Why is GCSE maths so hard?!

[bonbonours]

My daughter has just started her GCSE course which she will be doing over three years (she's in year 9). Maths is not her strong point so she has been asking me to help her to understand and work through her homework tasks.

For background, I got an A at GCSE Maths about 25 years ago, and have a 2:1 degree so whilst by no means a genius, I am fairly well-educated and work in an education field (not maths).

I have been completely baffled by a lot of her maths work, and we have had to watch how-to videos together (as recommended by school) to understand how to do some of the work. It is things like indices, including fractional indices, equations including fractions and minus numbers, surds (literally never heard that word before yesterday) etc. It is all deeply theoretical, and with no practical application that I can see in real life.

Considering that GCSE Maths is a basic requirement of pretty much any job and higher education course, this is insane surely? I can understand requiring people to have a decent working knowledge of usable day to day maths, percentages, ratios, interest rates, budgets, weights and measures etc. But why does everyone, need to know all this in-depth theoretical stuff? My husband works in a finance department and also has no idea about most of this stuff and never has to use it in his job.

Spotty Yes there are past papers on the exam board websites. The first students who did the 9-1 Maths have just gone to university - new Maths & English were sat June 2017.

Red I don't know where the school draws the line, but they get good results and I have a lot of faith in their maths department.

teen

Hello there. nc again but think you recognise me.

Ditto, it's having faith and the right teacher. By that I'm not suggesting those that your child doesn't click with aren't good teachers.
I don't believe that one teacher should be responsible.

My dd last teacher worked tirelessly to help and support, giving her own time freely, and tried to boost her as much as she could, for four years.
Bless her, she even said she'd try Level 2 equivalents if she thought it would hold dd back. I really couldn't fault her, she was also HOD.

New guy has just enabled her to come on with confidence and with the extra time I'm sure he'll do all he can to raise her standard.

Mine found GCSE maths a breeze. Didn’t even revise. Just knew they could do it and both got A*s. BUT. They did it in the standard 2 years. Your daughter, OP, is starting a year early. I really don’t understand why schools do this, and put their students through this. Either the students are too young and don’t (quite reasonably) have the methods etc under their belts, or they get bored to tears banging on about the same stuff over three years.
So in short I wonder if this is the problem rather than the maths per se.

Theone Maths doesn't really have a GCSE syllabus that is different from KS3 or even KS2. It pretty much flows seamlessly in a cumulative fashion. It's not like e.g. Eng Lit where the skills follow through but the books & poems are new.

at Drabarni

Many aiming for a 5 stand a better chance of taking the higher paper but also are unlikely to be able to answer many of the questions.

I constantly say to parents that unless their child is a solid grade 5 with a chance of a 6 there is no point doing higher. We have had students get grade 3 and 4s on the higher paper. They have sat the foundation in the November resit and walked a 5. Unless you are a solid 5 with a chance of a 6, stick with foundation. The majority (from memory 58%) of last years cohort did foundation. There has been a shift towards foundation nationally.

Teenplus.
I’m sure you’re right. I paid no attention and was crap at maths myself! But surely an extra year consolidating foundations (bc maths is like that isn’t it?) would be helpful?

Theone Yes, but a pupil's maths set should be moving at an appropriate pace for them. The OP's child shouldn't be doing fractional indices if they aren't ready for them yet. That is nothing to do with saying that KS3 is 2 years and GCSE 3 years or vice versa.

But surely an extra year consolidating foundations (bc maths is like that isn’t it?) would be helpful?

That's not how the curriculum works. Everything you learn from reception is used in GCSE Maths. It's not like you suddenly start doing GCSE, it's all GCSE from the start. Those aiming for grade 8/9s will cover absolutely everything. Those aiming for lower grades will cover less content and spend more time consolidating and revisiting. There's no point a confident student spending a year revisiting foundation knowledge. Conversely there's no point a grade 4 borderline student learning the cosine rule.

