What to do about Maths?!

[Hiddeninplainsight]

Right, I have been reading the very interesting thread on maths. So many interesting experiences. I am hoping you all can advise. My DD is in Y4. She is a bright girl, not exceptionally ‘gifted’ but is still a substantial outlier in her school. The main problem is Maths. She isn’t so exceptionally mathematical as some of your DC, but with that she doesn’t have an innate thirst for maths. However in Y1, and possibly still y2 it was her favourite subject and she has been bored in school since the beginning of y2 (with a brief respite when she was first introduced to fractions).

School are useless and have taught her maths is easy and dull. They want her to write out her workings but it is all so easy for her she can’t bring herself to explain (I think half the time she just knows).

It makes me really sad that they have turned her off Maths, but more than that I want her to know that Maths is hard, that it is about problem solving and the fun is in solving the problems. She loves a challenge so I think she would love it.

So, my main question is what do we do? I think she needs to have a focus and she needs to have something hard which she has to write out her workings for. We did an online maths thing which explored her knowledge and it said she was working roughly at the level of a y8 child (this was not based on what she has been taught, but what she worked out). My husband and I were wondering if we should get a tutor to teach her GCSE maths. I am worried she would then be bored in secondary school, although she is bored out her mind now (literally, she zones out for 40 minutes a day during the maths mastery whole class explanations). My thought is that it would challenge her, I think she would enjoy the challenge, I think it would provide a focus and I think she would enjoy it. But is it a mistake? Any other ideas?

Sorry! That was very long!!!

Year 4..so she is what 8? And you are talking about coaching her to gcse?
I think you need to let her enjoy the lack of pressure and be a child for a while

There are lots of maths ideas that are fascinating which maybe a good tutor could explore with her whilst not going onto GCSE curriculum - so that you can revive her interest and keep it going but not make school maths totally redundant. DD had some great Saturdays (run by an association which sadly no longer exists) but still did maths at school at the usual time rather than doing exams early. I agree she is still young and should enjoy herself, not feel pushed x

So, i’m not remotely suggesting there should be pressure. I am simply suggesting she start on something she may find makes her think and teaches her that maths isn’t about instant knowledge, but rather it is about working things out and problem solving. I also think it would help her to write out her workings because she would have at last something less easy to explain. Pressure only comes in the face of an exam IF she feels she has to pass. If she starts work on the area the exam doesn’t have to come after any set period. However it may not be the right choice. But if not, what are the other options? I am open to ideas and experiences! I don’t think ignoring how incredibly bored and frustrated she is is one, though.

At my DS's school quite a number of children started Y7 with a GCSE in Maths under their belt. DS was quite put out that I hadn't arranged this for him . Thing is, one or two of those children were ahead - and they'd have been ahead irrespective of the GCSE. The others - well, they weren't. And that grade C taken 5 years early isn't going to help them.

Cross-post helpnow! I guess part of my question is that if she already has the understanding of your average y8, how do you stop from moving forward? I am not a mathematician, but perhaps I am looking at maths knowledge in too linear a way?

I think maybe that's what I'm saying, instead of going onwards towards exams, look at areas that aren't covered or only touched on in exams. I am no expert, I only know because of DD's experience. There are maths ideas like fractals, cube numbers, where she could see the patterns and learn that sort of maths (alongside the exam-oriented curriculum at school without interfering with it)

Is it wrong that the only thing I know about fractals is Frozen?!

Are you talking about things like the number devil book? The philosophy of maths?

The problem is that it is soul destroying to sit in a bog standard maths class and do the long boring homework, especially in senior school, if you have an real talent and instinctive understanding of maths. The UK system doesn't allow kids to go ahead in maths, and I think that is very sad for those few kids who are actually far ahead of the rest of the class (and often ahead of the teachers) in understanding.

Please don't teach her gcse maths. Has she looked at the murderous maths books? They are great. There is also the nrich website and the primary maths challenge. If that is too easy then she could start to look at UKMT material.

They want her to write out her workings but it is all so easy for her she can’t bring herself to explain

DS2 used to be like this. As she gets more advanced, it will become more important that she can demonstrate how she reached the solution. She needs to work on breaking down her mental processes into steps and describing/communicating these to others. In GCSE and A-level papers, she will lose marks if she doesn't do this, so she might as well get into the habit early.

For example, he has just taken part in the UKMT Intermediate Olympiad. There are 6 questions, each question has 10 possible marks. If you just wrote 6 correct answers with no working, you'd get very few marks.

We did an online maths thing which explored her knowledge and it said she was working roughly at the level of a y8 child

I don’t know what online maths thing you’re talking about, but I’m a bit dubious about this because there’s no such thing as ‘the level of a y8 child’.
Please don’t teach her the GCSE curriculum because it will just mean that she might be bored in primary, but she’ll definitely be bored in secondary if she’s done it all before.

