Maths GCSE

[magwich2]

I know Guest55 teaches in a grammar school and I am sure that all she says applies to her able pupils but what do you actually DO with a bottom set of 15 year olds who need a calculator to work out their 2 times table (yes, really!!), work out 6 x 4 by getting a calculator out and punching in 6+6+6+6 and cannot for love nor money work out the area of a triangle?
All real examples in 2 different institutions and no matter how many "lesson starters" or "activities" are attempted they still cannot do any of it!

[moved]

I went to an interesting seminar recently, looking at the comparison between the 70s and now for the level of maths at age 13/14.

Children in the 70s were better at nearly everything that was used in the test, although straight arithmetic wasn't looked at.

I am disappointed as I know the quality of teaching is better on the whole.

[Guest55]

Magwich2 - I spent many years teaching in comprehensives before I moved to where I am now.

You need to link the arithmetic to real-life examples and help them the see why maths is important. Activities like planning a holiday or designing a room or using geometry to design a pop-up card let them use arithmetic and become competent in doing so.

[mystery]

Yes, that is one part of it.

I helped out in a classroom a couple of years back where some 6 th formers with poor gcse results were preparing for an Edexel or qca key skills maths paper. The paper had some desperately muddling questions on it. I was not impressed by the paper or the prep for it.

Students' last chance at developing some useful and basic maths skills before leaving school was being frittered away.

[magwich2]

DH has tried all that plus various sets of plastic tiles, cubes,nets etc etc but to little avail - the few who gain any understanding have forgotten it all by the next lesson no matter how much homework they are given!
I think that lower ability pupils do far too little maths at secondary level . There should be at least a numeracy hour each day and preferably 2 - less drama art and music until the basics have been learnt perhaps?

[Amber]

I know I am at risk of becoming a one-issue woman; but I have worked with very low ability secondary age children in Maths and my feeling was that they had just hadn't understood the real basics from the word 'go'. The curriculum then moved on; and they got more and more left behind, to the point where it all seemed really scary for them and they couldn't try any more.

If things were left a little later, so that they weren't expected to master all four mathematical functions by the age of 7 when (I know I keep on about this, but...) children in other countries are just starting their formal mathematical learning, then maybe they would have a more solid grounding by the time it came to secondary school. For some children 5 is just too young to get the hang of adding and taking away, and recording it to boot; the language of mathematics looks genuinely frightening to some older children because they have such bad memories of it from infant school.

[moved]

In the latest draft of the curriculum they will be expected to be able to manipulate fractions to the level of 1/3 of a quantity!

[doodles]

You need to link the arithmetic to real-life examples and help them the see why maths is important.

This approach worked really well for my DS when he was in Yr5, there was a topic he just couldn't get his head around so the maths teacher, knowing my boy all too well, translated the problem into seats available in a rugby stadium for a match. As rugby is the be all and end all of DS's life the problem just clicked into place - and he's never forgotten how to do that particular problem.

[yoyo123]

with younger pupils ( KS2) I find that games work brilliantly. The children get so interested in winning that they forget that they are having to "do maths" One particular child is a bingo fiend! He will convert mm to cm, simplify fractions and convert percentages to decimals at the drop of a hat if it involves a bingo board, but struggle and complain if teh same problem is given him on a page of the text book.

I may have mentioned my fondness for maths games before somewhere...

[mystery]

Yep, all this is true. But the situation that the OP outlines with a high ability child approaching GCSE with some pretty easy basics "missing or forgotten" is all too common and perfectly avoidable.