to be horrified at the behaviour in bohunt school

[SEsofty]

Just watched the programme about Chinese teachers in uk. Whilst I appreciate that it is reality tv and thus exaggeration for effect I was still horrified with the apparent number of children who were talking in class.

I'm not that accident and went to a very normal school but talking whilst teacher did simply didn't happen. I don't agree with the Chinese methods but talking whilst someone is trying to teach you is simply rude.

Vanilla, would you agree that some children are naturally better at maths than others and pick up new concepts more quickly?

i have not read the whole thread. I currently have two Hong Kong Chinese students staying with me and we watched the show together. It was very interesting hearing about their school day and hearing their thoughts on whzt they saw. One of them has a friend at school in Leicester who was astonished by the poor discipline compared to Hong Kong (quite progressive compared to China).
One of my students goes to a school where every subject is taught in English. So cantonese-speaking students learn french taught in english :o

Vanilla, my DCs sat in rows in their (non-set) US elementary school to age 14, and so did I at primary school in Ireland -- again no setting. TNS, I agree 100% with the contention that seating arrangements can be very important and table grouping can be very detrimental to some children.

I also agree that 'differentiated teaching' is a horrible practice because it consigns children to the rubbish heap from age five onwards. It amazes me that the UK is prepared to sacrifice so many children so that what is assumed to be the 'best and the brightest' can advance.

so what do you do with able mathematicians.for example going back a few years, when ds was in y7 there were 2 kids in his year who had sat and passed a GCSE module for fun whilst at primary. how do you keep them progressing in a .mixed ability class with kids who can't understand equivalent fractions say ?

mathanxiety- differentiated teaching gives children at the bottom the support they need to access the material and catch up. ds1 was on the bottom table for maths in y1 and ended up with an A at A level and is now in the second year of Engineering at Durham. differentiation prevents* children from falling further and further behind. Any teacher will tell you that children do not develop in a linear fashion.they learn at different times and in different ways

Differentiation sounds great but the reality is that it often does not extend far enough to properly help the least able or challenge the most able.

As to "catching up", how is this possible unless the people in front either slow down or stop altogether to wait for those making slow progress? Then, when they are all at the same level again, the faster ones will pull in front again until they are obliged to stop and wait again. After a while, that gets a bit frustrating, even for the most saintly.

I expect it is the selective schools in Asia where they only take the top set.

Sorry- missed a whole page - that was in reply to vanilla at 23:11

So when you have done all that from reception class, Vanilla and you get to a lesson where 6 have failed to understand and 24 have fully grasped it - what does the teacher actually do for the next lesson?

In any method you don't wait for an assessment to find out how they were doing. As the teacher you were in the lesson with them! You know how they were doing - and if any any doubt you have their work in front of you. You have to have marked it before you can carry on with the next lesson. That was the point of my question. You know that 6 have not got it and you need to intervene- so what do you actually do?

Why the assumption that the disruption comes from the 'bottom' table? It very rarely does because those at the 'bottom' ( as you like to call it) generally have the extra help with the TA and so are concentrated.
Disruption is likely to come from the 'top' who are bored stiff and have been ready to move in for 2 days. Or do you have the mindset that says bright children can't be disruptive?

How do you 'not leave them behind in reception' when some children come in able to add and subtract numbers in their head and some don't know what number 5 means? Are you proposing to take them all through finding out you need 7 counters for number 7 when they are quite comfortable with 77 and can take 5 off it without any counters or number squares?

What is 'rapid intervention' ? How does it work?
What happens if you get a child from elsewhere who arrives the middle of term and is 9 yrs old and has never done you method? What do you do with them? What are you going to do with the child who arrives mid term from Eastern Europe with not one word of English? What happens with the child who has been off ill for 2 weeks?

Where is the evidence that 'sitting in rows' worked for centuries and all turned out well? You seem to have ignored me explaining that my mother was bored stiff in 1929 waiting for everyone to get to the same point.
There are plenty of autobiographies by older people ( many now dead) who sat in rows - behaved themselves in fear of corporal punishment- and we're still failed dreadfully by sitting in rows in silence.

What happens in a small village school where the teacher has 2 years in one class?