What BadKitten said. Murderous Maths, nrich and UKMT are all good for going sideways with maths - so using it, testing your brain, but sticking with concepts already grounded.
Music is the other thing that some mathematical brains enjoy - it's all fractions and getting everything to fit in the same space. Might be worth stretching her with something like that?

Music is a good idea. As is programming. Very good for learning how to create logical steps.

There are assessments which will give a precise breakdown of strengths and weaknesses and age-equivalents both overall and in each area, e.g. keymath3 which can be administered by a SENCO or indeed any trained teacher who has access to the kit. Age equivalent simply mean performing (scoring) at the mean or median level for that age - it requires standardisation against a large sample population but it's perfectly well defined.

OP you may find that while overall she's functioning around year 8 level, there are gaps in the knowledge of geometry or algebra covered in KS3 which it would be wise to fill before moving on. Conquermaths is good. So also is the dragonbox algebra app. Some people also like artofproblemsolving

When it comes to gifted education, the UK is an educational backwater, still irrationally prejudiced against acceleration, despite overwhelming evidence of it's effectiveness. see for example this , [[https://www.davidsongifted.org/Search-Database/entry/A10489
this ]] and this.
While I agree that putting a Y6 child in for a GCSE when their level of attainment is such that they get a C is a complete waste of time, there is nothing wrong with putting them in for it several years early (a) if their attainment and comprehension is such that they'd get an A* or equivalent, and (b) when there is a plan or commitment to follow through with higher level material afterwards. The actual exam is irrelevant - what is important is the focus provided by a systematic curriculum. If they finish GCSE maths, they can do additional maths/stats/FSMQ. If they finish that, they can start A level. If they finish that they can do further maths, STEP, olympiad. Then there are MOOC's / distance learning options pitched at tertiary level. They will never run out of maths to learn.

Or, as Salkind's encyclopaedia of educational psychology, p6 puts it: "A gifted child who is not accelerated when it is appropriate may well experience educational frustration and boredom; have reduced motivation to learn; develop poor study habits; have lower academic expectations, achievement and productivity; express apathy toward formal schooling, drop out prematurely [...] Teachers and administrators need to be concerned about the probability of maladjustment effects resulting from inadequate intellectual challenge."
Benbow refers to failure to accelerate when it warranted as educational malpractice.

But, gfrnn that knowledge is fairly useless unless you’re using the results to set up intervention.

Those Y7s who got grade C at GCSE sat a test (GCSE) that said that they were working at the level of the average Y11 (C grade GCSE). Now that sounds amazing, working 5 years ahead, doesn’t it? Sounds like they need some special intervention and accelerated curriculum? Yet the average level of a Y11 is actually quite common for a bright Y7, it’s the old NC level 7. Loads of kids would get level 6 in Y6 then be level 7 in Y7. Those kids are not unusual and could be catered for perfectly well in top set and the normal school curriculum.

So ‘average Y8’ could well be the same as ‘bright Y4’, and boredom at school could be entirely down to e.g. the idiotic notion that maths mastery means all kids need to be taught the same stuff at the same pace.

I contacted Oxbridge regarding my mathematically gifted son taking exams early.

Their view is that they don't like a gap in education for maths, so if you take maths early, there may be no where to progress academically at school and they could be disadvantaged.

Maybe best to extend outside the curriculum.

You could work through the Junior UKMT challenges online. These are problem solving and outside the Curriculum.

Dragonbox Algebra might be fun for her. YY to music and coding.

I would try and find some outside help for her, it would be a shame to let her get bored with maths.

It is so strange that people only have to post that their child is good at something to be accused of being pushy!

It's all about mastery these days. Can she apply her maths in all areas of maths?Showing working out is expected, extra points in sats tests.
Our big question is always about explaining why and how you got that answer. Only when she mastered the curriculum for that year group then we would be advised to start teaching the next steps.
Gifted and talented in a subject also used to mean 2 years above the year group they are in, although I'm not sure that's still the case. You can be exceeding within your year group. (Teacher of 12 years)

Our eldest DS, now 12 has found similar issues, his maths teacher has explained to him that he has to learn to explain how he has worked it out for ‘her benefit’ which has helped a little but he still does it under duress for the most part as he can’t see why other people can’t ‘just see it in their heads too’ (I know, I certainly can’t!) His teacher is concerned that if he doesn’t learn to do this now he will find his progress becomes stilted in future as when he does make an error she won’t be able to guide him.
He enjoyed Murderous maths a few years back and I agree with the concept of broad extension rather than racing ahead. One thing not already suggested which DS has found very interesting is the extension into astronomy and physics- he devoured things like the Brian Cox series of books, tv programmes and similar as he is fascinated by the calculations involved and has always spent a lot of time calculating things for fun.

