Why Maths Is Different

The current Mathematics GCSE is quite a difficult subject to learn and a very difficult subject to teach, but I often feel that people don’t quite appreciate the subtleties of why this is.

The subject is broken up into lots of different, discrete skills (sometimes these skills are related to other skills, sometimes they’re not) and each individual skill needs quite a few approaches in order to target as many people as possible.

I can’t think of another subject that works like this.

Most other subjects, let’s take English as an example, have a few main skills which are constantly refined with new knowledge and applied to new situations. In English Literature it might be critiquing a text. Students do this their whole school career, moving onto different texts, but still using the same base processes on each one. Hopefully after doing this numerous times, their ability to critique a text becomes better and better.

This isn’t how the Maths GCSE works. Each lesson, or series of lessons, students are introduced to a new concept that they have to understand and apply to new problems. These concepts can link back to earlier concepts (which can create a chain of misunderstanding if you’re not careful) or they could be entirely new concepts unrelated to other things for students to get their head around.

This creates a problem, which I think why ‘I don’t get it’ can be so prevalent in maths. In other subjects students usually go into the lesson with an understanding that they are working on skills they’ve been using their entire school careers. In mathematics students come in and it’s likely they’ll be immediately hit with something they’ve never done before.

This difference between maths and other subjects also crops up in something that I’ve been thinking about recently.

In most subjects, a single question can be answered at many different ‘levels’, but in mathematics, it’s very rare that this is the case. This creates a big problem for maths teachers to think about when it comes to hitting the objectives, or at least heavily signposting hitting the objectives, in lesson observations in regard to differentiation and personalised learning.

Often we want to teach a skill, or have a student discover a skill, and then apply that skill. In maths each skill tends to have it’s own level assigned so it’s not really possible to teach that skill at numerous levels. Differentiation becomes harder.

I’d love to hear other people’s comments below, on how they get around this. Or if people think this is something that needs to be taken into consideration more on observations.

Let's Go Outside

A lot of maths is done at desks, in rows. I am guilty of this (I often find that if students are sat in groups of four, there is a little too much room for them to ‘hide’). However, going out of the classroom and into the real world is often really powerful.

I was recently trying to get my students engaged in the idea of distance time graphs. These can often be tedious, especially when phrased as an exam question.

KILL ME

My students where also getting confused. Especially when looking at a situation that was impossible, or a situation where the subject of the graph is on a return journey.

So I created this.

It’s a really simple resource, just a couple of graphs. However, the idea is the students have to recreate those graphs using a stopwatch, a marker and a trundle wheel.

This really engaged my students, and made them think about exactly how these graphs work. Once they’d practiced on a graph they would come and show me the finished product, we’d talk about how accurate their version of the graph was, and we’d talk about any misconceptions.

I recommend you give it a go and get outside.