Maths should not be torture

What makes anyone succeed at anything? What is it that made David Beckham a superb footballer? What is it that made Bill Gates a great computer programmer? The answer is practice. According to Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers” it is 10000 hours of practice. Would these people have spent so much time practicing their skills in their respective areas if they had not enjoyed doing so? Of course not. Children are capable of speaking English, which has rules that are much more complex than those of mathematics, because they practice it. They enjoy doing so because language is what gets them the things they want. But where is the incentive for undertaking maths? So often, maths is not fun. For many children, maths is incomprehensible and therefore boring. For many children, maths is something that makes them feel powerless and only serves to provide an opportunity for them to earn criticism. I remember myself, aged 7, hiding the fact that I couldn’t do some mathematical calculation or other. During the subsequent lesson, the teacher required us to continue on with the same type of calculations and I had to pretend to be busy and be working diligently even though I was doing nothing. All the time I was under the stress of being found out and getting told off. Worse still, the teacher continued with the exercise during the next lesson - another period of having to hide my weakness! At the end of this third session, the teacher wanted to see my work. Agony. What work? I’d done none! I had to come clean, and admit that I couldn’t do the sums. I expected to be told off. I wasn’t, the teacher didn’t seem to care. I was amazed. As an adult I can see that the teacher was simply happy to know which of her pupils could do the work and which couldn’t, and wasn’t about to punish those who still needed to learn. But the point of view of the young child is so different. I endured the fear of failure at maths for 3 lessons. Other pupils endured it each day and every day. For them maths was nothing less than a daily torture, whose purpose was to expose them as inadequate. At Puppet Maths we want to banish such terrors from the minds of our pupils. We want maths to be unthreatening. We want maths to be fun, so that children will want to practice it, and through practice will become good at it. We want to make maths somewhere where children can feel safe, somewhere where they can feel at home.