Last week it was announced that education and training would receive the lion’s share of the 2022 budget with an allocation of $6.9 billion.
It was also announced that tax exemptions would be made for companies specialising in digitisation and technology solutions.
There is the hope that this drive for skills training will overlap with this country’s digitisation push.
But while more money and policies will give shape to this drive, one teacher says the first steps behind this modernisation will not happen in Parliament but in the nation’s classrooms.
Speaking with Sunday Newsday at his San Juan home last Friday, mathematician and academic Dr Dayle Jogie says TT’s digitisation is necessary and must be supported by a good understanding of mathematics.
Like physics and chemistry, principles of information technology are rooted in mathematics.
Without mathematics, concepts like programming and computing would be impossible.
With 17 years teaching experience at the university and secondary school levels, Jogie has seen numbers, equations, graphs and programmes in their different forms and is committed to helping others understand the importance of these concepts.
Jogie’s passion for numbers began at a relatively young age, when his father who was also a mathematics teacher taught him and his siblings to count using the card game of All Fours.
“It really helps with your memory and if you don’t have any chalk on the board you learn to keep a mental check of your count.”
Jogie took this passion for mathematics with him through secondary school eventually choosing to study mathematics and statistics at McGill University, Canada, before taking a break and returning to Trinidad in 2004.
While in Trinidad, Jogie found work as a teacher for adult literacy classes at Barataria Senior Comprehensive.
It was here he first saw the difficulty many people have with mathematics.
[caption id="attachment_919372" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Dr Dayly Jogie says learning maths needs time, effort and the right attitude. - PHOTO BY SUREASH CHOLAI[/caption]
“There are adults and I would say they are successful adults because they take care of their children and these are parents maybe 30, 40 or 45 years and they wrote CXC mathematics at least five times but never passed.
“That was my rude awakening, I took it for granted that everyone had a pass in maths.
“They aren’t bad people and they are genuinely trying but their confidence is shattered, it’s like banging your head against a wall.”
Instilling this confidence in students is crucial to getting them to show an interest in the subject, but this can only happen by getting them to do the work while giving them small, manageable tests to build their comfort level.
Jogie later found work as a mathematics teacher for St Mary’s College and St George’s College while completing his degree at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, before eventually accepting a teaching position there at the Faculty of Science and Technology’s department of mathemati
