I don't really get this

I haven't been writing much here of the past week and a half as I've been applying for jobs and also going on interviews.

I had the first interview yesterday and it went very well.

"We'd like to offer you the job...I think you'll be very happy here and I'm pleased you'll start in September"

"Well I have another school to speak to first but I'm really pleased about this"

And the after about five minutes they decided to withdraw the offer. I explained I made a commitment to both schools.

They said it showed a lack of commitment.

A lack of commitment to a school I didn't even work for? What?

The arrogance was incredible, they waved the fact they got a decent ofsted inspection in my face and expected me to change my whole professional life for them. What other industry wouldn't even give a candidate 24 hours to decide on a position.

I saw a much better place today.

Easter is Upon us

So its time to start revising. It's the most important part of the year so every year 9, 10 and 11 lesson will include some past paper GCSE questions and it's the time we all need to stop doing a good job and start 'teaching the test'. No need to whine, this is the job. Getting kids to pass the exam.

This year I'm going to something a little different.

1) Let them know how to study themselves. Each class is going to get an hour of maths study skills so they can do it themselves. Detailed and more accurate guidance on the use of livemaths.co.uk which is what we use.

2) More emphasis on vocabulary-particularly in Statistics there are so many examples of students who simply don't know what the word means so they get confused. It's a real weakness of my teaching and I need to do this more regularly anyway but I'm going to get students to do their own word wall which I'll make myself refer to each lesson. If I use then so will they.

That's my focus while doing revision this year-already printed out the questions on boxplots for the year 9s.

I can feel myself getting tired already.

Making Something boring Interesting

Today an email from a colleage was roundly taken the piss out of because he sent links of these videos:

Flying Bread

22 Bricks

and suggested they could be used to teach estimating and accuracy. Other than being a little annoyed at the maths department for taking the mick out of something well meaning I was also thought that the email itself was rubbish.

'How about this for teaching accuracy and estimation'

He should know he audience, we are all incredibly busy people with better things to do than interpret what someone might do. The mian reason why maths teaching is so poor in primary schools is simply because the message isn't tailored to the audience (women of child bearing age since you ask), if the bloke who sent the clips to the teachers had also included a message bout how he had used them and if they worked well in his previous classes then people would have been a lot more receptive to him.

I just need to work out how to use them myself now...there's the germ of a good idea there.

Politics

One line manager told me to do x

Another said y

A member of SLT asked to go on z meaning I couldn't do x or y.

They had an argument.

It was decided I would do x,y and z and it was all my fault.

I agreed.

They'll all thank me on Friday for the hard work I put in.

AfL for parents

Well I suppose that was a cathartic experience for us all but I wonder how useful it really was. With the odd exception each student dragged their parents around to teachers who told them the same thing for five minutes. Each parent must have heard the same thing on repeat for an hour and then left.

I felt really sorry for Bonkers' mother who was simply told what a crap child she had. All she could really do in return was have a go at him. As enjoyable as it was to see him with his head bowed meekly saying 'Yes maam, yes maaam' to each criticism we had of him it seemed cruel on both parent and child.

Why not organise it in such a way that each parent sees only one or two teachers and then spend the other forty minutes on training the parent on the best way of helping their child. It's good we tell them how they behave in school but why do it for so long. Let's spend half an hour teaching them how to log on to and use webstes we recommend effectively, good simple activities they could use with their child as they live with them....adding up or estimating shopping bills...games and resources they could buy. Simple easy ways of improving their children rather than merely letting them know how much we like/dislike their children.

For a profession who talks so much about assessment and feedback we're not great at giving it to everyone.

Drop Day

Module resits are on Tuesday next week so in preparation of this we do a drop day for our studenst. Rather than follow thier normal timetable we have them all six periods. 5 hours of maths.

It's probably the worst type of teaching we could probably do. I really doubt anyone learns anything of any real benefit.

With the students I had on Friday I went through four past papers covering each question in detail and then got them do a similar question from a revision booklet we had prepared for them. It's everything I hate about teaching. Teacher led, little conversation, following and remembering rules with no real though about why they're doing what they are doing. By the end of the day everyone's tired, bored of each others' faces and really hates maths.

It's the most important day of the maths department's calender.

