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?

No, cat I wouldn’t ban my child from reading Shakespeare, but I certainly wouldn’t hire a tutor to teach it to them.

I don’t deliberately hide from my Reception child the existence of negative numbers because school hasn’t taught them yet, but neither do I give them proper lessons and worksheets. We just occasionally count down beyond zero and mess around a bit.

My Y4 knows about pi because we discussed it on pi day. I didn’t then get out a CGP workbook and make him do calculations.

We had enormous fun recently looking at 4 dimensional shapes because it cropped up in conversation. Same with the concept of infinity, and binary numbers.

So they are being exposed to maths outside of school but I’m not deliberately pre-teaching them what they will be taught in school, if you see what I mean.

cat me too, I think the UKMT stuff is great. It is exceptionally frustrating that the UKMT don’t make more of an effort to get it to kids who would benefit from it.

It's easy for you and me to casually introduce fun maths concepts and play around noble. I don't think most parents would feel able to do that, so something like khan or a tutor or a textbook becomes an attractive idea.

I know I’m lucky, cat, that’s why I’m saying it’s a real problem that there’s a lack of quality extra-curricular maths provision that’s easily available and signposted to parents that’s suitable for bright kids and not just repeating or pre-teaching school stuff, especially at primary.
Even for my DS and his love of reading there’s a kids book club at the local library.

There are lots of good links on this thread, but if the parents themselves are not good at maths it can be quite tricky.

There are so many points I want to follow up on, so I'm sorry, this is going to be really long!

I did say that my DD doesn't have an innate drive to explore maths like I know some kids do, and it does make the less formal approach to maths tricky. However, I did also say that my DD used to LOVE maths. She used to love problem solving, she also did enjoy proving her concept, when she was given the opportunity with something interesting. She really enjoys the challenging. The issue is that school has taught her to hate maths, by totally ignoring the fact that she used to love maths and love problem solving. They have taught her to hate maths by making her sit for 6 hours a week getting mind numbingly bored. I am not particularly mathematical, and she wouldn't choose to sit around on the weekend with a maths problem I set her. If school set her a maths problem she wanted to solve, she would (she has in the past), spent hours working it out and proving it. But they did that once, she took her answer in proud as punch, but she didn't get to explain it to the teacher because nobody ever asked (and she is too shy to say).

My question originally was should let her move into GCSE maths (given she is near that level). However, I have understood from the very many really helpful posts that we don't have to do that, that a tutor could challenge and inspire her with maths in many different ways. I do wish we could try and do it ourselves, but I'm not sure it would work. However, I really like the idea of a tutor setting her problem solving tasks (and different types of maths), that she can work on. I think she would like that too.

So, that is the issue. In my ideal world clearly I would NOT pay for a tutor. I would much rather save my money. Schools SHOULD be dealing with this because a) it is immoral for a school to teach a child that they do not count (and should just sit down and shut up, and accept that the know what is being said already) b) schools should make learning fun and engaging for EVERY child, irrespective of their ability. I totally understand that the fault is not individual teachers, nor even particular schools, the fault is the system which is chronically underfunded, painfully prescriptive, and totally rigid. It is crazy though because there are enough kids world-wide that this should not happen. Shared expertise, shared resource. But anyway. That is a battle I know won't be won before my child finish school.

The whole to accelerate or not debate is a really interesting one. I do feel like part of the discussion has been about two separate issues. One is about whether or not it is appropriate for, say, those kids who used to come through with level 6. Which at 9% of the population, is still a LOT of kids. The other is whether it is suitable or appropriate for those kids who are less than 1 in 200, or less than 1 in 1000. Whether or not schools are capable of accelerating those kids (for questions of resources etc) is another matter entirely, because here clearly the answer is no. However, for the question SHOULD these kids be allowed/encouraged to learn a pace which matches the speed at which they grasp and consolidate information, I do not understand how the answer can possibly be no. It seems to me that it isn't just about acceleration, and it isn't just about depth. It is about giving the kids who need it, both.

