I have done very little maths teaching with H. I mostly just seize the moment when moments happen, like when she has money and there are sales to get her to learn more about percentages… even then, she had worked the links between 1/2 and 50% and how to find 50% by dividing a number by 2 while I hadn’t been paying attention.

We both decided we should look at the maths H could be doing the next year (she’s decided to go to high school) as she would need to be able to find it easy enough to cope with the rest of the class and feel confident. I felt that she needed to develop a good attitude towards maths, she has always said she couldn’t do it… I think she wanted to be different to her Grandfather and I who like mathematics but dislike arithmetic.

H also got it into her head she really wanted to do algebra… I have always said algebra is related to logic.

We started with a year 9 (1st year at high school) maths and statistics learning work book. Chapter 7. Algebric equations. No help. H read the intro and correctly answered the questions.

All I did was congratulate her on putting down the units. We defined some terms together- simplify, expression etc and she was off. Occasionally I notice from some thing she says we need to go back a few chapters, negative numbers, and order of operations… so far! She has mostly been confused, in that she thought the answers were too easy to find and that there must be some trick that she didn’t know….

As for attitude, weirdly after years of rejecting maths, and going “I can’t” she is doing this work book for fun and in her own time. She is excited about it!!! Asks to do it, assigns herself workbook time.

So what it this, how can she just jump in and learn this, learn it by reading a work book and asking a few questions? Are we teachers not taught it takes years of building on what they already know, going around and around building on last year’s learning. Where are the physical objects H needs to go through the steps toward abstraction? H’s logic is as great as one would expect from someone who loves to read and understand what they read, that is all.

I propose a different model. Let the kids learn what they want to learn, even if it’s weird, and wait until they ask to learn something because they are motivated, even if their motivation is weird, and assume they work out when they are developmentally ready… even if that is as adults.

H is also attacking geometry but doesn’t know she is..