Ontario's first-year math investment: Politicians

Ontario's first-year math investment: Politicians

Samuel Reano

Let’s put aside our political views and focus on the future generation’s learning skills in math. The government of Ontario has come up with a four-year investment plan to improve students’ math skills. As of now, they have released their spending amounts for the first year of the investment plan. Note that EQAO is a big influencer for the government to decide how to invest in math skills to see improvement among schools and school boards. It took a long time for the government and EQAO to decide on the funding schools needed to aid their students to succeed in math.

I took the EQAO test in Grades, 3, 6, & 9 and my scores didn’t meet provincial standards. Yet I managed to pass math with marks above 75%. The teachers didn’t make math easy. They treated math like any other subject; some concepts are easy to grasp whereas the other concepts are difficult to grasp in one lesson and it requires lots of time to understand. It wasn’t just me that was concerned about the scores on the EQAO tests but my classmates and teachers as well. This has been going on for almost 10 years and now the government decides to spend money on improvement in math skills when they had never done so in the past. This is a well-planned decision because with the new curriculum for Career Studies where one unit has been added— financial literacy— students can now use their math skills to manage their finances. This holds huge importance in their lives. With financial literacy and math, the future generation is ready to handle personal finance issues. These same individuals will grow to handle the budget if they follow a career in politics and are elected for a position in the federal government.

While the investment is treated as an experiment, it will contribute to job growth. The first-year investment consists of school boards hiring math trainers and math coaches and an online system of tutors. The online tutoring system is beneficial for students and tutors because neither of them needs to spend money on gas and/or public transit to get to from one place to another. The tutors are ready whenever the students are ready to ask for help and the efficiency of their transportation methods contributes to a reduction in carbon pollution. As of now, there’s an excess amount of Ontario Certified Teachers and a limited amount of schools. If the excess amount of Ontario Certified Teachers contains math teachers, those educators can be used for the training and coaching programs for schools. The government will financially support a “summer learning program” where students can continue to improve their math skills during their summer vacation so that the material covered from the previous school year remains fresh for the next school year. Consider math as a language that is communicated through writing and verbally. It requires practice to be proficient and it’s a language that is communicated nationally, much like English and French.