@noblegiraffe you raise some good points, and I agree with some. To take them in turn:

"that knowledge is fairly useless unless you’re using the results to set up intervention" Well - yes, exactly. The only reason you'd want to do such an assessment is to decide if an intervention is necessary and, if so, use the results to plan it. Given that online tests can be of variable quality, something like keymath would give a far better basis for planning intervention.

"Loads of kids would get level 6 in Y6 then be level 7 in Y7. Those kids are not unusual". As far as I'm aware when L6 testing was in place, about 9% got it in maths. Level 6 was expected at end of Y9 so these 9% were about 3 years ahead. I agree top set + some enrichment is probably sufficient for three quarters of them. It's when you get into the top 2-3% that more significant interventions are needed, which is why internationally most gifted education research has focused on the top 2-3%.

"So 'average Y8’ could well be the same as ‘bright Y4'". Hmm I don't buy this one. If a child has reached Y8 attainment in Y4, then they're 4 years ahead and they've made close to 2 years progress for each year in school. The gap between their attainment and chronological age will widen with time such that they will be far more than 3 years ahead by year 6, i.e. they are much rarer than a child getting level 6 in year 6. So you'd need a very peculiar definition of "bright" to make this statement true.

"the idiotic notion that maths mastery means all kids need to be taught the same stuff at the same pace".

Well they probably got the idea from Nick Gibb who is on record as saying that "differentiated teaching is not common in high-performing south-east Asian countries. This is because it reinforces the performance gap between high and low attaining pupils. Across the OECD as a whole, the practice of differentiating work by ability whilst teaching has a negative relationship with pupil outcome", and who said in the same speech, without a trace of irony, that "Methods that were once castigated as ‘outdated’ and ‘bad practice’, such as memorisation, frequent assessment, and the use of textbooks, are being rehabilitated in English classrooms". So - welcome back to the 1950's: education chain-gang style where everyone moves at the pace of the slowest, and that's considered a good thng.

Mastery might be a good way to teach the 90% in the middle of the cohort. But it's a dreadful way to teach the genuinely gifted. Singapore, where mastery originated, uses different methods (including acceleration) for the top 1%, and differentiates further for the exceptionally gifted .
Further discussion on mastery vs acceleration can be found here . The author, Tim Dracup, remarks that the panel who originally advocated for adoption of mastery in UK schools in 2011 noted that "more work needs to be done around these issues, both with respect to children with learning difficulties and those regarded as high attainers" but that "For reasons best known to itself, the Panel never undertook that further work in relation to high attainers, or at least it was never published. This has created a gap in the essential groundwork necessary for the adoption of a mastery-driven approach".
i.e. mastery is a one-size-fits-all approach which is being blindly applied to all ability levels in UK schools because the panel responsible for it's introduction did not do their homework on how or whether it could usefully be applied to the gifted.

Level 6 was expected at end of Y9 so these 9% were about 3 years ahead.

A lot of the kids who got a level 6 at the end of Y9 went on to fail their GCSE (can’t remember the exact figure, but a significant chunk). Is it reasonable to say that a kid who gets a level 6 in Y6 is working 3 years ahead when what you actually mean is the kid is working at the level of someone 3 years older who has a reasonable chance of going on to fail their GCSE? That doesn’t sound as good, does it? It’s why using the ‘average’ child in Y8 is a pretty useless comparator to a bright younger child - the average child isn’t very good at the subject.
That aside, ‘working at Y8 level’ covers a fairly wide band. In addition, this as-yet-unspecified online test can’t really be compared in accuracy to a written test administered by a trained teacher.

In addition, what will be expected of a bright Y4 will have changed, no-doubt since even the written test was written. Expectations of a bright Y4 are now higher than a couple of years ago due to the change in the primary curriculum. (Current) bright Y4 versus (old) average Y8 are now closer than previously.

Nick Gibb is wrong about differentiated teaching not being common. If he’d paid close attention to what was going on in the Shanghai classrooms he’s keen to emulate, he’d have seen struggling pupils receiving significant intervention before the next day’s lesson in order to help them keep up. But anyway, I agree that keeping everyone going at the pace of the slowest is not what primary schools should be doing.

Noble, well, again I agree with a lot of what you say. The median student doesn't have a terribly secure grasp and is probably not destined to study the subject at tertiary level. But common parlance is that "working 3 years ahead" means working at the mean or median level for the cohort three years ahead, not "has fully assimilated the entire curriculum for that year group". On a related note, the guidelines I've seen on acceleration recommend that a child should be accelerated to the point that they are around the 80th percentile of the year-group to which they are accelerated - the 80th, not the 50th.

Nick Gibb is wrong about a great many things. He and his ilk have seized on "mastery" as a trendy buzzword and a bandwagon they can jump on, but not looked at the local context and the nitty-gritty detail of what makes the education systems they have chosen to mindlessly ape really work.

There might well be a place for mastery in a system catering for all abilities but the current tendency to use it the exclusion of all other methods is a neat demonstration of the saying that for every complex problem, there Is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.