sparx maths

[SomersetBrie]

I'm a parent of a Y10 who has recently started using sparx maths with school.
I am wondering what other parents/teachers think of it.
DS is good at maths but is struggling with the homework style in general and the difficulty in getting 100%.
I assumed it was a him problem (he has plenty of those!) but I came across some very negative comments online about sparx (mainly from students) and just wondered what others thought.
I thought it sounded great from the email we got from school, but getting more questions in your areas of difficulty and minimal help with these areas has been very frustrating for him.

@Covidisdrivingmecrazy it’s the same in DS’s school. He had his only ever detention for not being able to do one question before he discovered he could use AI. I couldn’t do it either, we both watched the video with the woman with the annoying Love Island voice and neither of us could get the answer, not helped by it changing when we got it wrong twice and having to start over. He was so frustrated, I was so frustrated, we were getting frustrated at each other and had to give up in the end as it wasn’t worth it and he was punished for not knowing. When it was pen and paper homework, you’d just get a cross and the teacher would explain how to do it. It’s horrendous.

Interesting that AI has entered the frame.
I started this thread over a year ago and since then DS school dropped the expectation from 100% to 80% and that's made the whole thing more manageable.
Thankfully now in the run up to GCSEs homework is always past papers or exam questions and Sparx is an optional extra.
I am quite glad to be leaving Sparx behind now - and also Seneca, which suited DS1 but DS2 hates almost as much as Sparx.

Our school still requires 100% completion rate or its detention the next day. The whole thing is god-awful, frankly. I honestly don't blame kids for using AI to complete it. What do schools expect when they're using AI to push kids to their limits. Half the time the teachers don't even know what work Sparx is giving them/teaching them. Sparx is a cop-out, frankly. We all know schools are under huge pressure but outsourcing homework to Sparx is awful.

My friend who is head of a different school maths department says the same as you and she will not have it in her school.

I've just got the senco in board and stopped doing it. Ridiculous and stressful and unfair.

Interesting, Sparx has been a hit with a lot of SEN kids actually. The repetition usually annoys higher ability kids though.

Hi. Yes he liked it at first but once the algorithm kicked in and it kept getting harder it started some anxiety triggers.

He gets very stressed by the neverending nature of it. So he can't predict how long it will take because if he gets one wrong it just keeps adding more questions and he can't resolve the original question. Some he has not been taught in class. He doesn't like the videos...plus he has massive issues with homeworks anyway. Home is not for school work! Rigid thinking and it is really hard for him.

The teacher offers lunchtime sessions to help but my child associates these with the naughty kids and feels like it's punishment.

I'm not sure what we will do as he progresses. But the maths teacher doesn't have to cope with my life and the meltdowns this was causing. He still came in top of class in tests anyway!

Autism and homework...urgh 😫

@Mumteedum I was about to say, its a common response to any HW for autistic kids and then I read your last sentence 😅

I hate it. She gets marked as not competing homework when she doesn’t know it but if someone helps her it will think she can do it and give her harder questions.

I was on at start of the thread saying my child was okay but not thrilled with it - that slowly changed to hating it. She out lasted most of the rest of the year group - rest just stopped doing at all. The school quietly dropped it - one teacher at a time - and went back to mathswatch.

That child tends to like on-line stuff but even she started to struggle with this - and she grew up doing mathsfactor in primary which she loved.

The fact that if you help them, it gets harder… I understand the theory behind it ie it gets more challenging but it just teaches kids not to do it or it’ll get harder for them. Where’s the encouragement in that? The whole thing is awful.

I have to use Sparx Maths for GCSEs and it has made me hate maths. It says it prepares you for your GCSEs but I have never had a test with questions nearly as hard as the ones in Sparx Maths, and at least with tests you're not forced to retake it if you didn't get 100%. The whole system is completely useless and I'll probably be using my computer knowledge to crack into the code and find the answers that way because at this rate that'd be easier

We've just stopped doing it completely now.

I've got the senco on side fortunately so no punishments. I've bought him some workbooks for GCSE instead. He's happily doing them. Ok, not loads because autism and homework and aaaaarrrgggghhhh but he's doing some.

I am quite prepared to fight my corner if.the maths teachers raise it.

Im finding sparx questions much easier than the higher paper gcse. So i assume pp means they are taking foundation?

@Prisecco2 me? Sorry...don't know what you mean by foundation.

He's y9 and they've just started GCSE content at school.

The questions you get depend on the level your child is at so if they're not answering higher level questions or not completing extra levels they will be getting foundation level content.

We're completing all the work. Its definitely not that tricky (yet).

who the fuck is ds

Sparx maths is the shittest piece of of shizer i have ever encountered in my 40 years of living my children believe that whenever they go on it they want to end their lives because of fucking bookwork checks they could NOT give a single shit about working out 2 plus 2 👺

Just fail all the bookwork checks. You can still complete the hw. Sparx changed this ages ago

Alternatively write down the working out and the answers and label them and then you don't fail the bw check.