Robert is amazing. The other children look up to him as a kind of mini-professor. He is quiet, well spoken and has a great vocabulary. He is both a big Minecraft and a Lego fan. Suprisingly, his favourite Lego is Minecraft Lego.
Robert has had a statement of special educational needs since he was very young and was previously educated in a Resource Base for speech and language. (A resource base is a kind of half-way house between mainstream and special school, providing a special school type education within a mainstream school). Robert is also a looked after child: he has been brought up by his uncle, after his mother rejected him when he was a baby. You see Robert has a disfigurement that affects his eyesight and the shape of his head. Still, Robert is lovely. He calls his uncle, “Dad.”
Elsa is amazing. It was her idea to call the group ‘The Mathemateers’.
She is creative and wacky and fab. Her drawing is accurate, expressive and her creative spark knows no limits. She has a brilliant flair for drawing and is particular good at drawing unicorns, griffins and other fantastic creatures. She loves the Harry Potter stories and is particularly fond of wolves (the animal, not the football club) – in the past she has been known to play wolves, howling for long periods of time on the playground. She has a stunningly beautiful singing voice and got to play the lead role in our play before Christmas.
She claims she finds it hard to concentrate in maths. “My eyes get distracted by colours” she tells me. She lives with her mum a long way from school and has to catch two buses to get here every morning, even though her dad lives close enough for her to walk to school.
We had to have a name for the class and I wasn’t so fond of the name ‘Year 6 booster group’.
I’d thought I might go with ‘PhilpClass’ but then it’s a trifle arrogant naming the class after myself.
And I needed a name too. I was planning to use both Khan Academy and Google Classroom as delivery tools for some of the content – more on that at a later date – and both tools require a class name to be set up.
There’s also an argument about identity. If children have something to identify with it can help them engage more. It can channel, even increase their motivation. All of them seemed motivated. As I said last time they had fearlessly told me what they didn’t like about maths and agreed they all wanted to improve. Now if only we had a name…
I’m always wary about opening up such things to children – after all I’m supposed to be teaching them maths – I don’t want to be wasting their time choosing names. But mercifully one of the children came to the rescue. Within seconds of suggesting we needed a name, she said “The Mathemateers.” And it stuck.
I’m now going to introduce you to the Mathemateers. A short pen portrait that may offer a bit of an insight into the children. Obviously I have changed their names.
It’s been a while since I had a regular classroom commitment. I’ve always thought that senior leaders suffer from an authenticity failure when they are divorced from teaching. But that’s another story, to be told another time. And to cut that long story short, this term I am teaching a group of seven year 6 children. Maths. For just one hour a day.
I am ‘boosting’.
Here’s what it says in the dictionary about boosting. But this is more than a SATs game. Putting my cynicism aside, each of the seven children in my group have a unique perspective on maths. And it’s a perspective skewed by failure.
Now I know that these days it’s cool to fail. Fail: first attempt in learning, chant the students to me. But not when you’ve failed week after week. Not when you’ve been the last to ‘get it’ lesson after lesson. Not when you’re at the bottom of the achievement rocket year after year.
What the children told me gets them down about maths
My seven Year 6 students are old enough to be embarrassed by their inability to do maths that children four years younger than them can do. They can’t tell the time. They don’t know their times tables. They can’t reliably count on or back. And what’s worse, they can all tell me stories of embarrassment, when their failure to do what their peers find simple has been exposed to the rest of their class.
Embarrassment and repeated failure make a powerful poison that taints the waters of learning. And the antidote to that poison is more than mere boosting. If all I do over the next four months is ‘get these children through their SATs’, I will have failed them. They don’t need my tricks and tips to score the best they can on some 45 minute exam papers in May. They need me to teach them well. They need some core knowledge and some confidence.
So as it turns out, I am not going to be boosting after all.
I’m going to be a ‘remedial teacher.’
I know that sounds awfully old-fashioned, but there are some reasons why I prefer that term. I see their lack of knowledge akin to a sickness and the remedy is good teaching. Each of these children has unique reasons for why they are ‘below national average’ in maths. Whilst I can’t remedy all of the reasons, for some I can do the following:
diagnose the ailment;
identify a treat;
present a cure;
give time for that cure to take hold.
I suppose I could label the same 4 point sequence like this:
identify misconceptions
plan some good lessons
teach well
allow children time to practice so that their confidence grows.
The majority of my posting this term is going to be about the journey with these children.
