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?

gfrnn I think I’ve been pretty clear on this thread and that one from 2014 that I’ve no problem with students being introduced to topics outside of the curriculum as opposed to sitting exams early. If no one is in favour of simply going full steam ahead to GCSE then we’re all good. (Incidentally, digging up people’s past posts and linking to them is considered not really the done thing on MN).

My son was assigned a UKMT mentor. He wrote the mentor a long letter, working out a whole set of problems, and got a one line answer saying the mentor didn't have time to answer at the moment. My son wrote twice more and never got another answer.

There should be a way for a child who is very good at maths to simply work faster and do new and interesting things within school. In the US this means going ahead, finishing the high school offerings and taking college courses. I am not saying that is a great system, but, from what I have seen, I don't think there is a good way of keeping kids' interest alive here in the UK. The problem is that kids are forced to keep doing the regular maths classes, which take up 6 periods a week, and which (in my son's school) also gave a lot of boring homework. A child who is doing GCSEs and also does sport and music doesn't have a huge amount of energy to figure out ways to have fun and keep learning maths after doing his dreary maths homework. It is very discouraging.

claraschu the mentors are mostly students who have been through competitions and being in the mentoring themselves. They tend to be very good students who end up at Oxbridge and other top universities so I am not surprised if they are not that into doing the mentoring. This is just speculation on my part as I mentor my own students so I don't rely on external mentoring.

The problem with the UKMT is they don't have a clear pathway for pupils to work their way up. Most pupils who qualified for the earlier Olympiad tend to stop there since they can't access the problems. If they want to get better, there isn't much of a structured pathway. The UKMT provide some good books for pupils to self-study but some are really hard. This year, I started writing my own syllabus and supplement them with questions that I did as a kid. This bridges the gap between just being a good pupil to a very good mathematician.

UKMT does a lot of work to enrich the mathematical education in this country. Rightly or wrongly, having an elite squad for the international competition does at least make the UK having a competitive team so they do win medals rather than just being there to make up the number. In some of the earlier IMOs, the total number of medals for the UK team was only comparable to the medals that my high school got. I see this like a competitive sport. There will be kids who can't do PE, some like PE, some are good and play for local teams or at county level, some compete nationally and a few compete internationally. The amount of training that the UK team receive is nowhere near other countries so they are doing a very good job actually.

My secondary maths teacher was brilliant - we had him for double maths for the last two lessons on a Friday, and we wouldn't do any actual maths at all. Instead, he had a whole cupboard full of board games, things like draughts, backgammon, mastermind and connect-4, and a bunch of magnetic rods that you could make 3D geometric shapes with, and we'd all sit round and play games.

Much more fun than doing sums, and it taught us all how to use our brains and really think, both logically and laterally, and to be good at problem-solving.

OP, perhaps your dd needs that sort of challenge - to stretch her brain in other ways?

GHGN One problem with the UKMT is the competetive aspect, which I think is exaggerated. Maths is more of an art than a sport, I think. My son just wanted to learn more new things, explore ideas, have interesting maths lessons.

if she already has the understanding of your average y8, how do you stop from moving forward?

You move sideways. Have a look at the papers on this site.

