No Shit Sherlock : Supportive parents do more than good schools to boost children's exam results

[TalkinPeace2]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-19923891

You don't say ....

That is good news TFM.

It's good for the kids, but it's playing merry bell with my work life balance...

My DCs primary did less homework than most and the parents were not happy and complained. They were told if you want to do more take the kids to museums and read to them. They are one of the highest performing schools in the area.

Hell. HELL!

TFM. Why do they have to get teachers or the same teachers? It is not right that you should have to do this.

Personally I agree that the money should be targeted in that way rather than giving every child a laptop in a very middle class area like the school near us when most will have a computer, Xbox etc at home!

It effectively adds a couple of days on to every term, and an hour on to 3 days a week. It isn't directed time. I'm not forced to do it. I am expected to do it, and it is very effective. But I think my directed time should be the same, but spread out over a longer day, with adequate time for preparation and marking. That would mean employing more teachers though, which is the opposite of what is happening...

"I think knowing the fact that multiplication is multiple addition, is far more important than being able to parrot tables."

Not necessarily true for children who aren't as good as you at maths. People don't learn tts to parrot them. They learn tts to use in other maths. It means that while you're to work out which fraction turns upside down, or what to add and divide to find a ratio, you're not also thinking about the arithmetic. You can focus on the method.

I think what you suggest is damaging and has held sway over the curriculum for a very long time. It might work if you're lucky or different but for the vast majority good tt's open the door to further applications and more complicated maths.

I hate that phrase "parrot tts". You're a mathematician - you KNOW they have a function, and essential function. Don't pretend.

They have to have teachers, because they need teaching. We don't supervise homework. They need more than supervision to maintain focus.

Losing Trust "My DCs primary did less homework than most and the parents were not happy and complained. They were told if you want to do more take the kids to museums and read to them. They are one of the highest performing schools in the area. " Fantastic.

There was a school a couple of years ago that refused to set homework for Primary kids and it made the headlines. The head was brandished as some kind of maverick nutter by the media and a heroine by a handful of parents like me.

The focus on maths 'language' and method at the age of 5 or 6 is absurd. I remember mine being given a new method every half term or so which completely confused her.

Yes all those different methods, nightmare. "Here you are, here's the Chinese, Arabic, Indian, Russian, chunking and several other different ways to do times. You choose the one you like best!" Stupidity on a stick.

I think it all went wrong when they demanded that multiplication be understood before learning tts. That way tts were being rote learned (crappily) well beyond the age when it's easy and fun and just absorbed like a sponge. Right exactly at the time they can be bored by drilling. In the meantime their understanding of more complicated maths is being hampered by not knowing their tts. Result:

I don't think it's that unusual Brycie, I was the same - hopeless at arithmetic, but as soon as maths began to get more abstract I was away. It was year 6, and the teachers were rather surprised at my rapid rise up the maths tables.

It is unusual though gelo. Given that the idea that it's not unusual has held sway over the curriculum, and given the results of that experiment, it obviously doesn't work for most children. And even if for children who are different, how does it harm them to start absorbing their times tables early, before they even know what they are, so that they have them at their fingertips by the time they come to do more complex maths?

I suspect Brycie, that it is only unusual because a lot of such children never get the chance to show their skills. I think success in maths isn't as much knowing tables (which really in this era of calculators etc isn't a skill that's hugely essential), but more about understanding the principles and algebra etc. Of course there's a strong correlation between people who are good at tables and those who are good at abstract maths, but I don't think that's very much to do with cause and effect but more coincidental. I suspect some people who have blocks learning number bonds and so on, who may well be able to be good at proper maths don't ever get that far because they're turned off maths and not expected to achieve at it long before they get the opportunity. If you're pegged to do foundation level GCSE you rarely or never get the chance to show those skills after all. If you are being given differentiated work that doesn't have the hard bits on you will never know if you can do them or not.

I'm sure a lot of children don't get a chance to show their skills, convinced of it. That's because they don't have the basics which help them flower when they start to do more advanced maths, to engage with the new concepts without worrying about the tables. Are you really suggesting children should use calculators to do 3x7? How will calculators help with finding a lowest common denominator? How distracting to move away from a piece of geometry and use a calculator instead of instantly knowing that 360 / 4 is 90? I can't take that seriously.

Presumably, you don't take it seriously because you are lucky enough to have a mind that retains that information more easily. For someone less fortunate why not use a calculator? I believe they can do factorisation these days too and probably find LCDs. As long as the understanding is there why not use the technology available to help with the mechanics? In real life there are few situations where instant recall is essential even if it is quite useful on occasion.

No, I don't take it seriously because the curriculum has been based around ideas like that for maybe fifteen years? and the results show that there's a problem.

In fact my own son, now older teenager, would have been great at maths had his confidence not been destroyed at primary. He was doing fractions (and so on) without a firm grasp of times tables as they weren't drilled into him (despite my efforts - we too only realised late that they weren't doing them in school. At GCSE he didn't have a problem with the concepts at all, his basic arithmetic let him down. For GCSE we had to revise times tables. The idea that children don't need to learn their tts "because they can use a calculator" has been tried and tested and failed. Now if you buy two ice creams for 1.20 some teenager behind the counter needs a calculator. It's a joke. And worse - it's not fair on them. It would have been so easy for it not to be like this.

Given that the teenager behind the counter has a till that does all those sums for him/her they don't need to know it. And furthermore, the fact the till does the work means that it won't ever become automatic either, but really so what .

As mummytime has stated down the thread and I can attest too, if you have the understanding, you develop alternate strategies that are almost as fast and almost as good, but it's only using a skill regularly that will keep it going, else you get rusty. So we have the situation where people can do things they need to on a regular basis but have to stop and think about things they only do occasionally - where's the problem?

Not sure why you think kids aren't taught their times tables because they can use a calculator. SATs exams are for the majority of the marks, non-calculator (the non calc paper and the mental test). GCSE maths is 50% non calculator. Kids are expected to know them.

Noblegiraffe: gelo is suggesting that tts are unimportant because children can use calculators. Yes I was going to mention the non calculator work but then gelo might say "that's not the real world". I think tts haven't been drilled because it's thought oppressive, boring, ought to be done after they have understanding of multiplication, doesn't need to be done if they have understanding of multiplication so they can do the sum each time and don't need total recall.

Gelo: "Given that the teenager behind the counter has a till that does all those sums for him/her they don't need to know it." I have high hopes that Britain's children, even those unfortunate enough to have unsupportive parents, would like to do more in their lives than use a till to work out 2 x 1.20. Heck, some of them might even design tills themselves one day. Not going to happen if they need a till to work out 2 x 1.20.

and being able to do mental maths would have been a huge help to some of the students when I was marking ICAEW coursework - they could not logic check their answers ....

What's ICAEW?