I think it's a lot more trickier in the past, but with lots of free great resources these days, children with parents who are not good at maths suffer less, imo. Though I really envy the children who has mathy parents for sake of my ds. Especially I speak to him in my second language, so already feel there are wall between us, and not being same mentality makes me feel detached sometimes. I wish I can inspire him like noble or cat does in his most favorite subject.

Irvine I do think there is still an issue for kids who are very good at maths but without that innate drive, even with all those resources. If someone could create a really fun problem solving programme with great graphics, and those sorts of rewards you get (points to buy virtual stuff, and the such like), my daughter would be in there like a flash. But she does need some sort of framework to make it worthwhile.

those kids who used to come through with level 6. Which at 9% of the population, is still a LOT of kids.

The vast majority of those kids could be catered for within the school curriculum though. Most of them won’t even get a 9 in their maths GCSE (that’s the top 3%). And I’m a big fan of the further/additional maths GCSE that lots of schools offered to their top sets (not so much now with the new GCSE).
That’s acceleration in the sense that they are taught stuff that the lower groups won’t be taught. But it’s not acceleration in the sense that they are not entered early for exams, or taught out of their year group.
To get a level 6 even they needed to be taught stuff beyond their classmates. This is fine. I’m not sure how schools that insist on all kids doing the same at the same time under the guise of ‘mastery’ will do in the SATS with these kids.

Kids who are not even slightly challenged by GCSE maths plus further/additional maths are very rare IME.

irvine’s DS will be one of these.

a really fun problem solving programme

A lot of computer games involve problem solving!

Does anyone else remember ‘L - a mathematical adventure’ played on the BBC computers at school in the 80s? That was fab! Crap graphics though...

Have you tried prodigy? It's free/paid maths site with more of gaming factor than actual maths itself. You can catch monster if you answer correctly, buy stuff with your points, etc. It's a bit tricky site to use as a parents since not much control over the levels of questions you can set(you can grade override like grade x, but still it's not spot on.), but my ds certainly enjoy gaming side of it.

www.prodigygame.com/

My DS is obsessed with Prodigy! The maths questions are standard curriculum stuff though, rather than problems, and it doesn’t really encourage written working out, if that’s what you’re looking for.

Out of curiosity, how do you know that your dd is within the top 1%?

Yes I remember L! That was in the days when I had to go in early to school and boot up the school computer system using one of those old big floppy disks.

L was amazing!!! I used to play that whenever I finished my maths work early, which was always.

Yes, true prodigy isn't problem solving.
But like noble says, a lot of computer games has problem solving elements in it, though not always maths related.
Things like poptropica comes to mind, for figuring out something from clue to go forward.
Also ds was recently hooked onlittlealchemy2, although it's not really scientifically correct as in use of elements, it certainly made him think really hard how to make something by adding 2.

those kids who used to come through with level 6. Which at 9% of the population, is still a LOT of kids. Sorry Noble - I wasn't clear. I was saying that the school can cater for most of those 9% exactly because there was a lot of them and they are reasonably common. I was, like you were, differentiating out those very few kids who the schools don't differentiate for (like Irvine's DS). There is a MASSIVE scope of difference between someone who is a fraction of a percentage of ability compared to those who are 10% or even 5%. That is just a fact of the normal distribution.

Out of curiosity, how do you know that your dd is within the top 1%? - it it is from an Ed Psych report. However, it isn't what the Ed psych report says which is why she needs differentiation. She needs differentiation based on what she is doing.

There was a question further up about what parents do with kids who are good at football/cooking etc. There were some good points about not being forced to sit through six hours of that. But it is an interesting point, when you look at some of the other subjects, like English. I think it is much easier to differentiate in English, because you can dissect a book so many different levels, and you can then write in such an individual way. My DD's teacher lets her write more complicated stories. She lets her read more advanced books. DD still gets bored of the pace of English sometimes. She finished the class book in class because the pace of the class was too slow. But the amount of time where it is everyone listening to the same explanations, and then dealing with work at the same level is just different in English.

My DD's teacher lets her write more complicated stories. She lets her read more advanced books.