www.ukmt.org.uk/individual-competitions/junior-challenge/archive/

claraschu I think this is where our opinions differ. In my experience, Maths is quite a different subject, it is very creative subject but it is also like sport. It has practical application and underlines many areas in our life. Therefore, if one aspect of Maths is about competition then it is fine. Some people don’t like competition but it brings out the best in other. Like I said, the focus of the UKMT on international competitions is nothing compares to countries in Eastern European and East and SE Asian. I came through a system where there used to be one super selective grammar in each town and cater for able kids in STEM and some MFL. Each school train their kids separately to compete in county and national competition. When I competed at county level I was 8, my first training camp was a week. At national level, the camp was one month. This happened every year and quite often the camps did not fall during the holiday. When we were 15, the very best kids in each school came together and took an exam to gain entry to 3 best high schools. We were taught every day by past medalists and trainers in every STEM subjects. The training camps at this level to prepare for international competition were normally 3 to 6 months. If my school is a country in its own, it will rank very highly in all Olympiad competions in all subjects. Now, comparing to this level of selectiveness and competition, the approach of the UKMT is very good actually. If kids here do not want to take part in competitions then there are still plenty of things for them to study. However, if they want interesting lessons then it is down to their teachers. The lack of quality Maths teachers in this country is staggering. This is a problem of the DfE and the goverment’s policies, not a UKMT’s one. If they don’t have enough Maths teachers then how do we expect that many of them will be teaching interesting lessons. They are forever chasing exam targets, getting bogged down with marking and data, how do they have time to extend their knowledge?
By the way, I don’t work for the UKMT and for the most parts, I don’t like the way they do many of their things. I still like them and their approach as a whole though.

GHGN I have nothing against UKMT, and I have no objection to competition. I just think that it is not something which takes the place of interesting, challenging maths lessons. I am glad you had such a good experience with them .

I don't think the system here is particularly encouraging to kids who are good at maths, and I don't think the UKMT fills that place very well for kids in lots of different schools whose parents know nothing about maths.

I cannot see the point in setting a glass ceiling on what level of maths children should learn to at what age. Especially when in other countries the ceilings are at different levels.
As for UKMT, IME they are teaching slightly different things from GCSE. They are teaching problem solving rather than what has already been discovered in maths. Dd used to do better in them when she practised beforehand, but with GCSEs approaching, prefers to do A level maths in her study time if she is studying maths.
I do not think it matters what they learn, so long as they learn and enjoy learning, but the one size fits all was not working for dd.
If you do not think acceleration is right for your child, then do not do it. However, you cannot say acceleration is wrong for every child, just as I cannot say every child should be accelerated if capable. For some, enrichment may be the better option. What was certainly not best was being told you are wrong about your child's level of ability, so we are going to do neither.

Neither is there any point in putting up glass partitions, saying ‘this is the school maths curriculum, and this is all the maths that will be learned, all you can do is go down this tunnel, so let’s go down it as quickly as possible.’

Noble, yes I do agree. But what was happening in dd's case, and also seems to happen in some other, but not all cases, is that they are confined in a box of what they are to learn and cannot go forward, or to the sides. They just have to repeat the same topics, because this is what the rest of the class are doing. At best they are given a more difficult worksheet having first sat through an explanation of something they learnt years ago. This happens for an hour every day in primary.

I don't really understand the point being made that acceleration results in 'narrowing' of understanding given that typical acceleration involves moving on through the rest of the curriculum, that children moving at the expected pace also follow? Is the problem then with the curriculum itself?

I think noble indicated that the new KS2 sats are much more difficult but for the able child there is no real difference - DD (y2) looked at last years and dropped about 15 marks overall due to geometry we haven't looked at yet, so translations, co-ordinates etc. Her class are currently focusing on learning the 2, 5, 10 times tables, so there is nothing for her but repetition. School acknowledge that she is an outlier but only say that they will have to deal with it (and have suggested acceleration themselves) as she moves through school but nothing is happening now.

At home we spend 15/20 minutes per day looking at new maths in depth, as I understand that there is little benefit from only cursory knowledge, but we have used acceleration as well as enrichment (though I think this is quite often actually acceleration as it will pop up somewhere in the curriculum at some point). So while looking at the properties of different triangles we have also looked at Pythagoras with this really useful book

I am not sure who linked to one of the discussions above which argued that highly able teaching should be focused on the top 20% rather the top 1%, which looks like what is happening in schools now with mastery. The problem is that this is a huge range of ability - it just isn't working for those at the extreme end of the scale and in my DD's case if school won't provide challenge, then I will. I also understand why other parents in a similar situation feel the same.

@JustRichmal - "What was certainly not best was being told you are wrong about your child's level of ability, so we are going to do neither" - yes - this. And I agree with your other posts.

