Is this really year 8 maths?

FYI, I have just done it on Friday and helped DD in solving her computing question in totally overkill way. I didn't read the first half of the paper because she came to me for the challenge question. They were converting binary and decimal and I started down the path of being very generic and wondering why year 7s know about remainder operators and substring/char at functions in scratch or python.

What I'm saying is that the question must be linked to a topic they are learning. And without the context, sometimes we approach it in a way that can be not what is expected.

As others have said. These questions look awful when you glance at them but once you are taught the method they are pretty straightforward. hard to work out if you don’t have the method. Pretty standard for year 8 but I expect designed to stretch them.

I don't think this is tricky at all. It's about know that these are questions for understanding exponents. Don't let your DD be discouraged. Work on understand what they are and the questions are quite easy.

Sorry, I wasn't trying to be snarky, but you did say you "Will raise the question with her teacher of what is expected when this happens in homework". I just thought that sounded rather like overkill at this stage. Can your daughter just have a word with her teacher to say that she found the homework tricky and wasn't sure whether/when they'd covered the topic before - the teacher might well then point her towards some previous learning and perhaps say 'try looking over what we did here' or whatever. Doesn't sound like there's a need for you to get involved unless this is a real repeated or ongoing issue.

I agree and used to tell my students to start from the assumption that they wouldn't have asked you this if you didn't have the tools to do it. So see if you can find something in your tool bag that might help. Slightly tortured metaphor but I guess that's why I don't teach English 😂

(Of course then there is always the odd time that a question does sneak in that shouldn't have - looking at you WJEC AS/A2 last year, you absolute monsters.)

Re. asking the teacher what to do if Sparx sets work she hasn't covered - although it would be useful to know this in principle in case it ever does happen, it's probably more useful for her to assume that she probably has covered it somehow, and that she just doesn't recognise it (like this example) - she will have done these rules given the harder rules you showed from her book, so it's important for her to start thinking about how she might be able to apply what she knows, to 'problem solve' and find a way of working out the answer, rather than kind of 'giving up' when she sees something unfamiliar and assuming that she hasn't covered it. It's such a vital skill in students, to be able to apply rules to broader situations, to work out how else they can get into a question, what might they need to know, how they could find those numbers in the problem etc. I think that the hardest questions on the exams (and in the end, the ones that distinguish the higher grades in GCSE from the lower ones) is not that the higher grades need 'harder maths'. They often need the same type of maths, but applied differently - the test is the ability to recognise what to do, and to generalise from the straightforward problems done in lessons or learned by rote, to something more interesting.

It's not that this is particularly tricky maths or anything new since Gove. There are some new and tricky topics, but I think that what has made the exams trickier is that aspect I mentioned above, the fact that they have to work out what to do in more complex problems and how to apply and use the material without being directed. There is a bigger range of levels of questions now, even on the same basic maths skills, which is good for distinguishing the top levels from the others.
(However, I do agree that there needs to be an intermediate tier for those who aren't going to be working at this level, so that there is more time for them to spend on learning the basics; and a foundation tier that needs to just cover the practical maths and not a lot of the abstract topics that it currently covers!).

It is very easy fir atop set year 8 ( 13 ur old)

The first one is just a simplification of fractions and the second one is just multiplication by 2 ... So yeah seems appropriate for year 8...

This shows that it’s not about doing complicated calculations so much as knowing the rules. I didn’t know how to do this because it’s been 50 years since I did my O levels! But once you showed the example, I could work out what to do.
I teach primary maths. I try to make sure children know the rule of how to carry out a calculation. When doing a unit on adding / subtracting fractions with different denominators, I make sure the children know the rule for finding a common denominator.

That poster was hardly ‘nice’ to the OP, using a patronising tone and accusing her of ‘whinging’.

Off topic but I am always fascinated that Maths A Level is the most popular A Level (at my kids’ school and I think nationally). Given how difficult so many seem to find it, it still is taken by many many pupils.

