Anxiety

The Guardian Teacher Network maths-anxiety

Interesting article, this.

In my first teaching job, I was gifted the bottom set of a cross Key Stage 2 maths set. Twenty Five 7-11 year olds, some of who couldn't count beyond 10. For my added delectation, I had the year 5/6 bottom English set.I suspect this pleasure was afforded to a New Qualified Teacher so I couldn't muck up the SATs results. After all, SATs is where it's at! I have to say, I loved it and since then I've taught lower set maths whenever I've had the choice.

Why?

Well, this article encapsulates one of the biggest problems in teaching maths...or any other subject, for that matter. Most children who aren't achieving in maths suffer from huge anxiety about it.  Crack that anxiety and they fly. Adults who have helped out in my classes, and I suspect there are a few of you amongst the readership, will have seen my class singing maths songs, tapping their heads and bottoms (Fractions - 'what you do to the top you do to the bottom'- bottom is such a funny word when you are 9), singing "I'm all about the maths" and so the 'we are maths geniuses' dance. We did smarties ratio and proportion, chocolate fractions (food always focuses the brain), maths sandwiches to help understand algorithms.  We made posters and puzzles and games ...and we came to believe we are all maths geniuses. It wasn't quick, it wasn't easy but we grew to understand that we can all do maths.

Many of the children we tutor are perfectly capable, bright little souls but somewhere in their early years in class, they managed to learn to fear maths. Our job is to help them 'unlearn' that fear.

Sometimes we meet parents who learnt that anxiety many years ago. It isn't helped by the fact that our children learn very different methods and terminology than we did.

Recognising that, we have decided at EKT to provide sessions for parents too. Details will be on the website soon.

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SPaG

Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar.

Fascinating stuff. No really, I genuinely find the nuances of our language  fascinating.

Of course I am a 50something humanities graduate, who is pursuing a Master's degree in the subject. I am not a 10 year old, facing a government SPaG test. Sample papers

One of my favourite  champions of children's education, Michael Rosen, has shared his views in an open letter to Nicky Morgan, Secretary of State for Education. He expresses the frustration that many teachers will be feeling, on reading through these sample materials, far better than I could -
Dear Ms Morgan

It's worth opening the links, I promise you it is. Our children are being force fed a diet of literary terms that are completely irrelevant to almost everyone except linguists. I had to learn what determiners, modal verbs and fronted adverbials were before I could teach them to my last year 4 class. Interestingly the children were already using these in their work perfectly adequately without knowing their names.
We had a 'word of the week'. Often, ( look there's a fronted adverbial just crept into this sentence...or is it just and adverb? Hmmm.) when other adults came into the room, the children could explain terms the adults had never heard of. Now these 'other adults' ...TAs, teachers from other year groups, outside agency staff and parents... were perfectly literate and had managed all their lives without knowing, or caring, about the different types of determiner.
So why must our 10 year olds be subjected to it, you might ask? And it would be a very good 'ask' indeed.

Children no longer write stories regularly, as I did when I was young. They may plan, draft and edit 3 or possibly even 4, pieces of writing in a term. Many of these will be non-fiction pieces. Of course, there are excellent reasons for teaching different genres but the bottom line is writing has become a technical exercise, rather than a creative pleasure. We are robbing our children of their freedom of expression. I think that is very sad. In practical terms, the obsession with Spag isn't driving up literacy skills, it's just changing them.

As a tutor, it's good business news. Children will need tutors more and more, to learn how to squeeze through the hoops our government has set up.But, at East Kent Tutors, we pride ourselves we are above simple business models. Our concern is with the well-being of our clients, and with old-fashioned concepts like justice and fairness. Every Child Matters, as the  the Government policy of 2003 tells us. Every child has the right to:

• To be healthy.
• To stay safe.
• To enjoy and achieve.
• To make a positive contribution.
• To achieve economic well-being.

It's good isn't it?

But let's examine one of those objectives just a teeny bit. To achieve economic well-being. For many children in our county, that would  require social mobility. Well that's OK, we have grammar schools for that don't we?  Recent figures show that grammar schools in Kent have, on average, 3% of children on free school meals (the marker used to indicate low income) compared with 15% in comprehensive schools. How much wider will that gap become with obscure grammatical terms being the benchmark for success? Many parents can help their children with this type of homework?

Dear Ms Morgan,
Please think carefully about why we educate children and how we engage them in creative thinking.
Then, please consider whether teaching subjunctives to 10 year olds  is really helpful to that process.
Thank you