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?

ACME’s report into developing able young mathematicians cautions against acceleration:

“It is not unusual for those groups or individuals identified as able mathematicians to be allowed or encouraged to progress through the curriculum at a faster pace. Such acceleration in mathematics is often counterproductive. Acceleration encourages only a shallow mastery of the subject, and so promotes procedural learning at the expense of deep understanding. This shallow acquaintance can also lead to learners feeling insecure and fails to adequately promote a commitment to the subject in students. This approach therefore often leads to apparent success without students developing the depth and tenacity that is needed for long-term progression. In addition, the use of acceleration is in stark contrast to the successful practice in many of the world’s mathematically most highly performing jurisdictions.”

www.acme-uk.org/media/10498/raisingthebar.pdf

These youtube videos are truly inspirational.

www.khanacademy.org/math/math-for-fun-and-glory/vi-hart
www.youtube.com/user/numberphile/featured

@NobleGiraffe. I'm aware of ACME's position.
Let's take : "the use of acceleration is in stark contrast to the successful practice in many of the world’s mathematically most highly performing jurisdictions"
In the post I linked previously, Dracup notes: "Shanghai might be an exception, but most of the other East Asian cradles of mastery also run parallel gifted education programmes in which accelerated maths is typically predominant ". The same conclusion in favour of acceleration is reached following an international survey of best practice undertaken by Stephen and Warwick (both British teachers, incidentally). The (US) NAGC note that "Educational acceleration is one of the cornerstones of exemplary gifted education practices, with more research supporting this intervention than any other in the literature on gifted individuals ".

And as for "acceleration in mathematics is often counterproductive. Acceleration encourages only a shallow mastery of the subject, and so promotes procedural learning at the expense of deep understanding. This shallow acquaintance can also lead to learners feeling insecure and fails to adequately promote a commitment to the subject in students. This approach therefore often leads to apparent success without students developing the depth and tenacity that is needed for long-term progression"

• this has been comprehensively refuted by hundreds of empirical studies including those conducted by SMPY - the SMPY studies are particularly noteworthy because the participants have been tracked for over 40 years - surely "shallow mastery", a lack a commitment to the subject or a failure to develop the depth and tenacity that is needed for long-term progression would have shown up by now? Or would ACME have us believe that the accelerated participants - despite long distinguished careers and now approaching retirement - are going to collectively lapse into pre-senile dementia?

The Australian society for evidence based teaching includes the "harmful acceleration" myth in their list of 6 Misleading But Popular Myths In Education

There is a common characteristic of the position on acceleration adopted by ACME and those of certain other UK based organisations who are incestuously linked to them (E.g. NCETM): They do not cite empirical evidence that supports their claims. Nor do they attempt to refute the broad evidence-based international consensus that acceleration is an effective intervention. They simply pretend that the research that underlies that consensus does not exist.

So while I've no wish to offend anyone on this thread , I will state bluntly that I think ACME's "view" on acceleration (i.e. studious avoidance of empirical evidence combined with unfounded misinformation/propaganda) amounts to professional negligence, dangerous sophistry and the most vacuous sort of mental masturbation.

I think ACME’s position was a considered response to the exceptionally harmful practice in the UK of entering students early for GCSE before they were ready - it was such a problem that they had to amend league table rules to finally put a stop to schools doing it. Parents loved it though.

I also don’t think that they are incorrect in saying that acceleration can lead to a shallow understanding of maths. This is absolutely correct. If your aim is to get through the curriculum quickly (and the curriculum was pretty shallow historically, there have been some attempts to remedy this - not successfully IMO), then the best way to do this is by learning procedures - your butterfly/grid method for adding fractions and so on. Looking at how long students in Shanghai spend on a single topic compared to the UK makes it obvious how shallow our teaching is even when not being accelerated. There is plenty of scope for deeper learning.

I agree gfrnn. I have 2 mathematicians in my family, and know a few others. All of them were miles ahead as children, and were lucky to not be held back by the school system they were in. The English system is not set up to encourage children who are truly gifted in maths.

Maybe the ACME view makes sense for kids who are quite good at maths, but not for the ones who just speak the language fluently.

The Australian society for evidence based teaching includes the "harmful acceleration" myth in their list of 6 Misleading But Popular Myths In Education

I just looked at the link, and when it says ‘acceleration’ it means putting students up a year at school. Not quite the same thing.

The English system is not set up to encourage children who are truly gifted in maths.

It’s not set up to encourage children who are truly gifted in football/cookery/languages/poetry either, but people whinge far less about that!

catkind If I have time I start the puzzle with DD the evening before and she can think about it during the next day in school. If I don't, I write it down in her book and she can try it herself. Most of the time, they are things that we do at home. I am quite certain that at some points in the future, she will find the lessons at school easy as she has started picking up the timetables already without knowing what they are for. I haven't even thought about what I will do at that point yet. I can certainly send work in with her so she is not bored. Not sure how her teacher will take it though.