Could you actually answer my questions Vanilla.

children do not develop in a linear fashion, but in fits and starts. their brain develops a bit and suddenly they can understand stuff they couldn't before. maths is concept based wirh learning building on itself. once an underpinning concept us understood, all the stuff built on tip of it often becomes accessible and the child can move up a group

Math anxiety I really agree about seating arrangements. I run workshops in schools and first thing I do is get them to line up their tables so they all face the front. How can a young child be expected to listen to a teacher who she has her back to, when the kid opposite is making eye contact, whispering and pulling funny faces.
I also make them sit up straight. Strong spines, deep breath to wake them up, eyes front. It really helps their concentration and they know immediately it's for their benefit, not mine.

But only if the next group up have not made the same amount of progress or more...

Learning isn't linear. How often have I heard that from teachers justifying why my children haven't moved on at all? Obviously nothing to do with the fact they haven't been taught anything new for ages thanks to mixed classes doing work they mastered a couple of years earlier.

I get the impression that this all hinges on Vanilla telling me quite plainly that 'all brains are the same'. This supposes that if you get 30 children at 5 yrs of age, teach them the mastery method, they will all be capable of doing Maths at Cambridge at the end!

This is just not true. It is highly unlikely, out of a mixed intake, that you would get more than 2 who could do that.

People also seem to see a huge stigma of being in anything that is not the top group. I don't see any stigma. I think that children need to be taught in a group with other children of the same level at a pace they can understand. There is the peculiar view that those at the 'bottom' are left to rot with low expectations and no chance of progressing!

My DS was in the lower maths set for his entire junior school career. It was best for his personality. He was in the third group starting secondary. He was a slow developer but he eventually gained his confidence aged 13 and that is when he progressed to the top set and needed his A at Maths A'level to get into his RG university. There was no stigma in being in lower groups- he got the appropriate teaching at the time.
My DS3 is the arty one - he has made a career of it. I can't remember which maths groups he was in - probably the middle one at primary and certainly not the top set at secondary. He got a perfectly respectable grade for Maths at GCSE, but Maths was not his subject and you would expect him to be in the same set as his friend who did Maths at Warwick. They had different needs- there is no stigma in this.
My other DS got special help all the way through. He was not academic at all. He got a B at GCSE. He did not go into 6 th form. There was no stigma. He had friends who were in the top maths set- he had friends who stayed on for 6th form.
My brother was very slow at Maths- I remember my parents once bribing him to get him to count to 10! He did nothing much until he was 13 and then he zoomed to the express stream in the grammar school.
My father's school reports are hilarious reading - very traditional - sitting in rows - 1930s grammar school teaching. He was very poor at maths until he was 15 yrs and he went from the bottom of the class to near the top.

The real hardship is being in a mixed ability group and not understanding the work or being bored because you immediately understood it.

When I was at school ( being an ancient person of over 60!) we sat in rows, we had no ability tables and we had no disruption. We had no test scores read out. However I could have placed everyone in that class in order of maths ability! I was in the lessons - I knew who was understanding the lesson or not- who asked sensible questions etc. I bet I was more or less accurate.

All children are different.

I can see that mixed ability teaching suited you if you were middle band or top middle band- the teacher has to aim for that.

so what side are you arguing for var123 you seem to be contradicting yourself!!

Sorry meant you would not not expect him in the same class as his friend who went to Warwick university to do maths.

if you are weak at maths. what you need most to improve is appropriate teaching at your level. not an ego massage by being put in a mixed ability class where you are not understanding anything

I don't get the idea that you think all primary classes have tables grouped together.
It is individual teacher choice how they arrange their classroom. In one school you are likely to get several styles.
I have done rows and groups within the same year. I like a change.
Often I would have rows or groups within one day- they are easy to move. You might want rows for maths and groups for art. In some maths lessons you need groups if they are sharing equipment.
In literacy you might want rows for writing but groups for discussions.

Exactly MadamArcati. What point is there in my DS, who had special needs and an IEP being in a large, mixed ability class when he could get extra help in a small class of children who needed the same sort of help?
That was why he progressed enough to get a B at GCSE - I think he would have been a D of E in a mixed ability class and being told 'you don't need extra help- all brains are the same and you just need the mastery method'!
There was no stigma.

Not sure what you find contradictory madam, but what I am arguing is that although mixed class differentiation has clearly worked well for your son, giving him the option to catch up and move in front, it has not worked for my sons at all. They have always been able to do maths easily and consequently have spent whole years doing things they had already mastered years earlier because others in their class hadn't mastered them.

