to think that number bonds epitomise everything that is wrong with the UK approach to education?

[IceBeing]

For the uninitiated, number bonds are groups of numbers that form additions. Eg. The number bonds for 10 are 1-9, 2-8 3-7 etc.

If you understand what addition / subtraction are, then clearly you don't need number bonds. They are a means to get kids to give the right answers by rote to questions they presumably don't understand yet.

This leads on smoothly to learning times tables by rote as a substitute for having any idea what multiplication is, learning the grid method for multiplying multi-digit numbers...learning by rote to rearrange algebraic expressions.....learning to factorize quadratic equations by rote...learning to manipulate vectors by rote...

Then at the end of this I have physics undergraduates telling me they don't like exams where you have to work things out, they prefer questions where you just repeat the right facts.

But it all starts with number bonds.

AIBU to think it matters a hell of a lot more that kids understand how numbers work, what addition and multiplication mean, than that they can give a nice clear confident, and above all, quick answer to a list of approved questions?

AIBU to think the best thing you can do for a kid that doesn't 'get' addition yet, is wait until they are bit older and try again, and that the very worst thing you can do is replace understanding with a rule set to learn?

There is a lot less classic children's literature in French and a lot of books published for children today are translations (very often from English). And not always drawn from the most inspiring or uplifting modern works.

Children learn to read later in France and there is far less encouragement by schools of reading for pleasure. DC also do far less creative writing at French primary school - and of course reading feeds creative writing and storytelling. In a general sort of way, storytelling and a way with words are not something that French DC are encouraged to develop.

I totally accept that kids from poorer backgrounds will be behind when formal education begins (when ever it begins).

I don't think the best solution to this is to catch them up as fast as possible without giving them the change to learn for themselves.

I think even less of the idea that we should handicap all kids equally by putting number bonds and phonics into nurseries.

Sort of like destroying all interest in learning for everyone so that kids from backgrounds that have poor opinions of learning won't be disadvantaged...

I wonder about how reading is taught in Japan/China...I mean it is definitely harder to be literate in Japanese!

So do they start earlier? Or wait till kids are older and cope more easily?

Doesn't it make more sense to teach things to children in the order in which they are accessible? If English is hard to learn to read, we should be starting later not earlier!

even in my physics department we aren't crazy enough to teach the hardest stuff first because it takes the students longer to learn it!

We teach the hardest stuff last, because then, with all the added sophistication of thinking and fluency of maths that comes in the intervening years the students can actually have a crack at general relativity or whatever.

Ha! So apparently Japanese kids only begin learning the alphabet aged 6. They then learn slowly over 6 years how to write Kanji.

What do we mean by poorer background?
Financially or academically?

poverty - either educational or monetary.

So interesting Bonsoir, thank you.

surely you can be poor but educated or keen to educate
or
rich and poorly educated/utterly disinterested in your children

a lot of members of lower socio groups are very keen to educate their children out of their situation

There is a high degree of correlation between disadvantage in socio economic terms and poor attainment in the academic arena. Social, emotional and cognitive differences between the most disadvantaged 20% and the rest are well established by age 3 and the gap widens by age 5. Differences in attitudes about the possibility that individuals' choices and efforts in the school setting can have an effect on outcome, towards the purpose of school and especially towards higher education, have proven very hard to tackle.

Actually I'm not disagreeing. I thought it was somewhat sweeping and overly generalised and I was interested to receive clarification.

I see a lot of problems with over indulged and under engaged teens and young adults who have had masses of advantages thrust upon them but limited parental engagement.

Decent self esteem work with some assertiveness training and good guidance would make a huge amount of difference for children from lower socio economic groupings

There is far too much emphasis on passing exams in school (which most kids do by rote learning), and far too little on applying the knowledge or actually enjoying your studies.

I'm only a few pages into the thread but just had to agree with that. I have lost count of the number of times my DSCs ywere told, on asking a question about something in class, something like "oh you don't need to know that as it's not on the syllabus".

'Scuse typos...

Kim, if you've got a kid who can't understand how numbers work, at what point do you stop flogging that dead horse, hand them a calculator and see how far they can go once that particular barrier is removed?

What's the difference between giving them a calculator and rote teaching them adding up?

kim, I think the problem is that teaching in school is actually about all of those things, and everyone has a different idea of how teaching time should be split between them.

But that child won't be allowed to use a calculator in a large proportion of their GCSE exam so the rote learning will give them a fighting chance.

Of course I would like to think that my job is to get kids to understand and enjoy maths, but getting them the best mark I can on a public exam to enable them to access jobs and the next level of teaching is what I was hired to do. Yes it's about league tables for the school, but the kid isn't going to thank me if I deliberately don't do something that I know will help them pass their exam (not cheating!) out of some moral principle about it not being real maths.

