Sunday Express, S Magazine - Rachel Carlyle
Any child can master maths – it all amounts to confidence, says our expert
If eight oranges cost £1.60, how much do six cost? Just reading that question makes me come over all panicky and cornered, and brings back memories of a particular teacher who wore sandals with socks and used to sneak off for crafty cigarettes in the book cupboard. When it came to children who didn’t “get” maths he just used to shout the same question a bit louder until you either pretended to understand or you cried.
I’m not alone: we’re a nation scared of maths, according to Countdown queen Carol Vorderman. “Every day, just walking down the street, in taxis or shops, I get comments about numbers. What I’m told most often is, ‘I’m scared of maths’,” she says.
Experts agree some of that is due to bad teaching early on, plus a kind of national feeling that it’s OK to hate maths as it’s for geeks. One recent survey revealed 70 per cent of pupils seek help for maths, yet over a third of us feel unable to offer any tuition whatsoever. It doesn’t help that the teaching of maths has completely changed since even the youngest parents were at school. According to a primary teacher friend who’s a whizz with numbers, the new approach is much better for most children. “The trouble is”, she says, “when they get home and ask parents for help, they always say – ‘no don’t do it like that logically.
So they understandI’ll show you how I did it at school’, which leaves the child completely bamboozled.” These days, there’s lots more emphasis on quickfire arithmetic: since the introduction of the numeracy hour six years ago, primary children get 15 minutes of rapid mental arithmetic at the start of each lesson.
There’s also more emphasis on “breaking down” numbersthat 64 is made up of 60 and four, and if you want to add nine to 64, you’d add 10 then take away one. As for long division, it’s so different no parent would recognise it. For dad Ron van der Meer, his frustration over his inability to help his daughters with maths led to some creative thinking. He devised an online tutoring programme called Maths Whizz, which is already used in over 1,150 schools and has just been launched for home computers.
After an assessment which gauges your maths age (a pathetic “age seven” in my case) it comes up with a personalised lesson plan concentrating on areas the child is unsure about. Then the computer leads them through a succession of quickfire exercises involving cartoon characters. Points can be spent at the virtual shop. “I didn’t have a clue how to help my children”, says Ron. “Maths is all about confidence.
Anyone, like me, who always said they were useless at it probably had a bad teacher. The brain then shuts down, and if you miss one concept, you can’t grasp the next one and you fall behind. I don’t believe there are people who ‘can’t do maths’ – they’re just not confident.”
Maths Whizz costs £27.50 a month for unlimited use; for more details contact www.mathswhizz.com or call 0870 199 6641. Carol Vorderman’s Maths Made Easy series of books for Dorling Kindersley (£2.99 each) is good, as is the BBC 10minute topup series (£2.99; both available from Express Bookshop, page 88). The Government also runs a useful website that explains how children are taught now at www.parentscentre.gov.uk.