Practical Advice for Improving Your Child’s Maths - Part 5 - Where To Begin

So you’ve negotiated some academic freedom for your child, you’ve put in a big Amazon order for their essential maths kit and you’ve explained to them what you are doing and why. As nice as it would be to lock them in a room with the textbook, that’s not going to work (just yet). We need to help them know where to begin. Let’s learn some maths!

It’s easier to find your way with a map

An issue I run into a lot is students viewing each topic from GCSE maths in isolation. They study one topic, then drop it and move on to another and onto another, failing to see the important interconnectedness of all of it. I don’t mean “maths is all connected” like some kind of maths spiritualist - I mean literally that students have to be able to see the connections between topics to successfully answer exam questions.

Likewise, they don’t know where they started and they don’t see an end point. To most students maths is a monolith that they half-heartedly chip away at for a few compulsory hours per week until at about 16 someone tells them they can stop. It goes without saying that this is no good for motivation.

I have always felt that students need to see the whole picture, a map of the maths course. In writing this article I was surprised that among the wealth of online maths resources available, something like I was imagining did not exist. So I made it myself.

A link to the full, interactive version can be found here:

https://atlas.mindmup.com/2021/04/a367e1509b5d11ebba1051f8eba5efa3/maths_gcse/index.html

If you use this link you can interact with the map and dig into each topic to see the subtopics that are part of it. Double click on any topic to see the subtopics underneath it. For example here is the top left topic, Non-Calculator Arithmetic, with its subtopics revealed:

Show this to your child! Print it off! It allows them to see the lay of the land, and how much there is to conquer.

Here are a few things to consider as you survey the terrain:

Firstly, it’s absolutely massive. As I pontificated in Part 2 of this series - The Problems - the volume of content in GCSE Maths (even the smaller Foundation tier) is absolutely monstrous. If you want to see it in all its glory, open the interactive mind map and reveal every subtopic at once. Is it overwhelming? Yes.

However, it’s more manageable than it looks. You don’t have to learn it all. It would be nice to do that, but a student could comfortably pass GCSE maths knowing two thirds or even a half of the content presented here. Secondly, you’re not going to attack it all at once, you’re going to take it piece by piece. This is why I broke it down into topics and subtopics. You can take one at a time.

The other reason I wanted students to see this is so they could plan how they would make their way through it. If your child has a preference on where to start and how to progress, great. Most students don’t. For the majority of students, who don’t know where to begin, I made the mind map in a specific order. Starting from the top left and going down the topics build one on the next, with the later topics needing the earlier ones to be understood. This also means they are in order of importance, with the earliest topics being the most important (and appearing on exams most often) and the later topics being the least.

Start at the top left and work down to the bottom, then go to the top right and work down to the bottom. Do not move on from a topic until you’ve mastered it.

Those two bold sentences contain some of the most important advice I am able to give. I’ll expand on it a lot in future articles, like how a student can know they have mastered a topic, but those sentences alone will take you a long way.

The subtopics on the map should correspond roughly to any decent GCSE maths textbook (and correspond exactly to the textbook I recommended in Part 4 - Gear Up). As each topic is mastered, they can be ticked off. The student can be familiar with the scope of the course, where they are in it and how they are going to move through it.

So now, you and your child have somewhere to start. If I stopped writing this series and the student stopped going to school, they would have a chance at knowing where to begin on their own. We are planting the seeds of academic independence. 

Of course I am going to keep writing this series and that should make everything even clearer. In the next part I’ll explain how a student should work through an individual topic and when they should move on. Stay tuned.

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