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!