This doesn’t require the teacher to actually do anything. In maths, what parents usually want is for their child to be taught differently to the rest of the class, which is a much bigger ask.
Obviously the teacher should be making efforts to provide more challenging problems, the nrich website can help here, but there is a major problem with primary teachers lacking confidence in maths themselves. You only need a C at maths GCSE to be a teacher after all.

Noble what I want is for her to be engaged and challenged in maths. I actually genuinely don't care if she isn't rushing through the curriculum. But what I don't want is for her to be twiddling her thumbs for 95% of the time she is 'doing' maths in the class.

I do totally agree that it shouldn't be down to the individual teachers. I don't think that is fair. I don't even think it should be down to individual schools. But there should be an specific materials, that follow the standard curriculum, that schools should be able to access to challenge different levels of those 'exceeding' kids. So, the stuff for the top 10%, for the top 5%, the top 1% and the those kids who are the top 0.1% and then those beyond that. All in one place. With answers and information for teachers (or parents!), and information to provide scaffold explanations if needed. And hey presto. The kids sit, busy, engaged and happy with their challenge. So easy .

Hidden, I always thought your dd's interest was literacy. My ds was always good at literacy as well, but never shown any enthusiasm like he did for maths, and now he is still good at it, but not compared to maths, he is slightly better than average. It is quite huge decline since ks1, when he was years ahead. But I am not worried. It's his interest that does matter. Not the potential he should get to, imo.
My ds spend far less stuff on academics now, since he found other interest, piano and martial arts. But still find time to do maths.
Your dd sounds like she is already achieving above average, and if the school can't cater and make her interested, you can. But if she really wants to pursue or not is up to her, imo.

Irvine I also thought it was reading initially. That was what was really obvious. But actually, when Maths was her favourite subject, she was doing better at that than reading (back in Y2). Not my much, but it was actually what she preferred. Currently, her passion is creative writing (but that is because her Y3 teacher was excellent at teaching writing, and she lit a fire under DD, which is still going). However, although her interests are fine, it is the total frustration and annoyance that she feels about maths which is her strongest school-related emotion. It just makes me really sad they have turned her off something she really did love. So we do do some maths stuff, but I really don't know how to reignite her love, and what to do to keep it active. She really enjoyed that maths test thing she did, and she really enjoyed that website, but she is at ceiling on it already, so it isn't a solution. I was just looking to see what else might be. I will explore some of the other websites, and see if any of them work for her. The dragonalgebra looks like it might be her thing, and there are lots of other suggestions.

The place who made dragon box is one of the American Uni, and has own site called centerforgamescience Their games are great.

One thing my ds figured out from early stage in maths is to entertain himself. Make up his own challenge. Find out the ways to come up with same answer but different approach. Maths is fascinating. I hope you can re-ignite her spark of loving maths once again somehow.

Have a look at this.

www.cemc.uwaterloo.ca/resources/potw.php

It is from a University in Canada. They do a problem of the week aimed at different grades.

An alternative comparison is with music. The junior departments of the top music schools (RAM, RCM, Guildhall, RNCM etc.) in the UK make provision for their young students which simultaneously consists of:
depth/mastery (Kodaly/Dalcroze methods, aural training, theory)
breadth/enrichment (exploration of genres/composers outside any syllabus; choral work; ensemble and orchestral playing)
pace / acceleration (advanced technical work at ages younger than normal). It's entirely normal to find 11 and 12 year old's working on grade 8 pieces - above the standard expected for A level.

I think they are getting something right that mainstream education in other subjects is getting wrong, in that they are providing:
A combination of depth/enrichment/acceleration as standard
Close mentoring / 1:1 relationships with subject experts
Opportunities to interact with peers of similar ability in areas of strength
All students proceed at their own pace, with no philosophical objection to advancement based on ability rather than chronological age.

Top music schools aren’t mainstream education though.

But Noble do you really think the system is working for all kids? I thought you kind of agreed that for some kids, like Irvine's DS, it doesn't work? Are you just saying that it is, say, 1 in 10,000 for whom it doesn't work, rather than say, 1 in 300? (I am plucking random numbers here :) )