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.

More script reviews today. Myself and my team are slowly working our way through the KS3 specification discussing the best ways to present the Maths methodology using puppets to make for an entertaining and adsorbing learning experience.

Script review

I've spent the last day in reviewing the scripts. This is necessary as we transition from face to face use of puppets in teaching maths to the use of video on line. As we will lack the ability to read each individual situation as it occurs and adjust our teaching to accomodate any failure to grasp a point by the pupils, we must make sure that the video content contains all the explanations and caters for all the forseeable misunderstandings that pupils might exhibit.
Happilly, my extensive experience as a Maths teacher allows me to predict what the most likely misconceptions will be, but it is always necessary to be careful as children are adept at inventing new ones, if they're given half a chance.

Well a lot has been done since the last blog. We've acquired some new puppets that we're going to use teaching maths. We hope that these will allow us to make even more entertaining videos that will grip the immagination of young people and allow us to teach them maths without them realising that they're doing "hard" stuff, so as a consequence they will find maths EASY.

Well I've been busy these last few weeks, getting the Easter assessments in the Maths department at school done, and written up, and then, with the end of term, taking a week-end's sleep. Finally, I am able to get back to blogging about edutainment. I am transcribing the routines I use in class for use on the web. This prior to videoing them and uploading them to my new website. Planning so many episodes is no mean feat! I'll keep you posted on my progress.

Well, I'm busy setting up my website and am currently working on content. What I'm producing for the website is a series of videos which use puppets to explain mathematical concepts and enable young children to "do" maths successfully, which is fun to watch, and interact with.

Hi, I'm Bill Farrow, thanks for visiting my Blog.

I'm inspired to make maths easy for young children to learn.For goodness sake, it's easier than the English language, with all its irregular verbs and eccentric spellings. Yet children don't seem to have a problem with English, but they fear Maths.

I am developing techniques to make maths child friendly, so if this is of interest to you, please return to this blog to read what I am doing.

Yours,

Bill Farrow.

ps. See more of what I'm doing on my website www.