Norah is a student teacher in Sydney. As a new migrant, she has limited knowledge of the local culture. However, with her passion for maths and teaching, Norah looks forward to showing her students the beauty of maths one day. In her first practicum, she was allocated to an elite independent boys’ school in the Eastern Suburbs. None of her friends went to or is sending their kids to that school. Norah felt a little nervous, though still having her can-do spirits.
The first five days were the observation phase. Her Year 9 maths bottom class was mainly composed of Anglo-Saxon students, except for one Aboriginal student. None of them showed any interest in maths. Their maths teacher, also Norah’s supervising teacher, has built up brotherhood with them–the kids showed him respect and enjoyed chatting with him about Footie during recess, while he put up with their indifference in his maths class. In the double-period maths classes, the students were usually allowed to play cards in the last 20 minutes. They also suggested that they would quit maths once they reached Year 11.
Norah acknowledged the students’ negative attitudes towards maths. But being a prac teacher, she was still keen on helping them learn some maths, for their sake as well for hers. She tried different approaches, but failed every single time: in her first maths period, Norah showed them a video stating that every person could learn maths. But the students couldn’t care less about how to become good at maths, and distracted each other right from the beginning. She then tried to incorporate some interactive ICT elements, like Kahoot quizzes, in her lessons. But the students just randomly chose the answers and kept asking her “when can we play cards, Miss?” When teaching geometry topics, she designed a series of hands-on activities to facilitate investigation and discussion. While the students showed some interest in cutting and pasting shapes, they soon lost their interest when the questions involved measuring and analyzing. Neither visual or technological or tangible elements could capture her students’ attention. Norah was disheartened at that point.
Norah’s supervising teacher tried to make her feel better, “these kids are nice young men…love sports, arts, other subjects; just couldn’t get maths.” Norah asked what sport would be their favourite, and his answer was rugby. “Umm… then what about I using NRL data as a trigger in the following statistic topics?” “It might work since some of them are really obsessed with football. Let me know if you need any help with rugby.” In the following two days, with her supervising teacher’s help, Norah climbed a steep learning curve and got the gist of the rugby traditions. She knew that some students had their favourite teams, so she invited them to talk about their teams using data analysis. She represented the distribution of premierships with dot plots and discussed the meaning of the graphs with them. Surprisingly, her students were excited about it and engaged throughout the lesson, and her supervising teacher also commented that “the NRL context is brilliant!”
Since then, she felt easier to relate to these teenage boys as they saw her willingness and initiative to know about them. She also changed her starting point of her lesson plans from “what I want my students to know” to “what my students would like to know”.
Yes, this is me. And this happened about half a year ago.
I had high expectations and provided various activities … just missed the bigger issues in class–the students’ disengagement and my lack of sociocultual perspectives.
Students wouldn’t engage in maths learning if they saw it as boring or irrelevant. More importantly, albeit the well-designed self-interested activities, they were also afraid of failure, so why bother?
Finally I changed my focus from my objectives to my students’ needs. By letting them talk about their favourite sport, I created a form of “dialogic” classroom talk, which enabled rich interactive communication and peer learning.
Engaging students with relevant questions and creating a sociocultural perspective in class can surely lead to effective teaching and learning. This may be a long journey for me because of my social-cultural background. But at least I am on the right track now.
Maths for us 