{"id":89,"date":"2024-02-17T22:19:40","date_gmt":"2024-02-17T22:19:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathswhisperers.com\/?p=89"},"modified":"2024-02-18T19:35:25","modified_gmt":"2024-02-18T19:35:25","slug":"blog-post-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathswhisperers.com\/index.php\/2024\/02\/17\/blog-post-1\/","title":{"rendered":"When am I ever going to need this ****?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>This was my reaction to finding maths difficult at university.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Up until then, maths had been easy at school, through O-levels and then A-levels in maths and further maths.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Faced with these difficulties, there was little help other than my tutor suggesting that I should &#8220;treat it with the contempt it deserves&#8221;; somewhat bizarre advice to someone clearly struggling.  Sadly, George Polya&#8217;s &#8220;How to solve it&#8221; didn&#8217;t seem to have found its way from Princeton to Cambridge so I was left to my own devices to muddle through&#8230; which I just about did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It was over twenty years later, after a career as a consulting actuary (during which I didn&#8217;t actually need any of my university maths!) that I started to hear students again bemoaning &#8220;when am I ever going to need this ****?&#8221;.  I had just begun mentoring some very disengaged 14-19 year-old NEETs and, by accident rather than design, started helping them with their maths.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I soon realised that this was our very natural knee-jerk reaction to finding maths difficult.  That realisation has enabled me to build a structure of maths of teaching around some very simple principles:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li>Question with care and listen with patience to elicit a student&#8217;s understanding; reaffirm the parts of this understanding that are correct; identify and repair any misconceptions.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Teach students the &#8220;why?&#8221; rather than the &#8220;how?&#8221; of mathematics, so that a few key, highly-connected principles are learnt rather than lots of easily forgotten or misapplied rules and formulae.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Build students&#8217; confidence to become effective, independent maths learners, using technology to allow students to learn at their own pace, in their own time and in their own space.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>I have worked as a head of maths curriculum for over 10 years in further education and adult education and overseen the learning of over 10,000 students in that time.  We live in a country where half of the working-age population has a numeracy level of a primary school child and 75% of the 16 year-olds who &#8220;fail&#8221; their maths GCSE each year have still not achieved it two years&#8217; later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It is possible to rebuild the confidence of people who have had bad experiences of maths in the past.  It&#8217;s not easy: but it should be easy to start by showing <strong>care<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Peter<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This was my reaction to finding maths difficult at university. Up until then, maths had been easy at school, through O-levels and then A-levels in maths and further maths. Faced with these difficulties, there was little help other than my tutor suggesting that I should &#8220;treat it with the contempt [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathswhisperers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathswhisperers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathswhisperers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathswhisperers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathswhisperers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mathswhisperers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":134,"href":"https:\/\/mathswhisperers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89\/revisions\/134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathswhisperers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathswhisperers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathswhisperers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}