SENATOR Basil Waite the opposition spokesman on education is calling for teachers, especially those of mathematics, to be recruited from among the top students in the country.

Waite, himself a math whiz before turning to politics, says teachers’ own discomfort with the subject in part accounts for students’ dismal record in math exams.

“Jamaica under-values mathematics as a subject. Math is not something to be feared, it is to be embraced and it is highly marketable,” Waite said in calling for greater focus on the subject.

He was speaking at the launch of the Mathematics Higher Passes project and workbook at the Girl Guides headquarters in St Andrew last Tuesday.

Waite said Jamaica does poorly in math because only 30 per cent of primary level teachers of math passed the subject in the Caribbean Secondary Eeducation Certificate (CSEC) exams or O’levels, according to a recent study.

This contrasts greatly with the situation in countries with the top-performing school systems, namely Finland, Singapore and South Korea, according to a study by leading consulting firm McKinsey, Waite said.

“One of the strategies (in these countries) is to recruit, develop and maintain teachers from the top talent into the classroom,” he noted.

The United States has its own problems in mathematics with only 23 per cent of teachers from the top one-third of students, Waite disclosed.

Only 30 to 40 per cent of the approximately 30,000 candidates pass CSEC math each year, and this after only three out of every five students are even allowed to sit the exam.

Describing mathematics as his favourite subject in high school, Waite had passes in additional math, A-level

math and in the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examinations, before completing a first degree in mathematics at the University of the West Indies.

Bypassing actuarial studies to study business and public policy in the United States, Waite said it was his “math background that attracted everybody” to his résumé.

“The main thing they were looking for was how you can work unfazed with the numbers,” Waite said of his scholarship interviews abroad.

Jewell Spencer, co-author of the workbook along with Donovan Dowie, said the idea for the book came after a series of CSEC workshops in 2008 in which students’ scores ranged from 1.5 to 49 per cent.

The objective of the project is to assist students to become familiar with actual projects, solutions and methodologies to be successful in the CSEC exam.

The duo started a company, Spencer and Granhill Ltd, to forward the initiative by partnering with private sector companies and individuals to distribute the book to mostly non-traditional schools whose performance in mathematics is particularly low.

So far, eight gold partners have come on board, pledging at least $40,000 to purchase 50 copies of the book for a school on a list of 15 institutions.

Gold partners include Alison Pitter and Company, BDO Marwilmac Partners, Capital and Credit Financial Group, Carey Metz, Caribbean Broilers, Jamaica National Building Society, Rattray Patterson Rattray, and the Paper Place.