The Elephant in the Classroom

The Elephant in the Classroom is a book by Jo Boaler. She is a researcher who has been trying to identify the causes of underperformance in Maths in schools in the UK and the USA. She remarks that one of the purposes of learning maths is to learn how to solve problems. However, in maths lessons, children are given questions to do which are not couched in the context of a problem. This reduces Maths to an abstract routine of number crunching. As pupils cannot see the practical purpose of these routines, they learn to mechanically do as they are told to solve the questions, and then promptly forget it all. This is true not only in schools, but also in home schooling / home education situations. Often when it comes to maths teaching, parents view of maths is coloured by their own school experiences, and they tend to recreated the learning environment that they themselves experienced. Also the text books that are available for use are similar to those used in schools in that they serve to provide question that practice number crunching. Better results have been observed from pupils who have been set problems couched in real world terms, for which they need to use maths to arrive at a solution. For pupils studying Maths online, Puppet Maths recognises that there is a role for learning number crunching routines, but that this should not be the central thrust of maths practice. Once a routine has been introduced, so that the pupil knows what to do to perform a calculation, then further reinforcement should be couched in the form of problem solving questions. This puts maths in context, and teaches the skill of problem solving, leading away from boring, sterile calculating to a process that gives the pupil a sense of achievement thereby making maths fun. No matter whether the child is studying for KS2 Maths, KS3 Maths SATs or for their GCSE Maths, the Puppet Maths programme can make maths easy and so make maths fun.