Could Maths be the Marmite of the Education world? Students seem to either love it or loathe it. They get it or they struggle. So, often you’ll hear students who don’t enjoy it say: “I don’t know why I’m bothering”. Or “I’m never going to need to know the quadratic formula after GCSEs”.
Many parents will sympathise! There comes a point where a lot of us reach the limits of being able to help out with homework. After all, the vast majority of us won’t have tackled things like simultaneous equations since our own school days. However, Maths is a subject like any other. So surely it can’t be down to some quirk in genetic make-up that makes some students succeed while others flounder.
In this episode, Nathan McGurl is joined by Dani Quinn. Together they are looking at Maths, why it seems to polarise students and what can be done to help them.
https://audioboom.com/posts/7738842
Dani explores the role of motivation and the impact that parents can have on developing a student’s intrinsic desire to push ahead. She also shares many practical and easy-to-follow tips to help support teens approaching exams. Importantly these are ways of supporting that allow for the fact that most of us haven’t factorised anything for years!
Dani is the Network Lead for Secondary Maths at the Ark Schools – a network of 38 schools across the UK. And previously head of Maths at Michaela for 5 years, the school made the best progress in Maths GCSE results in the country. As an educator, she says she has an unfettered enthusiasm for teaching maths to teenagers. Dani also blogs about techniques and approaches to teaching maths in the classroom.
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