OYBBK that's very kind of you to say. Doing that also helped me out since I had to re-learn many things in order to cope. It also gave me an incentive to do some work with my DD with the hope that one day she can be as good as yours. I was too lazy before that to be honest.

My son loves maths, and is ahead at school. However, I don't do maths with him at home per se, as I am satisfied that he has sufficient challenge at his school. I love maths too, so I take great pleasure in teaching him excel - he loves the formulas, algorithms - he grasped the Rubik's cube one quite well, he drew up profit and loss from my ebay sales, and I've had the pleasure of seeing his face when telling him about Fibonacci numbers and went on a nature trail looking for them etc.

If you want your child challenged and to make progress, get a tutor, otherwise facilitate her enjoyment of the subject and stretch her without her realising.

But Noble -

ACME's statement is contradicted by the vast majority of empirical research on the subject. That is not considered - It is an easily avoidable error which should be unacceptable in a profession noted for precise definition and rigour.

If they were concerned that early entry for GCSE was being used prematurely or for too wide a set of students, they should have articulated that specific concern rather than stated and maintained a blanket opposition to acceleration for all students, all of the time. Two wrongs don't make a right.
The result of their opposition is that those of us whose children are in the top fraction of a percent face stiff resistance even after a formal recommendation by an ed psych has been made to accelerate, because statements like ACME's are used by schools as an excuse for inaction. The position ACME have adopted is thus harmful to the thousands of children in UK schools in the top 1% or 0.1% of the ability range who are being denied an education commensurate with their ability and need.

"I just looked at the link, and when it says ‘acceleration’ it means putting students up a year at school."
There are many forms of acceleration and a huge amount of empirical evidence to support them. The book by VanTassel-Baska and paper by Rogers are worth reading.

"acceleration can lead to a shallow understanding of maths. This is absolutely correct."

Well, with no disrespect, neither you nor ACME have produced a shred of empirical evidence that this is the case. So I can't see that this is saying anything beyond that if the implementation is botched sufficiently then any pedagogical approach can lead to shallow understanding, which is hardly news.

NobleGiraffe re my comment and your response: "The English system is not set up to encourage children who are truly gifted in maths. It’s not set up to encourage children who are truly gifted in football/cookery/languages/poetry either, but people whinge far less about that!"

There are a couple of differences. The school system doesn't force people to do very repetitive and simple cookery exercises for 5-6 periods a week. There are great extra curricular clubs and lessons for people who are good at football, for instance, but there is no equivalent for maths. If you love music and play the violin extremely well, you can get private lessons which go at your pace and then you will be a better player than other kids, but it will only occasionally be a problem in a group, not every day. It is much more possible to go at your own pace, (and interpret language in a more or less sophisticated way) when writing or analysing poetry in a mixed ability class, than it is to do a long list of maths problems which are too easy for you in an imaginative and artful way when you are 13.

I suspect that you are just sick of people who think their kid is clever and special...

The truth is that it is hard to watch a child who has a natural joy in something have that joy squelched by school, and I think this happens quite often with maths.

I totally agree with claraschu.
My ds doesn't complain and just gets on at school, but he sometimes says he feels like the time is wasted at school and wants to be home schooled. They get 6 hours a week of maths. And nothing like cat's school. Repeating things you already mastered so many times without any inspiration will kill the joy.

Languages is another important issue though. It must be extremely frustrating for gifted linguists to sit through basic language lessons.

Hi, Our two are/have been in a similar position but are now in Y7. It seems fairly rare to expect the school to stretch / cater for the more able students, and as you say they get bored easily and turned off. Some stuff that we've done (most of which has already been mentioned).

• Murderous maths books. We got these a few years ago and the lad lapped them up (~Y3) and we went to see the author give a couple of talks and he's really entertaining. The presentation is generally fun and he does stretch things in places.
• UKMT (Junior). Good problem solving. The challenge and the kangaroo are not about showing working, although the olympiad is. Good range of questions which are less about knowing formula and more about how to structure a question / solution and often just about getting stuck in.
• Primary maths challenge ("feeder" for ukmt junior) and books based on their questions.
• Extension mathematics (alpha, beta, gamma). Written for years 7, 8 & 9. Good problem solving info and questions.
• Some of the popular maths books (maybe in a year or two).

A tutor would probably be useful to make the stuff come to life and be able to guide her / give feedback. As other people have mentioned, I'd not concentrate on GCSE and expecting the school to sort it out may be a dead end. Give the background reading (murderous maths, popular books / articles) and develop the problem solving (PMC, Junior UKMT) and have someone to guide her.

There are great extra curricular clubs and lessons for people who are good at football, for instance, but there is no equivalent for maths.

