Luke is amazing. He is probably the sharpest in the group with mental maths skills, knowing some of his times tables and being reasonably fast with his number bonds. His inability to read is his biggest barrier, and whilst that shouldn’t affect his maths, it does.
He is the member of the group who is newest to the school, coming from his previous place with a dreadful attendance record of less than 30% and his dad facing a huge fine. After a shaky start, where he spent his first week running out of school he has settled really well and now is a quiet, hard-working member of the class. He just needs to learn to read.
Sarah is amazing. Despite a hearing impairment that has kept her off school for significant chunks of time, she has an unflappably upbeat attitude to life. She is constantly cheerful and positively engaged with all aspects of school life. She is really best friends with Robert, but occasionally they fall out badly and behave like an old married couple on a cantankerous row. These arguments tend to blow over within thirty minutes or so.
Sarah was especially pleased that she learned to tell the time so quickly in our few sessions in the first week and kept telling me how she was helping the other children in the group. I’m not entirely sure how the other children viewed this.
Ebony Rose (or Ebs, as she likes to be called) is amazing. She is a great communicator with her friends and knows everything that is going on in the class – who is friends with whom and who has fallen out with each other. She is great at locating things, seeming to have a natural gift for knowing where things are. Her Nan runs a small pony yard and it means Ebs gets to ride ‘her horse’ every weekend. She would love to work with animals when she’s older.
While Ebony-Rose is the most socially gifted in the group, she is the least gifted mathematically. The others, all working below national average as they are, will still sit the SATs in May, but Ebs won’t, as for her achieving a level 2 would be brilliant (SATs at Year 6 currently test levels 3 to 5). She seems to find it really difficult to retain anything to do with numbers. She tells me she can count to a hundred, but a distinct fear appears in her eyes when I mention an number greater than two.
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.
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.