@secretsciurusvulgaris I agree with you that if a gifted child is accelerated through curriculum which results in shallow understanding, then another child who follows the same curriculum at a slower pace will also have shallow understanding. The problem in that case is the curriculum, not the acceleration. Probably most of the problem is right there. We talk about "the curriculum" - the national curriculum, a one-size-fits-all curriculum for everyone, at least until age 14. The problem is that the exceptionally able need a fundamentally different curriculum - one with more depth, breadth and pace. Instead of which they tend to either get (a) the same curriculum at the same pace (b) the same curriculum at a marginally faster pace (c) the same curriculum with some ad-hoc bolt-on enrichment activities. So people like GHGN devise their own syllabus (which is a fantastic idea BTW) because successive governments have abrogated their responsibility to provide one. If the current government really buys the idea that someone in Singapore knows how to do maths education, then they should import the Singapore gifted programme for the top 1% and its accelerated, enriched syllabus, not just the mastery approach for the main cohort.

Re: "sideways". I think this is where a lot of confusion lies. For a Y4 child capable of Y8 work, there is an enormous difference between moving sideways at Y8 level and moving sideways at Y4 level. the latter does nothing to relieve boredom or promote engagement. Whether it's labelled enrichment or acceleration you need a vertical component (higher level work) for any approach to be effective. Higher level work also needs to be instead of, not as well as, the regular curriculum for chronological age. Extra-curricular clubs / mentoring schemes / problem sets are good things, but if the child is bored rigid for 5 hours a week in their regular lessons for several years they will not be around or interested. Early intervention in regular class time is important.

So, in conclusion, just following through the school curriculum at an accelerated place with a tutor or by themselves is not a good idea.

Oh You, I agree. I think the best thing that happened to my ds was me coming on here few years ago and got great advice from noble and others. I was totally lost back then, but now I can really see why they told me to encourage going sideways rather than just forward.

Evidence trumps beliefs.

But gfrnn, arguing for acceleration as an education policy for bright students within a system is different to arguing that it’s a good idea for an individual student working in a different system which does not routinely include acceleration and is not set up for it. This would therefore require that individual student to be catered for outside of the system, and yet still be within it.

Noble, I acknowledge there are two separate issues, though having good information on best practice informs both.

Regarding policy the key points to me are firstly that it should be based on empirical research, not dogma, and secondly that current policy fails to acknowledge the existence of outliers, which fails the most able children and puts their parents and teachers on a collision course.

Regarding what to do for an individual given the current system: I agree with you that the system as a whole is inflexible but it's not completely homogeneous. It's possible to find individual schools with some flexibility. We were able to negotiate provision of KS3/KS4 material in school time. This avoided the need for tuition outside school hours. Flexibility is a key attribute when you have an outlier. We learned this the hard way - the first school we dealt with were notably inflexible and we moved for this and other reasons.

If the school had refused, we would have proceeded just as JustRichmal has outlined, and for the same reasons. The children and the local family and school circumstances are different in each case so this may not be the right choice for everyone.

Maths is more of an art than a sport, I think.

Claraschu, I agree with your observation!

The people I know engaging in maths-heavy research work – and also the pure mathematicians I know – are much more like artists than athletes.

The whole competitive mentality, the preoccupation with rank relative to others, is just not a significant part of their makeup.

Brilliant, creative people, in my experience, are more like Claraschu’s son. They simply want, as Clara says of her son, to learn more new things and explore ideas. Doing maths is an act of self-forgetting for them, not of self-validation.

There is an interesting discussion in an article called the Origins and Ends of Giftedness pointing out that

In sports, creativity plays far less of a role than it does in an art form or in a scholastic area such as mathematics. In sports there is no transition to be made from technical perfection to creative interpretation*

*(I might prefer utilisation or implementation to interpretation here.)

The author goes on to make a distinction between gifted children who become experts as adults and those who become creators. (An expert is someone who masters a pre-established domain while the creator reshapes a domain or establishes a new one.)

If the attitude of a child towards maths resembles that of a sportsperson towards their sport – an emphasis on competing against peers and becoming the best at it - I would imagine that child is more likely to end up as an expert than a creator.

