Tomorrow will see the official inauguration of the new Parliament designed by Renzo Piano. Apparently our MPs have been given the familiarisation tour.

There are the obligatory Facebook snaps as evidence. The eye-watering day-glo green chairs have been featured and the bridge linking two blocks has been suitably stress-tested by members of the PN parliamentary group who dutifully did the honours.

In the run-up to the official ribbon-cutting ceremony, a number of factoids surfaced in news reports. Apparently, the plenary chamber is smaller, there is no in-house cafeteria, no provision was made for onsite parking and nobody thought of the security issues involved.

The first of these drawbacks is basically a repeat of what happened with the Mater Dei hospital – a state-of-the-art hospital but with less space than its predecessor. I have to admit it is not a shortcoming that irks me unduly. MPs (or those who actually make it to chambers) can squash up together to utilise all the space available. Again – the lack of an in-house cafe is no biggie – they’ll just have to make it through a spell of caffeine-deprivation.

The bickering about parking slots serves to underline the difference between MPs and mere mortals. Parking places for MPs are being reserved near the Central Bank while members of Cabinet and the Leader of the Opposition will park in Ordnance Street near Palazzo Ferreria. This wasn’t good enough for David Agius who insisted that there should be no distinction between MPs (though a distinction between MPs and ordinary citizens who don’t get reserved parking, is okay).

The bickering about parking slots serves to underline the difference between MPs and mere mortals

The lack of provision for security is the most annoying because it may mean the limitation on the one aspect of the parliamentary building which is of any benefit to the public. In an attempt to sell the Parliament idea, there was originally talk of the first floor being open to the public either as an exhibition on parliamentary history (not exactly a thrill, but still...) or a permanent exhibition space.

It now turns out that since MPs are fearing as-yet-unidentified security threats (though there have been dark mutterings about young people loitering near Parliament’s glass doors) it may not be possible for the first floor to be utilised by the public as originally intended. This means that (again) the public gets the short end of the stick insofar as this building is concerned. Yes, it’s aesthetically impressive but it has limited functionality for the MPs and practically none for ordinary citizens.

So much for the idea of openness and democratic inclusion it was intended to convey.

• There was a bit of ‘the Emperor has no clothes on’ moment last week when mathematician Josef Lauri said that the odious Abacus textbooks should be binned. For those not in the know – the Abacus textbooks are the maths textbooks which have been used in primary schools over the last years. They are brightly coloured and attractive – and utterly useless in doing what they are supposed to be doing – helping children to be able to work out elementary maths problems.

Simple double digit additions which should be a doddle are rendered complicated, triple digit additions and subtractions are even more convoluted. The multiple steps involved mean that children are ever more likely to make mistakes, reinforcing the impression that maths is difficult and tricky.

And don’t get me started on the methods for long division and long multiplication shown in the Abacus books – they’re lengthy, laborious and have to be worked out over so many pages of paper that they probably require the destruction of great swathes of the rainforest. What’s more the chapters or sections about each topic is short and bitsy and doesn’t help for an in-depth understanding of the topic.

Despite these glaringly obvious drawbacks, the Abacus books seem to have insinuated their way into most primary school classrooms with the result that a whole generation of children think that it’s easier to multiply 36 by six by adding up sixes for 36 times mentally, while their parents have started to harbour unpleasant thoughts of what they would do to the authors/publishers of the textbooks if they ever came face to face with them.

Granted this may seem like a first world problem – mummies moaning because they can’t get with the modern maths method. But I think there are some things we can learn from this whole frustrating experience before we have this huge Abacus textbook bonfire.

In the first place, we should tread carefully before adopting new methodologies no matter how high they rate on the ‘fun’ rating. And – a bit of common sense wouldn’t go amiss either – learning by rote and memorising tables may not be supremely enjoyable, but neither is being left floundering in a sea of maths cluelessness thanks to these mad methods.

cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt