grrr... comprehensive maths

[vrijeme]

Just a rant.. I'm expecting the comprehensive enthusiasts to violently disagree with me.

DS1 is in year 10, Ds2 in year 8. Both excel at maths. For the second year running, DS1 got a merit on the UKMT Kangaroo. DS2 got his first merit on the junior kangaroo. Both achieved the best scores in the school, not just for their year.

Additionally, DS1 has the head of the maths dept teaching him and got a near perfect score on some recent big exams. DS2 also tends to come top, or second top (there's another boy just as good as him). Ds1 has no one who comes close with results etc.
DS1 is very bored in maths lessons. The teacher/ HoD knows and says he will do something about it, but never does. I've spoken to him 4 times over three years, so there's no way that he's unaware.
DS1 feels that the lessons aren't for him and that its a punishment being made to sit there listening to the same stuff over and over.
However, i understand the teacher's position about the number of times he needs to go over things again.
DS1 has a talent for maths but its going to waste because he is so unhappy in maths lessons that he's beginning to really dislike the subject. the teacher knows this too.
Now to the point of my rant. Both boys were due certificates for the UKMT merits. The HoD held onto them for ages (months). I wondered if maybe he was saving the for the awards evening.
But no. Neither boy got any recognition at the awards evening. Someone who achieves approx 25% lower scores in maths than DS1 got the maths award - he posted his photo with it online.
As to the UKMT certificate, the HOD stopped DS1 in the corridor a couple of days ago and gave it to him. Ds2 was given his yesterday, tucked into his maths homework.

The school is proudly comprehensive. I'd argue that they don't understand the meaning of comprehensive, because it seems that outliers are excluded.

I think there must be new concepts. e.g. i don't think DS had heard of surds until this year. But he says he understands it very quickly. Maybe the new info gets presented in very small chunks?

That was the 5-10 mins per 200 mins that I mentioned upthread about how he's not constantly bored, only for about 95% of it. There's about 5-10 mins a week of the first run through of a new concept.

I know DS is brighter than i was, but i really enjoyed my maths lessons. When I heard my maths teacher had died (many years later), I felt saddened. But my maths teacher wasn't one of a kind. I went to a comprehensive and almost all the teachers were good. They really cared and were respected in return. Why can't this teacher do what teachers in the 80s could do so easily?

Lurkedforever1 - I asked the teacher for that at the start of year 9. I even offered to mark it for him. I said the teacher could set it or I could or he could follow some text book. Basically anyway the teacher could make it work for themselves. His dept could be involved as little or as much as he pleased. He said no, all students have to do the same work (and he added by way of explanation that maybe DS would miss something important).

I meant more something entirely unrelated, either work from another subject or studying something you'd expect a school to approve of, eg a history topic not covered in the curriculum. However from his reaction to extra maths I gather that would be a definite no.

Could you maybe use the a-level as leverage? I'm presuming the teacher will want him doing maths, and doing it with him. Easy pupil, top grades, win all round for teacher with zero effort required. Do you think he might be more inclined to do something if he knew that at this point ds might drop it out of boredom, and if he doesn't he'll do it elsewhere?

veijme, I would definitely talk to the Head of Year.

It’s a shame he can’t daydream. My DS is excellent at staring out the window and switching off but I suppose it’s not for everyone!

Would it be possible for him to at least do some more challenging problems once he has finished the set work everyone does? If they gave him a textbook he could even find such problems without the teacher’s assistance.

Actually I think he should be allowed to wear headphones and just get on with doing examples after the first run through of a new topic so he doesn't have to listen to endlessly repeated information!

And all your DS needs is a copy of the curriculum to ensure he hasn’t missed anything whilst he's got his headphones on if that's a concern for the school.

@OhYouBadBadKitten I was thinking about it this afternoon,. I was thinking that maybe I'm letting DS down if I don't at least try.

I also know DH will be dead set against it as he'll say that the chances of improving things for DS will be almost non-existent so I'll be wasting everyone's time and there's better uses for my time. (I can almost hear him say these exact words!) So, if I was to do it i'd be doing it in the face of opposition from home, and the chances of making any difference would be very low, but the chances of triggering the sort of "you're the type of parent who tries to change things" reaction that I just got from @BertrandRussell would be high.

To be honest, I'm torn.

It's difficult at this point if he's going into Year 11. It might almost be better to make sure he's doing plenty of grade 9 material, to give him the best chance of getting that.