The attitude of parents is also crucial in shaping the way things pan out. The author of the article mentions a few potential dangers.

The danger of pushing so hard that the intrinsic motivation and rage to master these children start out with become a craving for the extrinsic rewards of fame.

The danger of pushing so hard that these children later feel they missed out on having a normal childhood.

The danger of freezing a prodigy into a safe, technically perfect but non-innovative way of performing because this is what he or she has been rewarded for doing so well.

Finally, as an extension to the above, here is a .

Haven't read entire thread, just a few eye-catches. Sorry, but 100 posts!

My Y10 DD was a bit like that from start of Y3 in pre-mastery days, except she was very animated/excited by maths and by-and-by we spent the next few years trying to persuade her she was definitely not 'rubbish' at everything else. There was a bit of school-side off-piste work and she didn't mind the regular stuff, so I let it be. The worst bit was too much perfectionism around SATs which definitely weren't challenging for her.

We've been lucky with the maths dept. at the upstream comp and critically, there is a boy in the ~230 cohort who is similar to her in terms of ability and personality. They've been put together in seating plans since Y7. Took a while to figure this out, but that like-minded company matters a LOT. Much more than the actual maths they're doing. She has a bunch of more erm.. quirky and clever girl friends, but she only gets to relax and do her maths-geek thing with the boy.

The dept. is looking after them well-enough within resource constraints. There's a weekly hour around competitive team maths and various off-piste stuff. Plus a couple of less elite lunchtime things with GCSE Further maths topics (will be suprised if school has them sit the exam though). They get 'our work' to do when they've burnt through the stuff that keeps the rest of the class busy for the lesson.

Both of them could have gone at a much faster pace, but right now I don't think we've lost anything really significant. DD still 'loves' maths & no obvious doors have been closed yet. Not sure if I have a useful point, except it all felt quite gloomy back in primary but now it doesn't. If primary is a bit crocky then it is not necessarily the end of something.

www.cimt.org.uk/

This is the best maths resource I have come across. It is a structured course and covers everything on the curriculum. We do it as an addition to school maths, as and when we have time. If your DD finds Y4 too easy (although it IS tougher than school stuff) you can go a year or two above :)

Somebody shared this resource on a forum before and I cannot thank that person enough. So passing on the good stuff :)

I haven't read the whole thread, but just wanted to offer some very up to date experience of how differentiated and challenging secondary school maths actually is. DS just finished the GCSE maths curriculum on Friday. The teacher spent the last week doing one topic. It wasn't complicated and DS had grasped it a few minutes into the first lesson on Monday. Nevertheless, he still had to spend a whole week of maths lessons practicing it, without ever being challenged by it. Plus ça change.
That pretty much describes secondary maths. IME it's no more differentiated or faster paced than primary school maths was.

Other posters have given good advice about how to deal with a talented and unchallenged child.
NN to taking exams early.
YY to finding ways to broaden the subject (applied maths, logic based activities) and to things like UKMT.
YY to the risk that a long-term bored child will become disillusioned, and that's the key thing to manage.
I do not think the answer is to perpetually hold out a carrot that the classroom experience will improve next term/ next year / next key stage, because that's just kicking the can down the road and it becomes obvious after a while that those promises were bare faced lies. The way to get depression is to hold out hope, but be continuously disappointed, and not be able to change the outcomes no matter how hard you try.

I reached a point where I was just honest with DS that his school would not be challenging him and he should just treat maths lessons as mental downtime. Saying that, he needs to do the work, not be disruptive, help others and not be openly scornful of how easy the work is because others in the classroom will be finding it challenging. I think he found it easier to put up with after that.

DS just has to get through one more month of revision lessons and then it will all be over.

Looking back, I'd say the main thing I have learned is that it's up to the parents to help highly able DC. It's simply not the school's job.

PS IME mastery is used throughout ks3 and ks4 and is simply busy work given to More able students until the less able are ready to move on . That could be either the less able in the class, or even, in the year if the school likes to encourage movement between sets,