulunbuy are at the top of the ladder with 34 points and Yirrkala are second with 29”.