I’ve got to admit, I’m considering a new career. Not because I’m bored of teaching maths, but because I could do with the PR boost.
Not everybody loves maths teachers. I get it. We stand lonely in the corner at parties with an empty glass, longing for somebody to start an interesting conversation but it never seems to get past the career choice. I wish I could just say “I’m a programmer” or “I work in a warehouse” and then the conversation just drifts onto other things and nobody is interested in how you “deal with the teenagers” or they lean into you with gin breath and tell you how they are simply ravenous for a Sudoku challenge. I don’t think that counts as flirting, does it?
I could start again. Professionally I mean. In my youth I worked in purchasing administration and I was quite nifty with raising the purchase orders and getting the best price. I got offered a job as a trainee IT Support at Sharp in 2001, but I opted to move to Suffolk and start my teaching career. I mean, it felt like the exciting option at the time, but it started me on what now feels like the single track of working in education. Perhaps in an alternative universe I’m an IT tech, swapping RJ45’s around on the server, wondering if I’d have been better off moving to Suffolk and selling my soul to City College Norwich (A-Haaaaa!).
I know there’s a lot of transferable skills within teaching (I won’t bore you) but when you see a CV and you see “maths teacher” the memories of a tweed jacket and being hit on the head with a flying board rubber come flooding back; how frustrating would it be to have an employee in the habit of answering a question with a question? I might turn up with a red Biro and start correcting your emails for SPaG and who in the world would want to work with that?
The problem is, I do really want to stay in the classroom. At the chalk face. It’s the only thing that keeps me interested. Does that happen with other careers? Do electricians get promoted to Manager and yearn to be back in somebody’s cellar, re-wiring the circuit breaker? Does Richard Hammond pine for the days he used to make the tea at the local radio station?
The problem is, if you like the classroom stuff; you’re good at the classroom interactions; the students enjoy your classes and you get good results year upon year. Who wants to move good teachers out of the classroom? Your manager certainly doesn’t. Reliable maths teacher are difficult to replace already. But far beyond the staffing and recruitment crisis that seems to be going on right now, what incentive is there for anybody to move up in the ranks in education? The further one goes up the pay scale, the less teaching and contact you have with students. And that’s fine if you don’t enjoy the teaching part, but… what if you do? What’s the incentive to “develop” upwards?
Realistically, the only reason anybody would wants to take on FE manager responsibilities is the opportunity to move up the pay scale. Otherwise, there’s not really much else, is there? The workload can be more intensive than teaching and it’s more difficult to prioritise. Many days you’ll work 12 hours, sometimes more than 5 days a week (I curse ye, Open Days!) and not really seeing your family or friends before the end of November. Even at this time of year, when the pressure is easing off a little with the teaching workload, it’s still full-speed ahead getting students finished and claimed before the deadlines, and then timetabling, and then that’s the summer months wiped out as well.
This is the cue for all the party-goers to chime in with “ah but you get the summer holidays, I bet that’s lovely! I wish I got 8 weeks off work”. No, no. We really don’t. We get 2 weeks to get that GP appointment that has been needed since November, book the dental hygienist for a bloody mouthful followed by a good telling off and a promise to stop grinding; purchase new work clothes for the new term online, clean under the fridge, mow the lawn, move house, get a new job, you know, the normal stuff. I seem to get a short sit down just in time for the neighbour’s grubby faced tweenagers to start screaming at each other on the trampoline and then it’s GCSE results day. Again.
This year I really have got some things to do in my “holiday”, as mentioned above I am hoping to get a new job up north and alongside that comes the difficulty of relocating with a houseful of useless gubbins that we bought in the COVID-19 lockdowns. Here’s a functional maths spatial challenge for you. How do you fit a treadmill, a garden patio set, a gazebo, an arcade machine, 2 scooters, a motorbike, 4 IKEA shelving units, a freezer, a bed, a CUDDLY TOY!!!!, a weights rack, 4 metric tonnes of Warhammer 40K figurines, a holiday to Malta and a projector screen into a single Luton van?
The answer? Nothing short of a miracle. I have no idea how we’re going to do it in one trip. Possibly we won’t.
“I passed the test. I will diminish, and go into the NORTH, and remain Galadriel.”
It seems that lots of people feel that the GCSE has had its day. There are some sensible arguments, but there also seems to be a hardcore of traditionalists who pore over league tables, humming and hawing about the decline of standards and the three “R’s”. As much as I agree with some of these sentiments (I was fortunate
enough to have parents who emphasised the learning of my times tables when I was seven) I do think that this calling for exam reform has all the features of a public relations rebrand and none of the foresight of how schools and colleges will deal with forced reform that is based upon ill-informed deep feelings about a subject that has changed considerably since the 1970s.
When the GCSE qualification was introduced, it was the cure-all for a flawed set of qualifications, the GCE “O” Level and the CSE. Children would no longer be ostracised by a two tier system; they could all take the same exam and be compared by the same standard. How… idyllic.
