What maths course can I get onto when I'm REALLY bad at it?

[MathsStruggle]

Hi all,

I should've done this years ago, but not having my maths GCSE is actually limiting me from starting a career I'd like to do.

I'm just wondering what course I could get onto which would be for beginners but where I could eventually go on to do my GCSE. There is no way I'd pass the maths test to get onto a GCSE course.

I've seen a 'Maths for Work and Study' course but I'm worried I'm just so bad that no course can help me :(

Any advice?

Sometimes it's not the math that's the issue it's understanding the question. I've done a lot of maths in the past and OH is a physicist both of use were wondering what they were asking as it's so basic. It may be the way they now teach.

Better late than never right?! Surely? Ha. Thanks for all your support it means a lot!

I also didn't understand what they meant by this question...I try not to bug you again! Damn you posting these exams! :)

Damn it, not that one!
This one.

@BigFatLiar I think it's my maths, and my understanding 😂 I've got no chance!

Rounding is a way you can check your answers are about right. If I asked you to add 11.67 + 28.98 + 39.51 in your head, it's tricky. (No need to find the answer - I haven't. Also, sorry about the decimals - just making it look hard.) But rounding to
10 + 30 + 40 means I know the answer is about 80.

For your question, 6b, they want you to take your answer from 6a and use it instead of £36 to do the calculation in question 5.

So imagine the question is
Two friends share the cost of the car journey equally.
The cost is about £40. (£40 is my answer to 6a.)
Roughly how much money does each of them pay?

Your answer should be close to your answer from question 5, but not exactly the same.

Thank you... so would the answer to 6b be £20 then? If they just want me to round it?

Sorry if I sound dense (I am!)

Thanks for taking the time to help me.

I actually think you’d get a lot out of the course- you’re clearly interested and giving it a go. Please don’t worry about being judged. The ‘test’ is just to make sure they put you in the right class, not to make sure you’re good enough. If someone has made you feel bad in the past that’s their bad teaching.

You are getting it OP

You can do the maths bit, it's the wording of the questions you need to get used to.

If you are in Wales there is a fairly new GCSE which is 'Maths Numeracy' it's a full GCSE but is more about arithmetic / maths in everyday use.

Start with functional skills and maybe build up to it.

I'm a maths teacher. Focus on what you can do, not what you can't. You don't need 100%. FWIW both those two questions you were stuck on are the same style. You can easily learn that- it's just exam style practice.

I know we seem to go on about how kids are like sponges, and adults can't learn anything, but it's just not true. Without having "done" any maths since school, I'd be willing to bet you're much better now than you were then. You'll be better at studying and time management for sure, and crucially you'll have the motivation.

OP - just wanted to say good on you for doing a maths course. My maths is appalling and I'm actually quite intimidated by working with numbers.

Your writing is clear and logical so I think once you get into the course and learn what they mean by the questions and the 'maths language', you will make rapid progress. I think you will be able to do more than you think once you understand the questions and gain confidence. Good luck

Yes, £20. Which if you've done the first one correctly should be close to the right number.

This is a self check, so for example if you'd done half of £36, and accidentally ended up with something that was really off like £5 - to check by rounding, you'd go well OK, £36 is nearly £40 so the answer must be somewhere around £20. Hang on then, £5 can't be right. And you'd know you'd need to go back and calculate half of £36 again.

That is why self-checking is useful in maths, because it can help you spot a mistake. Everyone makes mistakes sometimes, and if you're trying to calculate something important like how much paint you need for a room, it would be a bit of a disaster if you ended up buying too much or too little. Or if you owed somebody money and accidentally gave them not enough, that would be embarrassing.

Rounding something makes it easier, because working out half of £40 is eacher than working out half of £36, but it gives you a figure you can check against and think right, OK, yep, 20 is about 18, I've got it right. Or oh hang on, this is supposed to be about £20 but I've said 12. That can't be right, I'll go back and try again.

Being able to self check gives you confidence in your answers, rather than not really knowing if the answer is correct and just feeling like it's a mystery and guessing game. If they didn't teach this in the past no wonder people think maths is complicated and mysterious! I don't know whether I'm younger than you or just was very lucky with my teachers, but it's one of the most useful skills to give you confidence, IMO.

Functional Skills starts at pre gcse level and is very practical , problem based questions.

Yes to £20 being the answer. No to you sounding dense. So many people get really anxious around maths questions and tests and getting things wrong. I agree with everyone else that you'd do really well on a course.

Just hopping on to say my MIL did a catch-up maths course (can't remember which) some years ago when she was in her 60s.

She was convinced she was bad at maths and, therefore, stupid. She was so ashamed that she drove to a different area so she wouldn't bump into anyone she knew, and she originally told us all she was taking a painting class!

She quickly discovered that she'd misunderstood a few of the very early 'building block' concepts in maths. Once she had them down it all started to click and she really enjoyed it. Knowing that she wasn't 'stupid' had a massive impact on her confidence and self esteem. She found the whole thing quite emotional (in a good way!)

I wish you every success!

I'm in a similar position to you OP, I need a Maths GCSE for a Social Work Masters.
I hate Maths and have tried to avoid it as much as possible my whole life but can no longer evade it.
Literally rang local college yesterday and applied for online Functional Skills, they are sending me out an assessment to see what level I am capable of.
Good luck to you x

To add to my previous post - when DD was in Year 3/4 she started to get worried about maths. Her teacher was adamant she was fine but, based on what happened with MIL, we got her a tutor. As with my MIL she'd not grasped some of the very early maths concepts, but because she is good at rote learning she'd managed to get by just fine until the maths had got more complex.

