Practical Advice for Improving Your Child’s Maths - Part 3 - Breaking Free

In my last post I outlined the two major obstacles in learning maths. The two problems as I see them are: too much to learn in too little time and students don’t have the right attitude to maths.

If these are the problems, what are they actually getting in the way of? Well when I’m teaching I have two clear goals:

1. Get students to learn some maths before they finish school

2. Get them the best grades possible

(in that order)

With any luck, our goals are the same. I hope to advise on how we can achieve them in this and future articles.

A note on the approach I will take: I spend my day-to-day life teaching students the minute details of GCSE maths: how and when to apply the quadratic formula; methods for identifying congruent triangles; why 1 is not a prime number. None of that will be included here. That information is available a thousand times over, for free and in very high quality, all across the internet (you can even find some on my humble YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC741hycDNd9oiYYdZ4tLblQ ). I would like to work a layer above that, and help you turn your child into a student who will go and seek that information out for themselves. You can take a horse to water, but you can’t make it multiply fractions.

Anyway, now we know the goals and we know the problems. How do we reach the goals and solve the problems? Let’s get to it.

Step One

The first thing to do is unfortunately a little awkward: disentangle your child from their maths education at school.

The difficult fact is that our beleaguered maths teachers are tied into a system which, for the reasons I have outlined previously, is cruelly ineffective. Well-meaning maths teachers are held hostage by bureaucratic schedules of learning that demand they cover the course material at breakneck speed. They have no choice over this, but they are not helping your child.

In fact, students often come to me near the end of an academic year and declare “My teacher said we’re not even going to finish the course!” as if this is some damning indictment of the teacher’s ability. My usual response is to ask the student whether they know (thoroughly) the material they have been taught. A few basic questions will reveal that no, the student does not thoroughly know the material they have been taught. So why are they complaining? In typical fashion the teacher has been criticised when in fact they were probably acting in the best interest of their students.

As a parent, what action do you need to take?

My (unrealistic) ideal is that your child be released of all homework responsibilities in maths and that every maths lesson they are allowed to do independent work in some quiet place in the school. The chances are that this will go down at school like a lead balloon. Teachers are aware of the problems I have described to varying degrees, but even the most enlightened will not take kindly to being told that you, the parent, think you know better than them.

If, as is likely, the above is not achievable then aim for something like this: a conversation with the maths teacher that outlines your position and that your child will be undertaking work independently that does not line up with the school’s schedule of learning (which, I have now explained at length, is no good). Explain that you would like little or no homework load on your child. Understand, however, that in addition to the teacher’s attitude, the slack they can give you might actually depend on the law.

All we are trying to achieve here is a degree of freedom from school. This might even just amount to telling your child “you don’t have to go at the same speed as they do at school”. Make it clear to your child that they don’t have to move on until they feel comfortable (we’ll discuss later when to move on to a new topic). We want the student to feel that they are in control of their own learning.

Now What?

The thing you probably don’t want to hear is the following: the greater guardian/parental involvement in your child’s learning, the more successful they will be. The good news is this doesn’t involve you knowing any maths. What it does mean is helping plan revision schedules, managing work and rewards and generally being all up in their business. Frankly you’re not going to like it and they’re not going to like it, but the fact is most students of GCSE age simply don’t have the skills, knowledge or discipline to do this alone.

Let’s say that you have done some of the above and gained a little bit of control over maths for your child. We can’t just cast them adrift in the ocean of mathematics and wish them the best of luck; now is when they need the most support. Firstly, keep them in the loop at all times: what we are trying to achieve; what the problems are; the steps we are taking to overcome them. So let them know - you have now got a bit more control over your maths learning.

Secondly, you as a parent or guardian need to be heavily involved at this stage. We’ve just ripped a student away from a system that has taught them to be passive. They are not going to take naturally to the freedom (and matching responsibility) they have been granted. This is where your help is needed the most.

Your tasks are going to be:

• Making sure some work is getting done

• Helping to decide what topics will be tackled

• Keeping the student organised and on track

• YOU DON’T NEED TO KNOW ANY MATHS TO DO THIS

I am going to go into much more detail in upcoming posts regarding the exact work that students should undertake and how they should do it. For now, just know that you will be needed to oversee it all at the beginning.

We’ve taken our first steps

There’s no magic solution to our problems; the ideas I present in this series are designed to nudge your child in the right direction. If we successfully execute enough nudges, it might make a meaningful difference to the student’s final grade. I have and will try to present an ideal but often unrealistic course of action, along with a more practical path to reaching a similar outcome. The ideal has been offered to show you truly what we are aiming for to get the best, purest results. The closer you can get to it the better. The more realistic followup is designed to help you move in the right direction without taking the more nuclear option.

In this post we’ve seen how to take the first steps toward improving your child’s maths. It’s a little scary, but I believe it will pay dividends if we get it right. In my next post I will discuss the resources that are essential but often overlooked for facing GCSE maths.

More advice to follow. Stay tuned.

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As always, if you have specific questions please contact me directly at jake@jakeharristuition.com