Their challenge is to find a way to maintain their interest in the subject when they have to use long term memory to remember an occasion when they had to think hard to work out the solution.

I believe that teachers can only differentiate so much. There comes a point when teaching the middle but giving the least able slightly easier work and the more able slightly harder work, let's down both the top and the bottom 10%.

I have resisted responding on this thread but have caved in.

I am a maths teacher with a maths degree at a comp in an area with a boys and girls selective schools in the same town although it doesn't make a big impact on the cohort. Selective take 120 each per year from a huge area. We take 240 per year with Sports being our specialism.

At my school in the maths department all classrooms are effectively sat in rows or similar with everyone facing forwards. We sometimes rearrange for odd lessons but in general it's rows. In 3 schools I have taught in this seems to be the norm.

Last year I taught top set for GCSE and also set 8 out of 9 sets so pretty much bottom set.

I used my professional judgement to show my lower set certain high grade topics I felt they would be able to grasp to boost their chances of better grades. I did decide not to teach some topics as I knew they would really struggle with the concepts and it would knock their confidence hugely. A huge part of my job is building up these young people's confidence.

Since becoming a teacher I have assisted so many adults to redo GCSE in Maths as they need it for future study - the biggest issue they all seem to have is having been told they were rubbish at the subject so they have no confidence.

Mixed ability teaching is tough in maths, until we set yr 7 we teach in tutor groups. I can have a class of 25 students who range from level 6 (2 levels above end of primary expected) down to a student who is below level 2 so still has the ability of an average child in a reception class. I will admit that is a challenge to teach anything meaningful for all. I have (before I suggested changes to topics) struggled to teach a basic algebra lesson to such a wide split, one student moaning loudly it was easy whilst another sat in tears as 'he was always going to rubbish at maths'. This does nothing positive for anyone. So I do support setting in the current method of teaching.

With regard to revisiting previous taught topics a lot of Primary maths is not taught well, I know a lot of primary teachers who don't understand maths deeply enough to be able to teach 'mastery' they learn it just before they teach it - sadly this is creeping into secondary at an alarming rate as well.

So we do have to recap to iron out any previous misconceptions - but I don't assume no knowledge but as Noble says you would be shocked at how little students recall. A huge part of this problem is they are the 'google' generation where they don't need to retain information as it's all at the touch of a button - this is an attitude I have discussed with a lot of 16 year olds at length, they struggle to retain stuff as they don't often need to a skill that is slowly disappearing.

With regard to the TV programme I agree the students are being portrayed as a group of some of my worst ever classes. I think they were poorly prepared and didn't 'buy' into the experiment. Maybe an inter school challenge would have worked better. I do feel they are showing a huge lack of respect and very poor manners - but I hate to say it in my nice town and middle classed school it is very typical Yr9 behaviour I am just limited to 20-30 of them! The SLT seem to also be lacking the respect and manners I would expect as well.

Apologies for mammoth post and typos am on my phone.

Noodledoodledoo

Surely primary teachers understand basic maths? Even the level 6 stuff isn't complex, but what at level 5 would you not be surprised to find an adult with a qualification to teach might not know?

It never occurred to me before but thinking about it, it would explain why sometimes ds2s teachers struggled to mark past papers and calculate the score.

It isn't possible to manage to teach in a primary school without adequate maths. As a supply teacher I was immediately thrown into teaching yr 6 maths with no preparation. Many primary pupils are very bright in Maths- they would soon find out if you were weak!
Maybe lower down the school it is possible.

I do Primary Liaison work from my school and I have many teachers ask me to go over various topics at Yr 6 and below to help them teach it. I spend a lot of time teaching students 1 isn't a prime number which they have been taught at primary. Division is taught very randomly good/badly. We have up to 40 feeder schools so get quite a range. Just two examples.

This in no way applies to all primary teachers but for some it is an area of weakness they have to be an expert in all subjects - one if the reasons I am secondary. If I was primary they would all be fab mathematicians but rubbish at literacy as it really isn't my strong point.

My primary liaison work is going into spend an hour with the brightest yr 5/6 students to extend and enrich the maths learning. Primaries ask us to come in and we cover about 8 schools to do it.