made my day

[watervole]

 I had a lovely email from the mum of my current maths pupil.  He just had his results from school and he's now scoring equivalent to a year above his age.  A year ago, he was behind his class and struggling.

It really made my day.

I can't take all the credit.  He's a bright lad and I only see him for an hour a week.  I don't even work closely to the syllabus, just aim in the general direction of it.  What I try and do is find the points where he's failing to understand something and keep working backwards until we hit the point where he's comfortable and start forward from there.  When he's comfortable moving forward, we'll move pretty fast and take it in lots of directions and try and make it fun and slightly competitive.

I've found that boys respond a lot better to simple algebra problems if you let them roll dice to help generate random problems...  It gives them control of the process and dice (especially lots of D4, D10, D20, etc) are fun.

And we always take a break mid-lesson to play dice poker for five mins.  (because his attention span will be flagging by then and he always comes back better after the break)

The other thing that helped a lot is that his parents had drilled his tables perfectly into him.  This means that he has a good intuitive sense for a lot of things.  One thing I'm very keen on is making pupils estimate an answer before they start working on the question.  (In C's case, we both estimate an answer, work out the question and then win a bead for whoever came closest).  It's useful.  Often now, he'll work it out, look at his estimate and - without me prompting him -  go back and look to see where he went wrong.

Without that process, I find children will present totally crazy answers (out by several orders of magnitude) without really looking at them in relation to the original problem.  It's a bit like working out how far someone walks to go to school and getting a result of 3cm and not considering that odd.

Comments

[katlinel]

How lovely to have that acknowledgement! Tailoring the sessions to your pupils needs has paid off for both of you.

ETA: Just after I wrote this The Four Nations Maths Challenge popped up in my Twitter feed. By the look of it, it's done via schools but it might be of interest at the individual level?

[ranunculus]

I have taught before, though not in maths, and that kind of feedback is fabulous. I still feel good about two comments that ex-students have made, and they were many years ago.

[davidwake.livejournal.com]

An interesting post.

I would say that the school is sticking to the syllabus, as most education establishments do, in order to get him through the exams and therefore everyone 'wins' in terms of targets. This only goes so far. What you are doing is giving him a sense of interest in the subject and a general understanding of it. Both of these, but particularly the former, are vital. The school gives him Execel Syllabus B, AS 2.3, Units 2-3; whereas you are giving him Maths.

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

That kind of order-of-magnitude calculation is key in physics, and was the most enjoyable part of the subject, and indeed my education, as you could think round the problem and determine cause and effect while grounded in reality. Only then did the horrid maths appear to find an exact answer. Well done for instilling the idea so early.

I'm a qualitative man, me.

[sammason.livejournal.com]

You sound like a good teacher.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

Probably because I don't have to do it with a class of 30...

[vjezkova.livejournal.com]

I know that feeling when your pupil or student comes with good results. This is actually what keeps a teacher going:-)
Congratulations!
I am sure that if you had been my maths teacher, I would have loved the subject:-)

[eledonecirrhosa.livejournal.com]

Love the dice idea!

Ansd it sounds like he'll ace it when the math syllabus reaches the concept of iteration. Well done!

[watervole.livejournal.com]

I'm a gamer - we have lots of dice in the house.

We roll a D4 for +-x/ and high/low for positive negative and then roll for the actual numbers.

[jon-a-five.livejournal.com]

The idea of the dice is great.