Fear of peers

Competition between pupils can be a good thing if it causes them to stretch themselves in order to do better than their peers. But this presupposes that the pupils involved in the competition are competent. If they are not, rather than compete the child gives up. Why compete in a contest which you can’t win? For many children at school, the point of much of the work they undertake is to do better than a rival. This gives them a social status. If they cannot do better than those about them, they choose not to compete rather than lose face, they turn off and just don’t try. For some, when they do this, they become disruptive, which eliminates the boredom of being in a class where they are not working, but also clearly demonstrates to the rest of the class that they are not trying, which also gives them an excuse for not achieving.
Children are notoriously cruel. If one is weaker, they will pick on the weaker one. This causes children to hide their weaknesses. The upshot of this is that children who have difficulty in maths, hide the fact and stop trying. This is a tragedy, because unlike many other subjects, maths is constructed as a pyramid. If you don’t learn the basics, then you cannot learn the subsequent work as it uses prior knowledge. Pupils who lose out at the start cannot make it up later. A sound grounding is essential. Puppet Maths aims to provide a sound grounding in maths, in a non-threatening environment, where a child can learn without fear of mockery from other children, and get to understand how maths works.