March 25th, 2010
More than 80 per cent of parents struggle with their children’s homework, and more than half actually make homework worse for their children, according to research by our favourite Educational Tech organisation – Becta.
Tim Muffett of BBC Breakfast interviewed students and teachers at north London’s Anson Primary School, which has a novel solution to the problem – teach the parents!
Teachers at Anson School have produced short video snippets outlining key principles that parents can watch with their offspring and so become a constructive part of the homework process.
The idea that Anson Primary School is teaching the wrong people is wide of the mark. As we know well at Maths-Whizz – the most engaged and motivated students have engaged and motivated parents.
A child whose mother enjoys a subject, or is confidently able to assist him with homework, will be more inclined to see value in the subject, to do well at school, and to ask for constructive help.
This is something we’ve been fostering with Maths-Whizz for some time.
The circle of learning with Maths-Whizz
Our home and schools maths tutoring services promote communication between parents, teachers, and students – parents experience our animated tutor with their children, teachers discuss student reports with parents, and kids tend to talk to one another about toys, pets, and our Challenge feature.
[BBC News]
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March 18th, 2010
Maths-Whizz in Birmingham!
The God of Whizz needs a slap on the wrist. Whizz went to Birmingham’s NEC at the beginning of the month to show off Maths-Whizz to thousands of teachers and administrators who attended the Education Show 2010 and here, belatedly, is a brief round-up of the proceedings.
Whizz was shortlisted in two categories for the Education Show Awards (ERA Awards) – Supplier of the Year and Exporter of the Year. The show was another great opportunity to mix it amongst teachers and administrators who know and love Maths-Whizz, and those have yet to see the light (for shame!).
To correct the latter, Customer Service manager Natalie M, Product Manager Natalie S, and Sales Wizard Liam showed up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed to spread the word. The Nats had already done sterling work organising our presence at the show and managing our award entries.
Liam, Nat, and Nat!
Read on…!
Read the rest of this entry »
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February 18th, 2010
I’ve already twittered about this, but just a reminder that the much-discussed Channel 4 Dispatches programme The Kids Don’t Count has a minisite with a nice maths quiz.
Catch the twitterati talking about it with the #Dispatches hashtag, or try the test for yourself and see if you score 14/14.
As revealed in the Dispatches programme, only ONE of the 150 primary teachers who took a test like this got every question right. Which makes you wonder if they shouldn’t be taking a little primary maths tutoring before they take a class of future engineers, scientists and accountants.
Much fuss has been made of this, and the apparently parlous state our primary teaching is in. The GoW is inclined to be a little more generous, but only a little, because as he’s stated in the past, a love (if not innate aptitude) for the subject should come first, and an emphasis on testing second.
We’ll probably heap opprobium on the teachers, when we should be focussing on policy which chases test results, trains for pedagogy, and produces a blind willingness to cleave to a national curriculum which sometimes drains all the interest out of a subject.
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February 15th, 2010
The Daily Telegraph takes a look at the apparently terrible maths skills of primary teachers.
A test administered by researchers for Channel 4’s Dispatches programme found that:
Only four out of 10 teachers could work out that 2.1 per cent of 400 is 8.4. Only a third knew that 1.4 divided by 0.1 is 14, and less than 50 per cent could work out that a half divided by a quarter is 2.
As The Telegraph points out, ‘The material covered in the Dispatches test is contained in the primary national curriculum…’. And this chimes, rather sadly, with our long-held assertion that most adults have a maths age of 10 or 11. This is late Key Stage 2 – primary – maths, never mind GCSE.
In itself that might be worrying, but that we only ask a C-grade maths GCSE of new Primary school teachers implies that pedagogy and method is more important than knowledge and the confidence that comes from skill.
The God of Maths is a firm believer in the idea that you don’t have to know everything to teach excellently. Just as a good manager should always hope that he promotes his subordinates’ skills above his, a teacher should hope that his charges eventually over-take him. He just has to light the fire.
Despite this, something you cannot fake or rationalise away is a basic confidence and competence in a subject, and if significant numbers of primary teachers really are failing questions like these below, we ought to worry:
- 1.4 รท 0.1
- 2.1% of 400
- ABCDE is a pentagon. Name all its diagonals
- 7/16 + 3/4
- The mean height of a group of 4 people is 2 metres. One more person joins the group and then the mean height is 1.9 metres. What is the height of the new person?
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