That’s not very nice now is it. You and your husband and kid have issues with maths, fair enough, many do, but you don’t need to play mean girl too now do you?

And yes, very very often students say they haven't covered something, or that a test had loads of stuff they'd never done, when actually what is happening is that they don't recognise how the topic applies to a particular question. So this sort of thing is really valuable to practise as it shows all the different ways a question might be asked. Sparx is fairly good at that compared to other programmes, I find.

I suspect she has covered it.

She is doing fractional indices on the second page (x to the power of half is the square root of x ,etc). She is not going to be doing that if she hasn't done the straightforward index rules of adding powers when you multiply, and subtracting them if you divide.

She will possibly have done it on a topic on simplifying algebra or something, and learning to write things correctly in algebra - ie., knowing that if you have bxbxb you write b-cubed, and knowing that anything divided by itself is 1, so b/b = 1. If you do b times b, and then divide by b, you're just left with one b again. If you do b times b times b, and then divide by b, you're left with bxb. And so on. Each of the b on the bottom 'undo' one of the times you multiplied by b on the top. This is just an extension of simplifying fractions, and she probably did it ages ago on Sparx as they have lots of questions on that, before you really start to get into the ones with lots of powers.

Once she understands the basics of doing it with just lower powers that you can write out, they give almost exaggerated questions with large powers so that the students realise that the same principles apply. If they understand the basic ones, the bigger numbers are no harder. A number to a power that is then all to a further power is again just an extension of this.

You would definitely do all of that before you start to do things like why x to the power of half means the square root of x. So I would bet that somewhere in her book, there is an explanation of this, long before she got to do the stuff on the page on the right.

Sparx is quite good at bringing back old topics into the homeworks, to make sure that people don't forget that material, and that's one thing I like about it. It's up to the school what topics are put into it, though, so if the school aren't using it well, that's something to bring up with them.

Incidentally, surely she should be talking to her teacher if she feels she hasn't covered it and needs a bit of help, rather than you emailing them? She's Year 8!

Looks like hieroglyphics to me 😵‍💫

I agree with previous posters. Yr7-9 is full of stuff they may not choose for Yr10-11 But they need to study it first to decide

I have A level maths from a million years ago. I can't do my Yr8s maths as I haven't done it for years. But yes looks typical

Well said.

I am all for children learning all of these things - but what we actually have is a concentration on maths (at an inappropriate level for all but those who have a real interest and talent for it), parsing (what other creative subject do we learn by tearing it apart?), testing etc.

Where is education as mind broadening, culturally expanding?

I do think that maths really is a flash point for so many children - some children just do not get it - they are not wired up in that way. Why turn them off learning for the sake of being forced to do something that they will never need?

That was the posters point. Most of school isn’t directly relevant to the majority of adult life, but you want to keep as many doors open as possible.

They were highlighting that you could same the same ‘what is the point…’ question for all subjects not just maths.

Gosh some really snooty replies on this thread! OP, sparx has videos showing the method for each question but I think it’s based on an algorithm so the questions get harder depending on how easy you find other ones I think. FWIW I work in finance and don’t do any mental arithmetic - I completely rely on excel and a calculator - the key skills I like my team to have are logical thinking, how to find the answer to a question through their own research, and how to do formulas in excel. I got an A in maths A level and I can’t say I can remember any of the syllabus as it bears no relevance to any career success I’ve had since then. I can’t do my Y8 child’s maths homework half the time either!

Why do children need to know what makes up an atom?

Because you can't understand a lot of chemistry, and quite a bit of physics without this- it's a fundemental building block WRT how the universe works.

And okay, maybe the child will never want to take chemistry or physics further, but it's absolutely awful to suggest they shouldn't get that chance.

How do you know if you'd like to be a chemist before you study chemistry? And how do you study chemistry in a meaningful way without understanding atoms?

I'm sure a lot of your other examples are similar for other subjects.