Interesting thread.
DC is Y11, and maths has always been their Achilles heel. They are looking to do a science A level so are desperate to be entered for Higher so they at least have a shot at getting a grade 6. Their school takes the ‘ borderline students are entered for Higher’ approach, as described by a PP.

I’ve just engaged a tutor, as I can’t see another option to get them through.

Just make sure they are going to get a 5 in the higher. If mocks are below a 5 I'd be pushing for foundation and re considering A level choices.

A tutor can help a lot if DC work well with them and put the effort in. Make sure DC does homework set by the tutor and make sure the tutor knows which exam board and which tier you are doing. Good tutors should ask for this information.

Thanks @teachermaths . Decision point is a grade 5 in the mocks, hence the haste. I think confidence plays a large part here, hoping the tutor can bolster that.

I think too many students jump too readily from, "I don't understand this," to "I will never understand this," to "maths is too hard for me."

Instead it is better to work from, "this is how much I understand this this time", to "I understand it more this time through," to "great, my maths is improving".

For some reason, if you have reached the stage where you are really struggling the best thing you can do is walk away. After a couple of days the new topic will be easier.

Do not be put off by those who claim their child gets maths immediately, no matter how difficult, on first run through. I have a dd who is really good at maths, but she is really good because she works at it. GCSE does not test how you got to that level. When she was younger, whenever I taught her something new I would sometimes start by saying, "This is what you will be learning later, I don't expect you to understand it now, I'm just telling you it's there." (Should explain, I home educated for a while).

Dd used Letts or CGP work books and revision guides. Like anything, maths improves with practice. For the really difficult bits we turned to Khan Academy videos. They tend to have some really clear ways of explaining topics.

I’ve found it depends on the exam board

My DD got a 2 for GCSE maths the first time and the school were using AQA - ridiculously hard questions

She retook a year later and got a 6 but school had moved to EdExcel - you need higher marks than with AQA but the questions were a lot more realistic

Just whenever I taught her something new I would sometimes start by saying, "This is what you will be learning later, I don't expect you to understand it now, I'm just telling you it's there."

I have also found this approach works well with my DDs neither of whom are anywhere near being naturally good at maths.

@noblegiraffe I agree, that is another reason I was feeling frustrated. She was doing an online task which was labelled as "revision" for a test. As you say, this implies it would be something they had covered in class. But there were various things which she said she hadn't covered, and I couldn't see anything in her book which covered them.
The videos were an optional thing to click on if you needed help.

I'm interested to hear people talking about foundation and higher papers. I've no idea but she is at a grammar school so I wonder if everyone does higher. She is in bottom set but obviously that is bottom set of a generally higher ability cohort. Her target grade for maths is 5. I will be interested to talk to her maths teacher when I get a chance. She said after she had done the test that all the sets did the same test so the lower sets weren't supposed to have covered everything yet which I personally don't think is helpful as if you being tested on something you assume you are supposed to know it.

I can't really afford a tutor and anyway, although that would be something I would look at if I was being told she was falling behind and struggling to keep up at school, I don't think she should need a tutor just to be able to do her regular homework!

I can't remember who said the GCSE questions are much more practical than theoretical these days. That may be the case in the actual exam but the work she is doing at the moment is all completely theoretical, literally just equations with numbers and letters. No examples of how they might be relevant to a real life situation.

I think too many students jump too readily from, "I don't understand this," to "I will never understand this," to "maths is too hard for me."

Definitely.
And being bad at maths can almost be worn as a badge of pride.
Have you ever heard someone say "I really struggled with reading" in tones of Join The Club?
"I was always bad at maths" It's said a lot. On TV, parents, even other teachers.

I have a maths degree. When you tell people that you get a reaction. They either say "I did/nearly did maths" or "Oh I could never do that/I was terrible at maths/never under stood maths".
The tone of the voice is often embarrassment/apologetic for the former statement.
Every time a child hears these comments you are telling them "it's too hard for you. You can't do it" so they feel justified in not trying.