That, there, is exactly the problem. Parents don’t mind that their talented footballer is made to play against crap peers in PE or whatever, because they play for the local juniors at the weekend, have trials, play in competitions. No one expects the PE teacher to train the footballer themselves or for them to take part in sixth form PE lessons.

There is a complete lack of extra-curricular special provision for bright mathematicians and it is all thrown back on schools who are, entirely understandably, not set up for the kid who only comes along once every few years.

I’ve moaned about this before on here, but the UKMT run their competitions with the aim of eventually selecting the national Olympiad squad but they do bog-all about identifying and nurturing talent. It’s left to teachers like GHGN who are very few and far between in having the skills, the time and the inclination to train kids for serious competition. And as most schools don’t have those teachers, the kids simply miss out. But that is not the school’s fault. There is such a crisis in maths teaching that many schools can’t even recruit maths teachers to teach the curriculum adequately, let alone any extras. Teachers are overworked beyond reason so even those that have the skills may not have the time.
This is where organisations like the UKMT need to step up and step in. But they don’t.

I suspect that you are just sick of people who think their kid is clever and special...

Guess what, my DS is good at maths and complains that lessons at school are boring because he understands everything in a minute and they then go over it again slowly for the next three lessons. I could easily teach him harder curriculum stuff at home, but that would just guarantee boredom at school.

Well, with no disrespect, neither you nor ACME have produced a shred of empirical evidence that this is the case.

Meh, I’ve been doing the job long enough to know that I can teach a topic quickly to a class in a way that gets the job done, they can answer questions on a test, pass a GCSE. It’s called teaching to the test, and it’s generally seen to be a bad thing.

Surely your child’s school can be a bit more flexible with gifted pupils?
My own little village primary liaised with the high school 15 miles away to send down advanced textbooks for my daughter, and then when she transferred to high school at 11, they let her attend two different high schools simultaneously so she could study both applied and pure maths ahead of her year group. She went on to get a maths degree from Durham and has an enjoyable career in risk analysis. It just needs a bit of goodwill from the schools, and a recognition that not all kids learn at the same rate.

We've given a lot of suggestions, but Hidden said in her first post
she doesn’t have an innate thirst for maths.

I'm not sure that a child in Year 4 who isn't actively seeking maths should be going down the route of all of these suggestions if it's not something that she would enjoy. Lots of kids have high ability in different areas that they choose not to pursue because it's not something that floats their boat.

Sure, buy her a murderous maths book, take her to the maths bit of the science museum etc, but do that in the same spirit that you might offer other enrichment opportunities. At the same time keep pestering school for lessons not to be boring, because no matter what you do at home it won't affect how she feels about her school lessons.

She's very young, let her find her own path. If she asks for more maths after showing her a little, that's the time to offer more.

Guess what, my DS is good at maths and complains that lessons at school are boring because he understands everything in a minute and they then go over it again slowly for the next three lessons. I could easily teach him harder curriculum stuff at home, but that would just guarantee boredom at school.
I'm not sure that's true actually. School accelerated me in an odd way which meant I was working on A-level but still sitting in GCSE maths lessons most of the week. It was still dull but no more dull than before, there wasn't much overlap in topics. And was much happier for having something to really get my teeth into.

I think learning new content is never going to keep an able student engaged for long, and asking hard questions or puzzles can keep them engaged however much later content they know.

But you were doing the A-level content in lessons, cat which is slightly different to doing it outside of lessons.

The OP is wondering about getting a tutor to teach her DD GCSE maths because she is finding school lessons boring.

My DS loves reading. If I said that he loves reading so much that I found out what books the school would be teaching from now till GCSE and then deliberately read them with him at home because he was bored with what they were reading at school, people would think I was mad. They’d say ‘look at all the other books you could be reading with him, why not get him those instead?!’.

Sorry, phrased that badly. I was in normal GCSE lessons doing normal GCSE work except for one lesson a week where I got the accelerated work.

That's the exact analogy Noble.

But would you ban a 12 year old from reading any Shakespeare if they wanted to and insist it's left till age 15 because it's on other GCSE syllabuses therefore "acceleration"? Or ban them from writing such good essays because they're doing GCSE level analysis? Yes I know schools teach Shakespeare at 12 too, but think that just shows it's a poor analogy. Maths also has more dependencies.

I'm not necessarily arguing for acceleration. Just saying I think "they'll be bored in school" is not a good argument against it if they're already bored anyway.
My order of preference would be
a) asking hard and open ended questions routinely about the work being covered in class (hard for teachers)
b) teacher giving them appropriate side track material eg. UKMT or coding or just a book about a topic not used in school and license to do their own thing in class
c) failing that, parents can only do whatever they can to keep child engaged with the subject at home, whether accelerating or puzzles or whatever works for the child. If school are already failing, I don't think accelerating at home will make it any worse.

I'm a big fan of UKMT/Olympiad style maths, which can usually be accessed at a level that doesn't require acceleration.