@OutwiththeOutCrowd it would be virtually impossible to miss something significant anyway. It all gets repeated over and over and then revisited a few weeks, months and probably years later. And that's before the revision lessons get underway.

@Lurkedforever1 you'd think the A level would be an enticement, wouldn't you? It would be like a low-risk, high return business deal that there for the taking. You'd make sure you took it. But schools don't seem to have that kind of commercial mindset. In fact, lots of teachers and ex-teachers that I've met over the years not to do with school, have told me that they prefer teaching the less likely to achieve because they can make a bigger difference to their lives if they succeed. Teachers don't get paid on results, do they?

Well, yes, they do have performance related pay now.
Hardly fair though, in my opinion. They are not the ones that should be putting in the efforts for exam preparation imo.

@OhYouBadBadKitten - you may be right. Where Ds drops marks is by skipping stages in workings, or just copying down a +4 as a -4 when taking it down into the next line.
Example of the sort of workings he has to do:
(x+y)^2
=(x+y)(x+y)
= x2+xy+xy+y2
=X2+2xy+Y2

DS sometimes forgets that he needs that level of detail and just puts down the first and last lines. I've seen him lose a mark for the example above, even though he ends up with the correct answer.

@PhilODox bit do they get the performance portion for helping the natural Ds up to Cs or for the number of A*s? (I know its all numbers now but hopefully you see what I am asking: what are they asked to optimise in order to get the extra money?)

I've seen him lose a mark for the example above

Which is bonkers. No exam mark scheme would penalise him for that. I'd expect a bright kid to expand brackets in their head.

All kids have computer generated targets based on their SATs results. Performance management tends to be based around levels of progress from KS2 and/or proportion of kids hitting their targets.

Performance related pay will relate to improving performance of pupils across the board. It's in the teachers interest to have as many pupils as possible reach or exceed their targets, so that across all their classes they can show that they are having a positive effect.

The efforts of the teacher to repeat and review concepts is to get the ideas into the children's long term memory, for the benefit of those who haven't got as good a recall as your son. It will also help anyone who didn't quite get it the first time round, or who has a slightly shaky understanding. It isn't meant deliberately to bore your son.

Oh my God...
(from yougov)

A new report has proposed turning most universities into "comprehensive universities" that, like comprehensive schools, are not allowed to select students based on academic ability but instead have a mixed ability intake. The author argues that the current structure's "obsession" with hierarchies and rankings, has become a barrier to meritocracy and is amplifying social segregation. A handful of elite "strategically important world-class research universities" would remain unaffected. Would you support reforming the universities system in this way, or would you prefer to keep it as it is?

That will never happen.

No it's not something I'd support at that level. I'm not against comprehensive education up to aged 18. But of course a comprehensive school doesn't mean you can't set students for subjects and teach appropriately for the ability range you're presented with.

We don't even have comprehensive education up to 18. A-levels have academic entry requirements.

Yes, sorry, meant to put 16!

Well, many universities in other countries work like that but then they kick out many students who don't pass their first year exams. It's not quite as insane as it sounds. While I don't think it's very likely to happen, if the engagement crisis continues to worsen we might need to do some drastic rethinking.

What engagement crisis?

Students not turning up to classes.

At university? I knew that was the case when I went, but when I went it was free. I'd have thought £9k would concentrate the mind a bit more?

@Assassinatedbeauty you don't have to tell me that the school isn't trying to deliberately bore my son, or that the school, teacher, whatever are not there for his sole benefit.
I can see why the school repeats and repeats stuff. The teacher doesn't do it just because he likes to hear his own voice. I know the school is there to provide an education to every child on the register.

What happens to my son isn't planned or intended. It's just an accidental by product of the system. My words were pretty to describe it, not to assign a pretty motivation to it. I just wish the teacher would mitigate some of the negative impact by allowing differentiation within the classroom.

The only thing that I think was petty and intentional was the way that certificate was given. If someone played tennis at county level, would the school have treated it in the same way? (Answer: no. This happened and they had an assembly about it).

That's interesting, when you use the phone app, it takes out all the paragraphs

We experienced this with my son - he got a scholarship to an independent school where they delighted in letting him work to the highest level he could go to. Unfortunately he is now seriously ill anyway (so hold your flames please - I have enough to cope with) so not attending anything but hospital. My point is that your son may be suited to an independent sixth form, unless you are ideologically opposed etc.