Is this really year 8 maths?

[DrRuthGalloway]

My DD is in year 8. She is in a comp, we live in a grammar area but she didn't pass 11+, just for context, maths is a weaker area though she is generally able in my opinion. She was 13 marks off passing 11+.

At the comp (genuine comp, not secondary modern) she is in top set maths. They have a new homework system. She seems to be getting ridiculously difficult tasks - screenshots attached, a couple of a series of this sort of thin from her most recent homework. Is this really expected in year 8? I have no idea how to solve this and even dh, who got A for maths O level back in the day, isn't certain. I thought the new guidelines were to stay within programmes of study for the age group and not zoom upwards, but I am quite shocked if this is ordinary year 8 work.

This shows that it’s not about doing complicated calculations so much as knowing the rules. I didn’t know how to do this because it’s been 50 years since I did my O levels! But once you showed the example, I could work out what to do.
I teach primary maths. I try to make sure children know the rule of how to carry out a calculation. When doing a unit on adding / subtracting fractions with different denominators, I make sure the children know the rule for finding a common denominator.

It wasn't me playing mean girl, making out that anyone not doing Boolean algebra at age 10 is daft and that I am "whingeing" because I simply asked if it's standard year 8 work.

Neither my husband, my daughter or I have "issues with maths". DH is actively good and we (dd and I) are competent. I have certainly never been in a situation in real life that my maths skills were inadequate for.

My complaint is that maths is now made to be so ridiculously tricky post Gove that a perfectly competent mathematician passing at grade 4 or 5 is made to feel like a complete idiot because they only need to get about 30 percent on a gcse paper to "pass". If you are faced with a paper that you can't do 70 percent of, despite being a perfectly competent mathematician, that is going to rub off on your self esteem and sense of yourself in maths.

Anyway I have my answer, yes it's typical year 8 work. Thankyou to those who posted as much and didn't feel the need to scoff at, belittle or insinuate that a 12 year old who is finding it hard must have not been paying attention in class. We can't all be natural mathematicians.

I don't believe I said at any point that I was going to email her teacher?

I said we would ask the teacher what we should do when we get homework she feels she hasn't covered. As it happens, it's parents eve next week and dd will come, so we will ask the teacher then.

The first one is just a simplification of fractions and the second one is just multiplication by 2 ... So yeah seems appropriate for year 8...

It is very easy fir atop set year 8 ( 13 ur old)

Re. asking the teacher what to do if Sparx sets work she hasn't covered - although it would be useful to know this in principle in case it ever does happen, it's probably more useful for her to assume that she probably has covered it somehow, and that she just doesn't recognise it (like this example) - she will have done these rules given the harder rules you showed from her book, so it's important for her to start thinking about how she might be able to apply what she knows, to 'problem solve' and find a way of working out the answer, rather than kind of 'giving up' when she sees something unfamiliar and assuming that she hasn't covered it. It's such a vital skill in students, to be able to apply rules to broader situations, to work out how else they can get into a question, what might they need to know, how they could find those numbers in the problem etc. I think that the hardest questions on the exams (and in the end, the ones that distinguish the higher grades in GCSE from the lower ones) is not that the higher grades need 'harder maths'. They often need the same type of maths, but applied differently - the test is the ability to recognise what to do, and to generalise from the straightforward problems done in lessons or learned by rote, to something more interesting.

It's not that this is particularly tricky maths or anything new since Gove. There are some new and tricky topics, but I think that what has made the exams trickier is that aspect I mentioned above, the fact that they have to work out what to do in more complex problems and how to apply and use the material without being directed. There is a bigger range of levels of questions now, even on the same basic maths skills, which is good for distinguishing the top levels from the others.
(However, I do agree that there needs to be an intermediate tier for those who aren't going to be working at this level, so that there is more time for them to spend on learning the basics; and a foundation tier that needs to just cover the practical maths and not a lot of the abstract topics that it currently covers!).

I agree and used to tell my students to start from the assumption that they wouldn't have asked you this if you didn't have the tools to do it. So see if you can find something in your tool bag that might help. Slightly tortured metaphor but I guess that's why I don't teach English 😂

(Of course then there is always the odd time that a question does sneak in that shouldn't have - looking at you WJEC AS/A2 last year, you absolute monsters.)

Sorry, I wasn't trying to be snarky, but you did say you "Will raise the question with her teacher of what is expected when this happens in homework". I just thought that sounded rather like overkill at this stage. Can your daughter just have a word with her teacher to say that she found the homework tricky and wasn't sure whether/when they'd covered the topic before - the teacher might well then point her towards some previous learning and perhaps say 'try looking over what we did here' or whatever. Doesn't sound like there's a need for you to get involved unless this is a real repeated or ongoing issue.

I don't think this is tricky at all. It's about know that these are questions for understanding exponents. Don't let your DD be discouraged. Work on understand what they are and the questions are quite easy.

As others have said. These questions look awful when you glance at them but once you are taught the method they are pretty straightforward. hard to work out if you don’t have the method. Pretty standard for year 8 but I expect designed to stretch them.

FYI, I have just done it on Friday and helped DD in solving her computing question in totally overkill way. I didn't read the first half of the paper because she came to me for the challenge question. They were converting binary and decimal and I started down the path of being very generic and wondering why year 7s know about remainder operators and substring/char at functions in scratch or python.

What I'm saying is that the question must be linked to a topic they are learning. And without the context, sometimes we approach it in a way that can be not what is expected.