Square Maths Mathematics education uncovered and recovered
This is a chart called “100 square” that you can find in every primary clasroom: Children mostly use it for simple sums. Say, if you need to do 45+7, you find 45 on the chart and simply move 7 steps forward. Oops, sorry, you move only five steps forward, then you have to move your […]
Jo Boaler continues her mission to bring meaning into maths teaching and joy into its learning. The Stanford University project YouCubed draws attention to common problems in maths teaching and offers some insight into what works best, supported by educational research. Her enthusiasm is highly commendable, and I would encourage everyone interested to visit the website. You […]
A few months after my daughter started secondary school, I saw her school maths workbook. The usual A4 pages were divided in half, leaving two narrow columns to write down the solutions. It was painful to see the working out of the sum of four mixed fractions laid out over seven short lines or the […]
When I first started lessons with this boy it was clear how eager he was to show his abilities. His teachers believed him to be “below average” because he struggled with memorising his times tables. Even though he could easily work out any problem that tested his very good understanding of multiplication and related patterns, […]