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Original poster

Dispatches programme about children learning maths

222 replies

ItNeverRainsBut · 16/02/2010 08:10

Anyone watch this Dispatches programme on Channel 4 last night?
The Kids Don't Count

Quite shocking that when they gave the teachers the test aimed at 11-year-olds, they scored and average 45%!

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fzvs2f · 16/02/2010 13:53

To divide fractions all you need to understand is what a fraction is. A fraction is a piece of something, like an orange wedge or a piece of apple pie. Lets say you dive the pie into four pieces. Each piece is therefore a quarter of the whole pie 1/4. When telling the time you might say it is a "quarter to eight" meaning it is 15 minutes to eight because 15 minutes is a quarter of an hour. Every hour has four 15 minute quarters (or three 20 minutes thirds), therefore if you divide one hour by one quarter, you get four quarters. If you take that just a little further and divide half an hour (which is made up of two 15 minutes quarters) by one quarter, you find that one half an hour has TWO 15 minute quarters in it i.e. 2. This is why when you divide one half by one quarter, the answer is two. All you are doing is saying how many bits of one thing fit into something else. TWO half pints of milk fit into one pint bottle the same way that TWO quarter pints of milk fit into one half pint bottle............

Original poster
ItNeverRainsBut · 16/02/2010 14:04

Interesting article about gender and maths.

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EdgarAllenSnow · 16/02/2010 14:25

i think the most relevant point was the conclusion of that article - maths is a skill that needs practice.

kids that learn, and then practice what they've learned will do well in tests, but not retain that knowledge indefinitely, nor the aptitude unless it is built upon. All teaching methods result in the knowledge being forgotten, if not continued.

101damnations · 16/02/2010 22:42

I think the emphasis on literacy has led to maths being seen as not quite so important in some cases.We read with dd1 every night,but never thought that perhaps we ought to practice her times tables every night instead.It was only her teacher at parent's evening saying that dd was able at maths,but lacked confidence and needed to practice at home,so she was confident that she had 'got' it.,that made us rethink this.She also gets 3 pages of literacy/spellings for homework,but 1 page of maths.

Interestingly,the pupils at the school attain a very high standard in maths,and the girls are doing as well as the boys.

gaelicsheep · 16/02/2010 22:50

Every primary school should have an A in GCSE maths IMO, or some serious remedial classes followed by a very good pass in an equivalent level exam. I really mean it. If you can't get an A, you really have no business teaching maths.

I just posted on the other thread about the fractions thing. The kids had never ever been taught basic concepts, and I heard no mention of them later on either. I despair for the education system today - my poor DS. I foresee many fights with the school and much home tuition.

gaelicsheep · 16/02/2010 22:51

primary school "teacher" obviously

WilfSell · 16/02/2010 22:57

Ah sorry, started another thread - didn't see y'all here... Will read.

gaelicsheep · 16/02/2010 22:57

southeastastra - the trouble it that the pizza method, or paper cup method, is OK for easy fractions. But if you're talking about:

7/16 / 9/40, for example, then it becomes somewhat less intuitive, so you need a method.

I don't think I ever understood (still don't) why you invert the second fraction and multiply the two. What matters is that it works. Maths is full of stuff that you just have to learn and accept as true. I get the impression that today's kids aren't expected to actually learn and remember anything at all.

ButterPie · 16/02/2010 23:10

This is why I'm looking into HE - out of the four working primary school teachers I know, there is one I would be happy to have teach my children. All of them would be fine to babysit, but not to instill the basic knowledge and attitudes to learning that my children will need throughout their lives.

I will be being very involved if they do go to school.

gaelicsheep · 16/02/2010 23:20

I would love to be able to HE too ButterPie, but I don't want DS to miss out on the social aspects of school. As far as I see it he will be going to school to make friends. His real education will happen at home - god forbid he gets completely turned off.

midnightexpress · 16/02/2010 23:33

It was an interesting, if depressing, programme, though it's interesting also to see strawberrykate's perspective on here.

The thing that depressed me most was the SATs and the effect on the staff and the students. Does anyone actually think they are a good idea? Really? It's a genuine question, because I don't really know much about them (yet), but they seem to get such a universally bad press, and aren't taken at that age outside England afaik.

gaelicsheep · 16/02/2010 23:36

I've said on the other thread that if I was in England I would be withdrawing DS from school for the duration of the SATS preparation and the tests themselves. The thought of 11 weeks of his school year being taken up with that tripe fills me with horror.