Her tutor made sure the early concepts were properly embedded and, like with MIL, it clicked. She's 12 now and has just finished year 8. She's in the top set for maths, it's her favourite subject and she has huge confidence in her abilities.

Seeing what happened with two members of my family I do always wonder whether we should be slower to teach maths in order to spend longer at those foundation stages.

I’m doing my functional skills now OP, it’s free and done over Google classroom at home, run by WBTC.
www.wbtc-uk.com/english-and-maths/

Seeing what happened with two members of my family I do always wonder whether we should be slower to teach maths in order to spend longer at those foundation stages.

Controversial opinion here, lower set maths groups should get the best teachers. In these days of small school budgets if a maths teacher leaves and isn't replaced then another teacher is given the low group regardless of their teaching subject.

I've taught maths in FE and one of the best things I have heard is, "Oh I get that now, I never understood it at school".

It has to be taught properly for sure!
I got decent Maths A-levels but just rote learned all the questions. It wasn’t until I got to uni and a kind friend ‘re-taught’ the fundamentals that it made more sense.
Like for example points on a line. And how visual matrices are

Flying now with graduate level subjects requiring these skills…

OP If I were answering 6b I would put something like:

£36 rounded to nearest 10 = £40
£40 divided by 2 people in the car = £20 per person

Original answer of £18 per person, rounded to nearest 10 = £20 so the first answer is likely correct.

Often in these tests they're not just looking for the answer, but for you to show them how you got there, so that it's clear whether you understand the process to use.

I totally agree maths needs to be taught properly from early on. I didn't get some of the basic building block stuff until I took an algebra class as part of an associates degree in college in the US. There they require you to meet a minimum standard of maths and literacy to be able to graduate and I had to take an entry test and a basic and intermediate level algebra class, as well as a probability and statistics class to get my qualification. A lot of the stuff I covered, I'd done in gcse, but didn't understand why certain processes were used, or how that impacted more complex mathmatics, I'd just learned it by rote, so couldn't manipulate concepts to apply them in any situation outside that one example (not sure that makes sense!). I learned an awful lot from those classes. So OP I do have something of a sense of what it's like facing learning maths as an adult, I was 30 when I started that study course. If I can do it, I think anyone can. If you have the enthusiasm to want to try, that's half the battle right there.

I teach children who struggle with maths as a private tutor, particularly those with language issues. And occasionally I get an adult wanting lessons as well, doing some sort of catch-up course. I find them often really enjoyable to teach, because they can be so determined, really work at things, and often have more skills than they realise once you show them how to translate the problems into things they are familiar with (e.g., thinking of decimal questions as problems with money, or negative numbers as bills to pay, or whatever). Online lessons have been great as it's so easy to draw things on the screen and show visual representations of how something works.

Often the problems are actually back at the very earliest steps - for example, really knowing and understanding things like basic number bonds/fact families (don't worry about the names for things like that, as once you're shown what they are, you will know what they're talking about): but things like really knowing in the example above that if 3 + 11 = 14, then 14 is made up of two 'chunks' of 3 and 11, and if you take away the 11, you've still got the 3, or vice versa. So you don't have to learn all those facts independently. You can see that if you had to do 14 - 3, you might count backwards to see what the other 'chunk' is, because 3 is such a small one. But if it's 14-11, you might start at 11 and count up to 14 to find the missing bit, because 11 is much closer to 14. Counting and number lines start to develop that sense of number really well, which is why they spend so much time with visual aids like that in early education. it's really helpful for adults who've missed that to have the visual aids too, and get that internal number sense, so that they don't think of maths as just a series of artibrary methods that have to be learned and memorised.

After the first question I suspect they may want to know why £40 eg

the two 10s are 40 and 30,
£40 - £36 = £4
£36 - £30 = £6
£4 < £6 so £40 is the nearer number t0 £36
£40/2 = £20

Don't panic about doing 'math' for most of these if you can go to Tesco and can check your change you should be fine.

I was not expecting to get this many responses, thank you so much everyone!

I'm just waiting to hear back from the college, although now I'm worried that they're closed for the summer holidays? 🤦‍♀️

My husband got a B in his maths GCSE, he was trying to help me with a couple of the questions last night but he has a totally different way of working things out! I'll see if I can post an example of how he was working out one of the sums. I think I won't be able to listen to him because I'll get confused...I'm a bit like "this is the way" once I learn something 😅 even though the why he did it was petty clever! It won't help me in any exams!

I'm actually enjoying working through those exam papers, I'll do another one tonight and see how stuck I get. I have realised I actually need to go back and learn some of my times tables.... I've told my husband he will be getting ignored in the evenings for a while!

My early years experiences with maths were not good. My dad tried to teach me (mum couldn't as she didn't know maths herself) and if I didn't understand it I could see him getting angry and frustrated with me and it put me off. He just used to get angry and say "you don't want to learn, be a lug then!"

The other problem I had was that the way my dad taught was different to school, so then I was even more confused and then I just assumed I was too stupid to learn it / didn't want to learn it... ended up with an F for GCSE.

Sorry, bit of a tangent there! I know my dad just wanted the best for me, he didn't want me to be like him and my mum... I'm the same with my kids but I just want to lead my example not by shouting at them!

Oh, and I'm 35.

What annoys me about maths is that I spend ages trying to work out what the question they're asking me means, only to find out it's actually simple?! Why can't they just say "what's 36 rounded to the nearest 10?" Why word it the way they did!

I know you've already explained to me why it's worded that way, but my brain doesn't like it. Nope.

I used to waste so much time in exams trying to understand what the questions meant ;(