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Original poster

Teaching maths when you only have GCSE

104 replies

xsquared · 19/06/2018 19:34

Not me, but I have several colleagues whose subject specialism is not maths, but either because of a shortage of qualified maths teachers, or for whatever reason, they are teaching numeracy or maths up to GCSE foundation level.

Don't get me wrong, I am not a snob and there are plenty of effective teachers who are not officially "qualified". On the other hand, I have seen several examples of poor understanding of maths from the teacher, leading to giving wrong information to the class.

What is there to do? Nobody wants to teach maths anymore.

OP posts:
TeenTimesTwo · 19/06/2018 19:45

That's seriously depressing.

unfortunateevents · 19/06/2018 19:43

As you said, what is there to do? There seem to be shortages of teachers in every subject, no-one wants to go into the profession, lots of teachers are leaving to do other things, no teachers seem to want to encourage people to enter the profession - it's all very worrying.

Original poster
xsquared · 19/06/2018 19:43

Bless, except geography and RS are optional and do not take as many number of hours to teach. Maths is also a subject where many colleges and work places ask for at least GCSE grade C.

The lowest point was observing a colleague telling the pupils "minus minus makes plus" and the question was something like -6-4.

OP posts:
BlessYourCottonSocks · 19/06/2018 19:38

There are, sadly, many teachers teaching subjects which are not their specialism. And always have been. If you are a qualified teacher you are expected to teach whatever your HT deems is reasonable.

And at least people have a GCSE/O level in Maths. How do you fancy teaching RS when you didn't have to do it at school? Or Geography when you dropped it in Y9 - because that is considered acceptable too. Nothing special about Maths.