School as a parallel world

Children used to learn in the real world. My own grandfathers left school at 12 and went to work. One grandfather said that he learnt nothing of importance until he left school. I think that that is not quite true. He would have learnt to read, write and do arithmetic at school, which was all that was expected of schools in those days, but he was taking those skills for granted when he made that comment. However, there is some truth in what he said. As a practical man he valued skills that he could apply to making a living, to bettering his family, and these were not taught in the world of the schoolroom. Indeed today, 100 years later, schools do not teach children how to survive and prosper in the real world. Schools have become a parallel existence and when young people leave education the realities of life in the real world often come as quite a shock. This parallel existence is true in maths education. We ask pupils to calculate 3 + 5. This is an abstract calculation. It has not been put into any context. They are not being asked to calculate the sum of £3 and £5, or 3 boxes and 5 boxes. Such examples belong to the real world. Without context maths loses its meaning. If maths loses its meaning then it becomes simply an exercise that children feel they have to do to please their teacher and stay out of trouble. If we expect children to calculate in an abstract manner, then they will do so, but they will not always appreciate the uses of what they are doing, it will not catch their imagination, and they will not enjoy doing it because they fail to understand the purpose for doing it. This is especially true as children become teenagers. At Puppet Maths we put the maths we teach in the context of solving real world problems. We home in on the relevance of the maths to situations that the pupils can imagine either at home or in an everyday situation. This way they will engage with the subject, and achieve good results.