ButterPie · 17/02/2010 01:31

It is the social aspects that are worrying me too gaelicsheep. I am making arrangements to go to an art club for HE'd children under 8 (as I suppose mine are HE'd as they don't go to nursery) to see how the whole thing works.

ImSoNotTelling · 17/02/2010 09:31

gaelicsheep that is a good illustration of what I was talking about earlier. For people to really understand maths they need to be taught well. Maths is an incredibly hard subject to teach even if you are good at it yourself, trying to get the children to grasp the underlying concepts is really hard. But once grasped, they are never forgotten, because you understand how it works. Like when letters suddenly coalesce into words, numbers start to form patterns and behave predicatably and you can manipulate them.

For some children this is more intuitive than others, and I think that everyone has a "cutoff" point for maths, past which they're never going to get it as their brain can't process it.

But if people are teaching methods rather than concepts and principles, then there is no opportunity for children to really engage with it. Doing things by rote is boring, understanding concepts and using them isn't.

I have often wondered if the sort of person who chooses a career as a primary school teacher is less likely to be the sort of person who has a "science" brain IYKWIM (contraversial)

Original poster
ItNeverRainsBut · 17/02/2010 09:54

Arguably someone who struggled with maths themselves might teach it better, as they'd have firsthand knowledge of what it's like to not get it right away.

I do worry about this notion of maths as "hard" though, in this context. We are talking primary school level maths, not Fermat's Last Theorem, and it's supposed to be able to be grasped by children. Surely it's not that the maths is hard, just that it's not being taught effectively.

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ImSoNotTelling · 17/02/2010 10:05

I'm not sure. I have seen quite a few maths teachers in action, only one of them was really able to communicate the concepts in a really engaging way. To make people understand rather than just learn a method.

The fractions stuff on here is an excellent example. Many people saying how to divide fractions, but the concept of why it works like that is harder to teach than simply how to do it. But once that concept is grasped, and a person really understands, that knowledge is there for life and is a stepping stone to more complicated concepts and a deeper understanding of how numbers work.

It's like teaching what letters make which words, and teaching specific phrases, but not taking it to understanding how the letters can be combined in different ways to make different words, and how the words can be combined in different ways to make different phrases.

The notion that maths is hard comes from messages in films and the telly I think, with scientists always protrayed as geeks and boffins.

houseworkhater · 17/02/2010 11:32

I found the bit about SaTS very depressing. The fact that all the teachers interviewed said they would have to stop actually teaching students maths and begin to teach them how to pass a test was disgusting imo. What a waste of valuable school life. No wonder children turn off from school as they are little more than lab rats in some scientific experiment. Very depressing.

coldtits · 17/02/2010 11:37

One of the questions was 1/4 divided by 1/2

Now if you take 1/4 of something and chop it in half, surely you have 1/8?

Apparently not. but I have NO CONCEPT of why this isn't the case.

onebadbaby · 17/02/2010 11:49

1/4 divided by 4 is 1/8.

Try thinking of 0.25 divided by 0.5 that will help you see why the answer is 2.

Or think of 4 divided by 2.

southeastastra · 17/02/2010 11:55

i still think the pizza method is best for beginners.

imagine a quarter of a pizza, cut that in half, how many pieces do you have?

coldtits · 17/02/2010 12:07

It doesn't help me see why the answer is two, it makes me think the answer is 0.125

If you have 1/4 of a pizza and you cut it in half, you have 1/8 of a pizza.

How is that not so?

SofaQueen · 17/02/2010 12:12

Another way of seeing it is how many 1/4 make up 1/2.

Just like 8 divided by 2 is the same thing as how many 2's make up 8.

senua · 17/02/2010 12:13

If you have 1/2 of a pizza and you cut it in quarters, you have 1/8 of a pizza.

That sentence translates as 1/2 times 1/4 = 1/8

The question in the programme is a different one: it is 1/2 divided by 1/4 =2

claig · 17/02/2010 12:13

1/4 divided by 4 is 1/16. It takes 4/16 to make 1/4.

For 1/4 divided by 1/2, you can think of it as being how many halves does it take to make a quarter, and the answer is 1/2 of a 1/2 is a 1/4. Alternatively you could multiply everything by 8. So 1/4 divided by 1/2 becomes the same as 2 divided by 4, which is 1/2.
When you say 1/4 of something chopped in half you are saying what is a half of a quarter and this is really 1/2 x 1/4 = 1/8.
It is not actually 1/4 divided by 1/2.

claig · 17/02/2010 12:16

1/4 of a pizza cut in half is 1/4 divided by 2 and it does equal 1/8. It is not the same as 1/4 divided by 1/2