How are your children being taught the fundamentals of Maths? Do you know? Or is it all a bit of mystery, a secret carefully guarded by the teachers?
At my school - and it is a fabulous school in almost every respect - we don’t have textbooks for our 5-9 year olds and maths workbooks remain in class (there is no maths homework), so I actually have no clue whether they are learning addition or fractions.
When I ask my daughter what they did in Maths today, I inevitably hear:
- “Um... nothing?”
- “I can’t remember.”
- “What’s for afternoon tea?”
- “Well, Jessica said that I could borrow her pencil but then Katie, that’s Katie S not Katie M, said hers was better than Jessica’s, so we spent the rest of the lesson comparing the pencils...” (!!!!!!!!!!!)
- “We did these squares. You write a number on top. Then you skip a line. Then there are some other numbers already filled in, and then you fill in some other numbers, but I don’t know how.” (?????????)
When I ask the teacher how I can support her in teaching maths to my child, I hear:
- “She’s doing well. You have nothing to worry about.”
And when I insist:
- “Play board games and card games with her. Make maths fun. Make sure she really knows the answers without having to work them out.”
That really bothers me. Why should a child memorise answers to sums? Maths is all about comprehension. What’s the point of being able to recite like a parrot that 15+15=30 and 15+16=31 and 15+17=32? I would prefer my daughter to be able to work out 15+16 in three different ways, taking her sweet time to arrive at the answer.
What do you think?
PS: Some great links for this discussion:
- Math Flash Card Builder
- Check out what other parents say about Math
- Your child’s learning style (my daughter is highly visual and the auditory way of learning maths at school doesn’t suit her natural ability)
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