It is things like indices, including fractional indices, equations including fractions and minus numbers, surds (literally never heard that word before yesterday) etc.
I don't think these are ridiculous things for year 9, we'd certainly done most of those before year 9, although I don't think we called them surds. We just talked about square roots.

@bonbonours It sounds like your DD is struggling because she was trying to revise work inappropriate for her level. If her target for maths is grade 5, she won’t have done fractional indices by Y9 and possibly won’t even be taught it at school.

If everyone was doing the same test, then perhaps they were all set the same revision homework? Set 1 would have breezed through it - your DD should either have been set different revision work, or been told which bits of the revision work weren’t applicable to her set.

Regarding testing her on work she hasn’t been taught - if she is aiming for a grade 5 and is entered for the higher paper (which if it’s a grammar school is likely) then to achieve this in maths she would have needed 33% this year. Unfortunately this means that she won’t be able to do a large part of the paper, and probably won’t have been taught the stuff for half of it. Students in this situation need to get used to sitting tests and exams where there are questions that they haven’t been taught and need to leave out, otherwise when they get into an exam situation, they will totally crumble.

For grade 5 students who really can’t cope with this, they’d be better entered for the Foundation paper, where they can still get a grade 5, but will be able to attempt all the questions.

You need to talk to the maths teacher about how much time your DD spent trying to teach herself new material instead of revising things she had covered, and how this can be avoided in the future.

@noblegiraffe

Thanks, I will definitely try to speak to her teacher.

@noblegiraffe This also seems to be an issue where the entire year group is set the same test but many will not have covered up to what the top set are doing. Exams and revision should be based on testing what you have actually been taught. It is just disheartening for kids to look at papers and instantly feel bad because they don't know half of the work. No wonder they are put off maths.

re: comment on the difference between AQA and EdExcel..

The sooner the education system moves to a single exam board, the better.

Very other countries have this weird system. It is completely fraught with difficulty.

@BackInTime I do agree with that but Ds1 is now in year 12 and the only reason his English Language grade was an 8 was because of all the extra work he put in at home. Yes, they were taught in school but we supplemented that learning with wider reading and practising writing stories, finding out how many words roughly to write.

The AQA higher level maths paper (and noble can correct me if I am wrong) is 50% content dedicated to working out who is a 7, an 8 or a 9. So 50% of that paper is pretty much unanswerable for someone who will be aiming for a 6. That is my understanding of it. Luckily Ds got a solid 9 which was never in doubt because he worked at it, did maths questions every day.

Sometimes you can look at a question and think they haven't covered that and then realise you are applying the wrong method. I do believe that there is a crappy attitude toward maths. I myself had one but I realise it is because I was missing basic building blocks of maths such as times table knowledge.

Exams and revision should be based on testing what you have actually been taught

We used to have three tiers at GCSE which enabled that to happen for more pupils (Wales still does have three tiers) but that changed over 10 years ago and now we’re stuck with two. The Gove reforms have made things even worse, skewing papers to the higher end so grade boundaries are much lower - this means pupils are routinely aiming to answer about half the paper.

The 50% of content aimed at grades 7, 8 and 9 isn’t an AQA thing, that’s a GCSE maths rule for all the exam boards, so it’s the same for Edexcel and OCR. Gove again.

Because the final exam will be so hard, we need to prepare our pupils for getting used to not being able to answer questions, or picking 1 or 2 marks from longer questions. We do this especially from Y9 so the mocks don’t come as a horrible surprise.

Also, I absolutely pity children whose parents are less educated than me, and who very likely would be even less able to help them with their homework

I don’t have a degree

I’m perfectly capable of GCSE maths homework

But thanks for the pity - how rude

Also, I absolutely pity children whose parents are less educated than me, and who very likely would be even less able to help them with their homework

I pity children whose parents are this breathtakingly rude.

There are loads of parents who can’t help their kids with their maths homework because it’s totally beyond them. They tell me about it at parents’ evening.