Michael Gove holding an invisible canteloupe melon. Photo taken from The Telegraph (c)
Obviously, the GCSE Maths exams became so unwieldy in content that they needed to be separated into three tiers, Foundation, Intermediate and Higher. This allowed for the vast variation between candidates. A few years later even that was too complicated, so the exams were streamlined into just two tiers, Foundation or Higher. On the chalk face, this allowed schools to stream secondary pupils; concentrating on underpinning the basics for the Foundation Tier candidates and really stretch the Higher Tier candidates. In reality, this just meant that highly qualified/paid teachers teach the “Higher” candidates, and the PE / IT / Science / supply / unqualified teachers teach the “Foundation” candidates. Because of the shortage of qualified maths teachers in England, secondary schools have an extraordinary turnover of staff teaching the Foundation Tier groups because they require greatly enhanced behaviour management skills as well as mathematical competence; unfortunately neither is easy to come by. I’ve heard stories of teachers in tears, tables going out of windows, and students boasting of their horrendous behaviour in secondary maths classes.
So, unfortunately on the Foundation Tier, you’d have to do really well (75% or higher) in order to attain the coveted grade C. Or should we call it “The Golden Ticket”. And that’s easier said than done when you’re aged 15 and surrounded by distractions, disruption and 500ml of Relentless.
Every year, I teach students on GCSE retake course. Each student has a different story to tell, about the number of supply teachers they had in school, about the humiliation they suffered from a certain maths teacher, about the irrelevance that most of the maths curriculum has to real life application. It’s my job to try to turn these students around, to make them start feeling positive and commit to achieving the C grade that will allow them to cross the divide between being branded a failure (yes, they all consider a GCSE D grade a “FAIL”, even thought it’s not) and being hailed as a success and going to university. Gosh, I was glad to see that this new-fangled GCSE brought the two tier elitist society-dividing system to an end (<– Sarcasm).
Wrong. Since the development of the GCSE curriculum in the nineties, the world has changed. OfQual has rightly allowed the GCSE syllabus to move with the times. Kids have access to better calculators; better internet, better opportunities to learn in general. And we only have to look to our everyday use of smartphones and app software to see that it’s no longer important what math facts you can commit to memory, but how effective you are at solving problems using the tools that you have available.
The ridiculous squawking of politicians and ill-informed “education fascists journalists” that erupts on a yearly basis to return education “back to basics” is designed to appeal to a certain demographic; those people who learnt that way themselves. Again, I learnt a number of skills by rote when I was very young, so I am to be included in that demographic and it helps me more now than ever before because I’m now a Maths teacher, and I’m expected to teach it. But most people don’t become maths teachers. Most people don’t pull out a pencil and paper every time they need to calculate. What do they do? They reach into their pocket and pull out a mobile phone calculator or go on the internet, or use an app that is much, much quicker. And let’s face it, less prone to error.
While teaching GCSE Maths this week, I was forced to remind my students that they must commit to memory the basic formula to calculate the area of a circle. They will not be given the formula in the exam. Traditionalists may agree, you cannot have a formula handed to you on a plate every time you need to calculate the area of a circle, can you? However, if you were in employment and needed to calculate the area of a circle, the fact is that you would either look it up and substitute numbers into the formula, or you would find an internet page that very kindly works it out for you. Would you need to remember it? Do you remember it now, after X years? Well, you might if you understand how it works. But the fact is, not many people do. Young and old, new methods and traditional, few people can clearly explain the reasoning behind long multiplication, let alone area of a circle.
Conceptual understanding is key. Rote learning has its place, but mainly for the purposes of passing exams. If you fully understand the concept of multiplication, you can use a traditional method or the grid method or the Italian method because you’re going to get the correct answer and be able to verify it. Many adults do not understand the “new” methods of multiplication, and I’ve heard children relay stories from home about how Dad rubbished the grid method and taught Jonny the “proper” way. So when little Jonny comes home from school with multiplication homework to do, he has this conflict to contend with. Most of the time, both teachers and parents have little success, because not only do children get the two methods mixed up, but well-meaning (and numerate) mums and dads may not be able to explain what they are actually doing, just that that’s how you do it. Of course, there are maths teachers out there who have the same problem, so let’s not be naive (particularly at primary level, where you’d expect conceptual understanding to be of the highest priority).
I coach young adults who have been taught several ways of doing multiplication, and I usually have to go right back to the basics to tackle the conceptual issues of multiples. The fact is, any nobber can learn a method by rote, but both new and old methods have the same issues when it comes to understanding how they work.
Anyhow, surely the point of qualification reform is to provide employers with the information they need to select staff with the right skills. A truly progressive qualification must assess a candidate’s ability to find and use information selectively; to analyse using numerical strategies and to communicate numerical ideas clearly and succinctly.