I lied. They do learn something, they learn how to pass a test, they can remember some rules, they can follow some process. A school, a department, a teacher, a student all lives and dies by their results and drop days, as boring as they are improves them dramatically. I am left wondering if we actually needed to do them if the kids were all taught properly in the first place from the moment they started primary school and before.

I just hope they don't forget everything within 24 hours.

Dispatches

I suppose it would be remiss of me not to comment on Dispatches on channel four. I thought the central premise of the show was sound.

• Primary children aren't very good at maths.

• If they're not good at maths at age ten, they'll have given up by they're fifteen.

• If they've given up by 15 they'll be poor when they become adults.

• This won't help them in the workplace.

• If they have children they won't be able to help them with maths, provide them with maths skills or encourage an enthusiasm for maths.

Simple, and it weren't so important it would be trite. But what I didn't feel the show did was take that premise on step further

• Adults become teachers.

• Teachers without maths skills or maths enthusiasm can't teach maths

• Teachers like this need to sort themselves out and they need help to sort themselves out
  

But how to help teachers become good teachers. This problem strikes me as quite simple but you have to firstly judge your audience-they's no reason becoming angry or self righteous about this issue, there's no reason why Primary teachers should be good at maths. If you leave school with a B in maths, go on and read English at University you can be a great teacher with poor maths skills.

Rightly or wrongly most of our teachers are working mothers, this is a simple fact. If we need to teach these professional working mothers better maths skills we need to make it easy for them. Currently we're not. They need to take six month long modules, often weekly or in the evening or at weekends so they're not being taken advantage of. The method of teaching needs to be in hour long chunks, ideally online so these can be learned when they want to be learned with clear links being made to methods of teaching and learning. These are professional earnest people who want to get better at their jobs, but they need help doing it and it needs to given to them in a way that's easy for them to digest or they'll carry on working hard in a pointless way misrepresenting a subject the children they care for need in the future for a good life.

It's complete madness it's not being made easy for primary teachers to learn maths and leaves another generation of children being exposed to poor maths teaching and leaves another generation of poorly trained teachers dreading the mandatory 50 minutes of numeracy each day.

And who on earth can engineer enjoyment in something they dread.

Good Lesson/Bad Lesson

This year, for the first time, I'm making sure I'm doing more open ended projects with my classes, particularly in Key Stage 3. I'm trying to make sure it's all I do with one of my classes for the rest of the year-a lower ability year 8 class. They won't see a text book this year-they are all rubbish and boring. At times I slip back into giving them a series of closed questions, especially on algebra topics I need to cover but will figure out ways to link these topics to shape and number in the future.

Anyway, for the next three weeks we're doing a project on 'ProZone'. ProZone is a compnay which analyses football matches from a statistical perspective and sells their results to football clubs for an obscene amoun of money. My students know all about the company from their PE lessons and they also know that on Friday they'll be watching the second half of Spurs against Bolton (Lincoln City Vs Chesterfield was soundly rejected by them which I think it a shame) with the overall plan of designing a poster and written report about the Statistics of the game. This lesson they had to plan a data collection sheet, some of the pupils presented what they did to others in the class and others commentated on what they liked and didn't like about the work and, more importantly the problems they would face when recording their data while watching the game. Talk. Talk. Talk. Its only recently that I've been encouraging them to talk about maths identifying it as a weakness in my lessons and they're still not at all used to this way of teaching but slowy they're getting used to communicating mathematically verbally.

I loved this lesson, the students could see an outcome and purpose for what they were doing, they talked openly about each others work and were mainly respectful of each others ideas and opinions. They were able to plan and be forward thinking about their work, skills which can be transferred not only to other lessons but also to beyond the classroom. Great. I'm looking forward to their results and more importantly getting them used to talk about maths-something which is done really infrequently in maths lessons in this country, something I'm more than guilty about myself.

Then onto my intermediate year 11s. They've an exam soon. I told them about substituting values into formulas. I gave them some questions. Some of them did the work. Some of them needed help. Some of them will get the question correct in the exam next week.

They will all have forgotten the skill the week after.

