Practical Advice for Improving Your Child’s Maths - Part 10 - The Summer Slide
Ask any secondary school teacher in any subject and they will tell you about the negative effect summer holidays have on student progress. Students return to school and, not only have they not progressed, they have in fact gone backwards. The academic research on this is a little less definitive than the anecdotal evidence but still points solidly to a significant loss of knowledge and ability over the Summer period.
It’s clear this a problem we need to solve. While we once again leave the educators and policy-makers to tackle the problem on a national level, we must determine how as parents and tutors we can help our students now.
Sun, Sea and Square Roots
There is some very low hanging fruit here. The obvious advice is: make sure your child does some maths in the summer holidays. Don’t do nothing. As I’ve emphasised in earlier blog posts it doesn’t even take a lot. “Little and often” is a good mantra. One question a day - heck, one question a week! - would make a positive difference.
Some teachers provide help with this by offering a “one-a-day” worksheet for students to tackle over summer with a particular focus on the topics they have done through the year and that they need for the next. This is a fantastic idea and I love to see it. It seems to be increasingly common so if this resource is available to your child make sure they take proper advantage of it. That means actually doing one question a day and keeping up with it as much as possible.
If you have no such teacher and no such worksheet (as many students do not) - no problem! You can still do one question a day. Just crack out the old textbook and do a question out of it. Ideally you would select a topic that you have done in the last school year so it’s optimally relevant, but in theory any section of your GCSE textbook should be useful.
Students will get stuck on some questions, and this is where the real treasure is buried! I would suggest looking back over Part 6 - Tackling a Topic for the details on what to do when stuck, but essentially you should:
1) Check an example in your notes or the textbook
2) Try Googling the problem
3) See if there is an explanation on YouTube
I’ll say it again: the most successful students are the ones who seek out answers to the questions they can’t do themselves.
Of course it’s not realistic to expect a student to keep up with a one-question-a-day program like this flawlessly. Things come up and distractions occur. Our jobs as parents, carers and tutors is to gently help the student back on track and avoid complete, permanent derailment.
You want me to do what???
To some, what I am suggesting is utterly horrifying and - without exaggeration - bordering on abusive. How dare I suggest we place a greater burden on our already beleaguered students? To which I reply: I am simply laying out the reality. This is what is needed to be successful in maths. For many students this level of work is necessary simply to scrape a pass. And make no mistake, your children are competing against peers who most certainly are doing this and getting ahead. Over the summer, across the country, there are students (many privately educated but plenty of them not) who are taking their education into their own hands and doing the type of work I am describing. Students who your child will be competing with for university places and jobs in a few years’ time.
For those of you who don’t find my proposition too appalling, I would suggest just trying it out. It’s not as bad as it sounds and takes less than 15 minutes per day. The results are well worth it.
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As always, if you have specific questions please contact me directly at jake@jakeharristuition.com