Both girls aren’t massive fans of maths. But… I’m finding as we’re getting through each year’s textbook, the moaning is decreasing and there are even some moments of enjoyment! I’ve realised, embarrassingly late on, that the girls have been finding it boring because it’s too easy rather than them having a strong dislike of maths per se.
How not to do maths!
Then came my maths epiphany! I read a post on Instagram that made me question how we were approaching maths. It made me realise that getting everything right wasn’t actually a good sign; it meant that the level of work wasn’t right. The girls weren’t being challenged and so maths wasn’t interesting. That’s why they didn’t want to do it! It sounds obvious with the benefit of hindsight but I’d really not clocked this at all!
We’ve followed the CGP textbook dutifully for each academic year and have just ploughed through those. I was chuffed and relieved that the girls were getting nearly every answer right and we had few topics that required extra practice. The girls were bang on track for their age so all was good in theory but the girls’ increasingly negative behaviour around maths was telling me that all was not good at all.
Now we have (mostly) happier mathematicians!
We then did a big shake up of maths! Peggy missed year 6 maths out entirely to avoid the repetition of year 6 maths in year 7. After completing the year 7 book, we moved to using books for year 8 and 9 alongside each other so we took every topic straight up to pre-GCSE level in one hit before moving on to the next topic. This new approach made a big difference to their attitude towards maths. Both girls moaned less as they worked on more challenging questions and got used to getting more things wrong. I won’t lie and say it was easy transitioning from getting everything right to getting more things wrong. There were tears, a temporary knock to confidence and plenty of frustrations (from both sides), but the girls have now accepted that getting things wrong is OK. It’s actually a good thing as we learn more from failures than successes. I’ve certainly learned a lot from my own failures in our approach to maths.
I’m very glad that I read that post on Instagram and, without it, I may have unintentionally put both girls off maths for life! It’s still not their favourite subject by any means, but we have far fewer maths-related strops nowadays. I’ll take that as a win for now!
