Skimming and skipping

In maths class, while I was spinning my spinner and adding the numbers that it fell on together, and while I was spinning out this activity for as long as possible so that I wouldn’t have to go onto doing something harder that would require me to think more, other children in the class were in competition with each other. These children all knew one another. They all lived on the council estate next door to the school. They had developed a pecking order based on who was furthest forward in the maths text book. I regularly heard one or another of the pupils declaring that they had finished exercise number such and such, followed by scathing comments directed at pupils who had not progressed so far. I kept quiet. I was far behind these high fliers, I didn’t want to attract their attention and gain their distain. Also, in a sense, I gave up. I realised that even if I were to finish a whole exercise a day, it’d be weeks before I got to where they were, and by which time they’d have moved on. So I quietly worked away at my own thing. But these children who were so far ahead of me did not better me at maths. By the end of the following year I was ahead of them. What I had learned I had learned thoroughly, whereas they had skimmed through the work with the objective of finishing the exercises rather than inwardly digesting the lessons they were devised to teach. At Puppet Maths we believe that thoroughness is important in learning maths, and whereas we wouldn’t want a pupil to get stuck at any particular point in the course, we wouldn’t want to hurry the pupil on at a faster rate than they can cope with.