I don't get it...

This week's post is a guest post from Rose Marszalek,  our Head of School: Curriculum, who writes about her experiences learning mathematics as a child.

I don’t know about you, but when I went to school Maths involved blindly following rules such as A = (L + B) x 2, C = π r² , and putting a zero at the start of the second line when you were multiplying by 2 digits.  I had no idea why, but I did it because my Teacher told me to and it worked.  I loved Maths right up until Year 9.  In fact, until then I was determined that I was going to be a high school Maths Teacher.  But what happened in Year 9?  Well, that’s when I was asked to explain, justify and prove my mathematical thinking and reasoning.  And could I? No, I couldn’t because I’d just been following the processes and formulae drilled into me for the previous 8 years of my schooling.  In primary school in Queensland in the 1980s I was not taught or exposed to rainbow facts or near doubles or place value or the split strategy.  I dutifully learned all my number facts (and spelling for that matter) by rote and regurgitated them at the weekly tests and did pretty well.  I trusted the processes my Teachers drilled into me for addition, subtraction, multiplication and even the dreaded long division.  I loved it all.  But all this showed was that I had a good memory.  I made the connections and saw the patterns myself because my brain was naturally looking for them (and perhaps because my mother was a Maths teacher).  However, I couldn’t truly explain many maths concepts I thought I understood, until I had to teach them many years later to the students in front of me.

Today though, as we implement the Australian Curriculum Mathematics, we teach kids the patterns and expect them to reason, justify and prove their thinking, starting in Prep. We guide them to make the connections between related number facts, to use place value to multiply and to measure the area or a shape without a formula – controversial I know!  There is a time and a place for a mathematical formulae and vertical algorithms (or ‘sums’ as I called the pages and pages of them I did and loved in primary school).  This place however is not till later in the primary school years and in some cases not till secondary school.  Racing through number facts and rote learning them day after day is not the way of Maths anymore.  We need our children to make the connections and see the patterns, so that they know that 8 + 9 is 17 (near double or doubles plus 1) and can extend this to know that 80 + 90 is 170 and 800 + 900 is 1700.   Don’t be in a hurry for your child to get through their number facts.  Take the time to re-learn them yourselves with the strategies that your child’s Teacher is teaching them.  You just never know, something might make sense for you for the first time!

Common Courtesies - doing it naturally

I was visiting 2M last Thursday afternoon and as I cast my eyes around the room for somewhere to sit, little Jack says 'Sit here, Ms Sands' and patted the empty desk next to him. He then raced over to the corner of the room with an 'I'll get you a chair'.

And later that day as I was leaving the office laden down with my brief case, lunch bag, hand bag and other myriad things I seem to collect to take home every day, young Amaya says 'Let me get the door for you'.

This is common courtesy at it's best, and I'm so proud it happens in our school not only every day but multiple times a day.

We do teach Common Courtesies. We have a list of ten we've all decided are the really important ones. It includes things like saying please, thank you, excuse me and good morning; things like knocking politely and waiting by a door for an invitation in; things like using people's names when you address them. Our list is displayed in every classroom and we usually send it home in the newsletter once a year asking parents to reinforce the same at home.

Common courtesies are taught as a routine in our school. We can't just assume that children will know how good manners make the world go round. So by teaching these few courtesies explicitly we can at the very least ensure they have some standard ways of behaving that help them draw people closer to them.

Our kids' manners are the first things noticed by every visitor to our school. People find it so surprising.

But what I love is that they don't just know the script, know the routine and just say it - they do it naturally. Caring for others and displaying common courtesy is common place at Peregian Springs. Thank you to all parents who help us reinforce this!

Be kind to each other...

The other morning before school I walked down the pathway towards the senior school and one of the Year 4 boys grabbed his handball and said 'Are you alright, Ms Sands?' I looked at him in surprise, 'Yes, sweetheart, I'm fine.' 'Oh, that's good - you were holding your tummy and I thought you were sick.' And with that he went back to his game.

The night before I had received a distressing email from a parent who was clearly at her wits end about the swearing and racist name calling her children were being exposed to in the playground. Her concern was that this sort of talk was virtually being tolerated in our school. And she believes that we are not doing enough to challenge the behaviour and stop it.

I've been mulling over these two incidents ever since. On one hand we have children demonstrating spontaneous acts of kindness and care, and on the other, a small (very small) group of students who think swearing and racist commentary as they go about kicking a ball around is a perfectly okay way to speak and play.

In a school where a premium is placed on social and emotional development, where dedicated lessons in social and emotional literacy are taught every week in every classroom, where our efforts in this area are recognised as outstanding by the Department of Education, where dedicated staff work with individual and groups of children to assist them develop self awareness, self management and respect, and where all staff display and model integrity, kindness and compassion; how is it that the thoughtless actions of a few give rise to the perception that all children are behaving like this and that it is being tolerated?

I love our kids - the well behaved ones, the naughty ones, the ones who smile and wave, the ones who swear, the ones who look horrified when someone says unkind words, the ones still learning what unkind words are, the ones with tons of friends and the ones struggling to form relationships with others - all of them, I love all of them. And as a school we will continue to teach them how to be humans of the highest integrity in our world through our learning programs, expectations, and processes for dealing with less than desirable events and behaviour.

We need parents to partner with us in this. We need parents to stand by us and reinforce with their children what is acceptable and not acceptable in our world, parents who censor what films their children watch and what video games they play, parents who discuss the effects of racist and sexist language with their children, parents who are prepared to take a stand with us and tell their children that 'enough is enough' and that swearing and name calling needs to stop, and parents who feel so strongly about this issue that other parents who tolerate it feel pressure to monitor their own behaviour.

We can do this together and we need to be kind to each other...