The Truth About Maths That Nobody Dares To Share

If this is your first newsletter from me, welcome! You have joined a pretty special community of people who refuse to give up on the learners in their lives.

Something happened this weekend that reminded me there is something important you might not know about me.

My partner and I headed to Turangi for the hot rod club AGM. He is on the committee. I was there for the social side of things. And very good the social side of things was too. There is something genuinely lovely about kicking back, relaxing and catching up with a really cool bunch of people. No agenda. No rushing. Just good conversation and good company.

Which brings me to what I actually want to tell you.

Something you might not know about me is that I do not only work with reading and dyslexia. I also work with maths.

I know. Bit of a surprise right?

Let me tell you about a pile of glued together boxes.

Not one pile. Three years worth.

My 15 year old client started school during the play based learning era. By the end of Year 3 the sum total of her maths learning was a collection of glued together cardboard boxes. Her parents were alarmed. They moved her to a new school.

She sat on the mat with her new class. The teacher asked them to count in 10s. She had no idea what that meant. Not because she was not clever or trying hard enough. But because nobody had ever taught her.

And from that moment on, struggling with maths became her normal. With every lesson she could not follow and every question she could not answer, her self esteem quietly eroded along with it.

She knew multiplication existed but nobody ever showed her how it actually worked. She was just told to multiply. So she figured out her own way around it. Repeated addition. Over and over. For years. Even with large numbers.

She did not know addition had a structure. And trigonometry? Completely out of reach because nobody had ever shown her how the different types of triangles fit together into a bigger picture.

Obviously I am not a builder by any stretch of the imagination. But I know you cannot put a roof on a house that has not got any walls. And you certainly cannot expect the gaps to fill themselves by osmosis. Chucking gap filler at a wall was never going to fix a missing foundation.

She is in Year 11 now. And this week she sat across from me finally filling in the gaps that three years of glued together boxes left behind.

This is not a learning problem. This is a system problem.

And the difference we are already making is extraordinary.

Did you know I work with maths too?

Whether it is reading, writing, spelling or maths, the approach is the same. We find the gaps, fill them in and build the structure from the ground up using hands on activities that connect with the way your child actually thinks. And honestly, you cannot tell me that working maths out in a book is anywhere near as much fun as baking a mug cake or heading outside to measure the rate that ice melts. There is simply no comparison.