Like the various shortcut methods for adding fractions that don't give any understanding of common denominators - you can be sure I don't teach it that way lower down the school, but my GCSE resit group are shown them. People get sniffy about formula triangles and while I teach the kids to rearrange formulae as best I can, I will also be giving them triangles so they have the best chance of correctly answering a speed distance time question.

IceBeing--I live in Japan and read and write Japanese fluently.

Japanese is not written with an "alphabet." It is written with two (very easy-to-learn) syllabary systems (hiragana and katakana), plus Chinese characters (kanji).

Although theoretically, elementary schools "teach reading and writing from zero, starting with hiragana and katakana" in practice the large majority of kids can already read both (certain hiragana, and usually katakana as well) by the time they enter elementary school at age six, and are generally pretty good at writing them too.

These syllabary systems are so easy to learn that it's super easy for parents and other unqualified people (daycare staff etc.) to teach them, and for kids to pick them up little by little by looking at picture books--rather like Finland's writing system. I would be very surprised if I met a five-year-old who wasn't at least reading hiragana.

The schools "run over" the syllabary systems very quickly over the course of a couple of months in the first grade, then rapidly launch into kanji.

By the way, the difficulty of reading kanji does not stop kids from reading children's books, including their textbooks. That's because of the practice of using "furigana" in children's books.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furigana

Kids' books use kanji just like adult books, but they insert the hiragana (which shows the pronunciation) in small font above the kanji, so that kids can gradually pick up more and more kanji, while at the same time being able to actually read the book. The difficulty of reading kanji therefore does not pose a barrier against children doing things like reading books and learning to love and enjoy books, acquiring general knowledge, enriching their vocabulary and being able to read their school textbooks.

By contrast, in the case of English we have no furigana system, which means that children cannot read English books until they have actually mastered our difficult orthography system.

My own observations of the differences of writing systems here is actually yet another reason why I have decided to start my daughter to read English early. My observations of Japanese kids quickly being able to read children's books in their own language, makes me feel even more strongly that it is a good thing to be able to read sooner rather than later.

Plus, I've heard too many cases of English-speaking parents here who delayed teaching English reading until age 6, only to find that their kid now had no interest in doing so--he or she could already easily read Japanese children's books (thanks to furigana), and this sapped their motivation for mastering the much more difficult English alphabet system.

Until I was about 14 I was terrified of Maths! I didn't 'get' it at all and each lesson just confused me further. We weren't taught number bonds back then, but I think I developed them in my head at some point and counting made perfect sense from then on. When I see a 6 I also see a 4-sized space next to it, when I think of 7, I see three dots beside it and so on... I am definitely a fan of number bonds, particularly when maths doesn't 'click' with a child.

It's a pity not to allow calculators in exams imo. DD3 did an exam today (ACT in the US) and had her calculator, plus they gave the formulae on the paper. The idea behind that is you decide where to use the information and think your way through the multitude of problems. Her calculator was set to exam mode. In a setting like that, thinking is separated from memorisation.

NG, if there is a purpose to the methods that are taught beyond getting the answers right, then how are the tricks you described better than using a calculator?

Maths is easier to learn in Chinese I think because the numbers are all organised around multiples of 10. e.g. 12 is 'ten two' and 25 is 'two ten two'. It's a bit confusing to translate big numbers from English as they have 100, 1000, 10000, and 100000000 as units? instead of 100, 1000, 1000000, 1000000000. But that's obviously not a problem for Chinese kids computing in their native language. I guess Japanese is the same?

Yes, it is very similar in Japanese. I think there is some evidence that the linguistic structure of certain languages may give some kids a head start. But I think the main difference is the way maths is taught and the cultural mindset towards maths in the "East Asian" countries. Lots of things about the Japanese education system annoy me A LOT, but I do think they do a much better job of teaching maths, honestly.

I've known kids go through international schools here and Japanese schools here, and the differences in maths instruction methods are often striking. It's pretty much accepted that at most of the international schools, esp. at elementary level, you will HAVE to do quite a lot of tutoring/Kumon for maths if you want them to be as good as they would be at a Japanese school.

"NG, if there is a purpose to the methods that are taught beyond getting the answers right, then how are the tricks you described better than using a calculator?"

Every time you interrupt a mathematical problem to mash buttons on a calculator, the process of interruption and shifting from task to task eats up "working memory"--the thinking bit of your brain that you should be devoting to actually working out the problem.

Like when I lived in an apartment with an old-style electricity supply: if you plugged in too many devices, the electric light would go all dim. Not enough electricity left over, so the lighting got compromised.

The more maths facts people have memorized, the more working memory they have left to deal with the interesting/hard/creative bits of maths.

Think of memorization as "the world's most amazing labor-saving device."