Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Independent maths in a classroom setting

Thanks to you both! I must resist the temptation to add anything else to my DS's list of possibilities right now (he's still finishing Descartes' Cove, and that and Alcumus are really enough computer maths for right now), but it's good to have options for the future.

Update: four days in, it's going not too badly, although we clearly still have some fine-tuning to do. It seems that his teacher this year prefers that we plan and superintend his maths, to the extent of sending his workbook home for us to mark. That makes sense, but the extra responsibility (e.g. for planning what he can do remotely, not just finding appropriate stuff for right then when we can help him) is going to take some getting used to! He can use his textbook in class and we'll also keep an envelope of other work updated in his bag. Haven't pushed using a computer just yet; he seems to like the relative inconspicuousness of the textbook for just now (everyone else has a textbook too, and he knows what to do when the class is told "get our your maths textbook", he simply has his own). What he hasn't got the hang of yet is reading the chapter carefully before doing the questions, which has led on one occasion to his being stuck and on another to his making mistakes. OTOH, that does show he's on work where he does need to learn something!

He may not actually spend much time on maths at school, because they are going to try to arrange that his instrumental lessons are timetabled for maths time - pragmatically that makes sense, as it's less disruptive for him to be out at a time when he'd be doing something different from the rest of the class anyway.

I'm agreed to write something in the way of a plan for what he's going to learn this term. That's going to be fun, since one thing I know about predicting what he's going to learn is that it's not easy!

Just thought it might be useful if I updated on this in case the experience is useful to anyone else. Background: I started this thread to ask about people's experiences having a child working independently on their own maths in a classroom, since for DS-now-7 we really had no alternative to making that work. It's been going better than I had any right to expect.

As expected, he didn't find it easy, to begin with, to deal with getting stuck, and there was rather too much staring into space! I made him a laminated card (business card size) headed What To Do When Stuck, which he really liked; he says he's now internalised that and doesn't need to consult the card any more, and indeed, he seems to do well.

He always has two strands of work on the go, one problem-solving and one learning new material. It feels easiest to keep it simple and have just one resource in each strand; he's worked through Challenge Your Pupils (very nice, multiple choice so minimal writing!) and done a selection of chapters from a textbook (short chapters work well). Typically we read through the introductory material from a chapter of the textbook on the bus, and he does the questions in class. Everything he does in maths comes home to be marked and gone through (even though the answers are in the backs of the books - his teacher seems to feel happier handing the whole thing over).

He and another child are taken out of class once a week for problem-solving sessions with the head, and occasionally he has written work to do relating to this, in class - I'm happy about this for several reasons, especially that it means someone in school does actually get to be involved in his maths. (The head remarked the other day that "he really shows insight, he isn't just parroting advanced maths that he's learned" - good to have that noticed :-)

The problems he does at school are not that stretching - he needs to be able to do most of them independently without too much struggle. At home he does more challenging things, mostly Alcumus and Descartes' Cove (which is nearly over, sadly... I wonder whether he'd like to go back to the beginning and go through without any help next time?!)

He doesn't seem to have had any problems at all with other children's reactions to his doing different stuff: "they don't take any notice".

Anyway, so far, so good! Thanks again for all the comments when I was anxious about this at the start of the year.

Hi ColinsMum:
Thank you for the link to this thread. Wow. I could learn a lot hanging out with you. . I really like the concept of how your son's math is structured. It has pointed out that no matter how hard the "enrichment" questions are, my daughter still deserves to be learning new material.

That Descartes' Cove looks like so much fun. Where would you put that in terms of difficulty, amount of math learned? (As reference, my daughter takes AOPS Algebra and finds at least one question a session very challenging; she usually gets level 18+ but struggles with levels 20-25).

Is the Challenge your Pupils the problems solving strand? I couldn't tell as the textbook also looked like it was preparation for a problem solving competition.

Thanks for all your posts!

Colinsmum, what did the "What to do when stuck" card say? We are going to steal this...

DeeDee

As near as I remember, it's:

What to do when stuck
Is it worth zapping harder?
Can I see a better way to do it?
If not, mark the question "?".
Go on to the next question.
If "???", revisit questions marked "?"
Re-read each question carefully.
Keep brain turned on!

That's fairly telegraphic so as to fit onto a laminated business card. He talks about "brain zapping" problems so that's the first point - will another more concentrated go with the same technique crack the problem? For the second, it may even say "Can I see a mathematician lazy way?" - I once had a maths teacher who told me maths was the art of being lazy (since so much of it is about finding neat easy ways to solve problems that would otherwise be a lot of boring exhaustive search, trial and improvement, measurement or whatever) and this made a deep impression on DS. The point here is to spot cases where he can't do it because he's missing a trick. Then I want him to indicate any question he's left out because he couldn't do it with a ?, and I don't want him to do that for more than three questions in a row without interrupting the process and trying again. Finally, like most people he can trip over misreading questions or just failing to think, and that accounts for the last two lines.

My guess is that she'd find DC low on the difficulty scale compared to AOPS algebra. The algebra adventure specifically doesn't go much beyond quadratic equations. Some of the Hypatia's Cove questions are pretty challenging, but most of the early questions are straightforward if you already know the material. (And that seems to be the way it's intended to be used: as reinforcement for people who have already basically met the techniques, followed by more challenging problems using them than are typically met in school.) Amount learned: really depends on how much of it she knows already! The links to the NCTM grades 6-8 standards which are basically what it covers from the DC site seem to be broken but I think it's roughly the same as what is here. DS was meeting quite a lot of stuff new for the first time as he went through, at least for the early adventures (since he was also learning stuff outside DC and going through DC quite slowly - starting when we gave it to him for his 6th birthday - he know a much higher proportion of it already at the end than at the beginning!)

That's right. It's simply an organised collection of questions from the Mathematics Association Primary Mathematics Challenge, which is very similar to the UKMT JMC that he's using now, but a bit easier. Some of those questions are very straightforward, but using the book let me direct him at the harder ones, since they were grouped together! Individual papers for the challenge can be downloaded free from here (they are likely too easy for your DD though).

Wow, Colinsmom --

Reading this thread opens my eyes to my own DS-almost-6! I thought he was really good at math until I see the level that your son was on at the same age. Incredible. I guess I will count myself fortunate that I don't have the same challenges to deal with!!

please don't do that, susandj - the great thing about this board is that it feels like a safe place to be matter-of-fact about this stuff! (And fwiw, don't be so sure that you don't have this level of challenge with yours - mine changed very fast very suddenly at a certain point!)

Don't get the wrong idea, Colinsmom -- I'm not feeling like my son is inadequately bright or anything! I'm just having a hard enough time figuring out how to get the schools to deal with HIS math abilities. I can't imagine having to figure out how to work with him if he were three or four years even *further* ahead. I just have no idea what you would do.