Practical Advice for Improving Your Child’s Maths - Part 2 - The Problems

In my last post I outlined my plan to write a series of blog posts aimed at helping parents improve their child’s maths, without knowing any maths themselves. In this post I will describe the two biggest obstacles facing maths learners (so you can help them get around them!).

The Big Problem

There’s too much to learn and not enough time

This is, without a doubt, the biggest problem a maths student has to overcome and one that in most cases will undermine their whole education. It’s the facet of modern British Educational policy that will hobble teachers and their capability to teach.

At GCSE level, students have on average 1.1 days per objective to reach an exam level of mastery. This is insufficient for even bright students and means that key concepts are not solidified before the class moves on. The next topic is probably more difficult and might depend on the last topic (that the student didn’t have time to learn).

A common experience for me is for a student to report that they have finished a given topic in their school lessons, so I give them the most basic question on that topic. They are unable to answer it. Honestly, most of the time my students can’t tell me the name of the topic they have just studied.

Naturally, this overwhelming volume of material punishes state school students more than private, who get on average 20% more teaching over their secondary school careers. (By the way, this amounts to a year’s worth of teaching: by the time they hit 6th Form state school students can expect to be a year less educated than their fee-paying peers).

The qualitative result of this is that students feel despondent, disinterested and, above all, confused. Lots of these students had performed well in maths until they entered secondary school but a year or two on are lost in a world of keywords and diagrams. The lessons are white noise to them. I cannot imagine how frustrating it must be to know that you are good at maths (after all, you saw the evidence all the way through primary school) to then seemingly lose it. It is no wonder they get put off.

The Other Problem

Students have the wrong attitude.

It is self-evident to anyone who has spent any time working with students that outcomes are strongly dependent on student attitudes. A range of attitudes present themselves and they appear to be derived from a combination of nature and nurture (although I’m inclined slightly toward the nurture: students who work hard often come from families who carefully encourage them to do so). At the risk of piling my criticism on state schooling further, they also have a hand in this.

State school cultivates a puppy-like dependence on the teacher as the source of, well, everything. All the course content (the actual information that needs to be learned) comes from the teacher, but that’s just the start of it. All practice the student does is set by the teacher, the schedule of topics is set by the teacher, the textbooks they use are decided by the teacher. This develops a mindset precisely the opposite of what we should be aiming for, which is academic independence. The teacher, heretofore the fountain of all knowledge, is explicitly unavailable in the exam (which is the end-point of all this work in the first place). Not only this, but any state school students who are lucky enough to progress to university will find themselves woefully unprepared. University has the polar opposite approach, essentially having students teach themselves. Regardless of whether people pass through university, they almost certainly end up in the workplace. Former students who rely on their boss as much as they rely on their teachers will discover quickly how valuable working independently is.

While investigating the origin of student attitudes might be instructive, it is beyond my area of expertise and therefore the scope of this work. If we take student attitudes as they are, we see that the problem is that most students are not interested in learning. They see it mostly as a boring chore, especially for maths. Whichever way you slice it, success at maths comes from practice which must be undertaken independently. Disinterested students are simply not going to do this.

From a personal perspective, working with a student who is disinterested is precisely like shovelling snow while it is still snowing. I am trying to teach a student who has no desire to learn anything new, and seems hellbent on forgetting everything they’ve already been told. Each week the student seems to know less than they did the week before and rather than progressing, we spend each lesson desperately trying to get back what we achieved in the last.

Working with an engaged student is quite the opposite. Every new week sees them take bounds forward, due in large part to the work they have done independently. They come to me greedy for knowledge, to fill in the gaps that they couldn’t quite place themselves. Each week they consolidate and seek a little guidance, to then aim themselves like a coiled spring that will leap ahead once more before the next time I see them.

A student’s attitude to learning feels strangely fixed, like some fundamental part of their identity. Even though changing it could be of great personal benefit, it very rarely happens. When it does, it is almost always comes from within - they decide to make a change and begin to make it happen. Frankly, we haven’t got time to wait for that revelation (if it comes at all). In upcoming articles I’ll describe concrete steps that any student can follow to become a better student. It might take some cajoling, which is why I’ve targeted this series at parents and guardians. However, if you manage to follow even some of my advice the results will come.

What Now?

We’ve established the problems - there is too much to learn, too little time and most students don’t have the right mindset - so now what? Obviously a top-to-bottom overhaul of the current curriculum is in order, but while we hash out the politics of that over several decades we want to help your child now.

In my next post I’ll begin to outline how you can help your child overcome these problems. It is my opinion that too many articles about becoming a better student simply describe the characteristics of a good student (e.g. good students do their homework on time) without actually advising on how to become one. Maybe it’s ambitious, but that’s what I’m going to try to do. It won’t require you to do any maths, it won’t require you to become education secretary and it won’t require your child to have a personality transplant.

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At this point I would also like to add to anyone reading this, if you have any questions please feel free to contact me directly at jake@jakeharristuition.com

There is a lot to take in from this series and you might have specific questions about your situation. I am very happy to advise.