The sad thing is most of the classes I teach are like this be it due to a lack of time to plan appropriately or that there's an exam coming up soon and they need to be taught what's on it. It's not good enough at all and this type of 'traditional' maths teaching is endemic in schools from primary through to A-Level by either lazy, pressured or poorly trained teachers. It's not good enough. It's a misrepresentation of what maths is all about, maths isn't a series of procedures to be remembered and regurgitated, it's a vibrant, logical and expressive way to communicate the world. We over test our students and it results in poor teaching and not enough creative problem solving, communicative tasks. It's a trite and repeated opinion however it's also very true. I don't feel that from years 9 to 11 I could do a 'Prozone' type investigation with my students despite feeling it's the best way for them to learn and be engaged with maths. I fully understand that I live and die as a teacher on my results and I also understand why. It's such a pointless, counterproductive way of doing work.

As my colleague, Irish, like to say 'Pick the Daisies'. She is so right. I had a great lesson with my year 8s and will have a good two weeks with them that's what to remember because they'll remember that lesson for a much longer time than my year 11s will remember theirs.

A depressing conversation

Cocky is in year 11 at the moment, naturally not particularly stupid nor that clever, usually smiling and always in trouble. In year 8 while I was an naive NQT he was pretty enthusiastic about school and a little cheeky, now I hear he's rude to teachers and difficult to teach but now lads like these are the least of my problems.

'Why aren't you in class Cocky' I asked him as I walked into our office while he was hanging about outside looking at a poster. However as I see him walking around the school during the day rather than spending any time in lessons I can guess the answer.

'Got sent out sir' before adding the inevitable 'innit'.

Rather than letting him wander about in the corridor for the next half hour I invited him into the office and let him sit down and proceeded to speak to him about my plans for the half term (going to Scandinavia since you ask) which he seemed to be quite interested as I made him a cup of tea.

Making cups of tea for students isn't typical for me by the way, simply being incredibly generous as it was the last day of term.

'How often a day do you get sent out of class Cocky?'

'Every day....I can't wait before I leave this school'

'So why do you bother turning up' I thought about saying before really asking 'So what do you want to do when you leave'.

'Nothing'

'What are you going to do for money'

'Mum'

'Happy with that'

'Yeah sounds great-I just want to do what I want to do'.

It transpires Cocky's mother was fined £250 as he regularly truanted lessons, at the moment if he isn't in school when he should be the police give him a lift in at a cost of another £250 for the mother per go. His mother doesn't work, hasn't worked for ten years, lives off the dole, has lived in the same council flat she got when she was 17 and has no plans of doing any paid work. All I found out about the father is that he's a 'D*******' who also doesn't work and has never done. Despite living in in Central east London he's never seen the Sea has boasted about taking drugs to other teachers will leave our school in fours months with no hope or desire of getting a job, driving a car, leaving the country to go on holiday, leaving his council estate, joining a band, taking up a sport or anything other than watching TV with his mother. He too plans to go on the dole. This is a life he is looking forward to and smiles with genuine enthusiasm about it.

He goes to a good school. It's miserable this should happen.

Let's talk about me. This is my third year of teaching, behaviour in my classroom is good, I have a mild interest in becoming head of department but enjoying teaching a lot. I'm not a great teacher but getting better as I think more about the needs of my students rather than how I was taught myself. I didn't become a teacher to 'help children' or even because I 'enjoy working with students' (I think they can be quite poor reasons to become a teacher). I became teacher as it was a good career and I care about the public understanding of maths and this is still my first interest however when you teach, anywhere, but particularly in East London or an inner-city environment you can't teach properly unless you understand the context.

Cocky was failed. Mainly by his pathetic excuse for his parents who never gave him the moral or social guidance children need, but also in part by the school (which mainly does an excellent job for the students). Was he taught in an engaging way? Or was he just given a list of questions to do following some guidance? Was he taught any skills which an employer would be interested in? Students need to leave school with a skill to do something...plumbing, IT work, social care...anything. How well was this done? A bright cheeky funny 11 year old turned into a rude funny 16 year old with no ambition and no chance.

This is why I've decided to write about my professional life-a way to think clearly about what I do at work. Mostly I won't be talking about the lives of students, I plan to write more about the teaching of maths, which methods work, the system of education in this country, the masters in mathematical education I'm staring in April however you can only do this well if you attempt to be aware of the kids and their experiences. I'm looking forward to it.