Project Maths - Time Allocation

Miss Lockhart

I'd like to hear some maths teachers' opinions and experiences of project maths - from the point of view of getting the course covered in the time recommended or allocated. I'm particularly interested in LC but I'm interested in any and all views.

The more teachers I speak to recently, the more I hear serious concerns about the reality of trying to finish the course. It worries me that teachers of motivated students of reasonable aptitude seem to feel it is necessary to provide a significant amount of extra classes to ensure their students will be prepared. I have also heard many express concerns that the time pressures involved are a serious barrier to active learning methodolgies and developing problem solving skills. The reality of trying to bring up FL students, who have been strongly encouraged to do OL under the new course, is adding to the problem.

I am teaching in a DEIS school. Many of my students lack motivation and the simple fact is that they will not attend extra classes. At the moment we have pretty decent allocation of 4x40 minute periods and 1x70 minute double class. However, it is clear that this will not be enough and if teachers of motivated students are struggling with time then I'm very concerned about how we will fare.

This is becoming a huge issue in my school so I'm eager to hear others' experiences and advice.

Chris68

You're not alone. See attachment.

Moody_mona

My issue isn't with the the amount of content, it's more the delivery. I don't have time to spend a class with everyone rolling a dice. I've been using TY this year to spend ages on Probability and Statistics activities rather than teaching.

teacherhead

I had the misfortune of hearing Joe Duffy today, big hoo ha about students failing mocks in maths and project maths being a disaster generally.

Chris68

The mock papers are not written by the SEC. If students failed in large numbers it may well have more to do with the papers than the syllabus.

derb12

More importantly I think, the marking schemes are set by DEB and Examcraft and not the SEC and therefore are pretty reasonable.
They don't give crazy high marks to the trivial parts a and b and then combine later parts of questions to have a miserable 5 marks covering two questions.
Mark the LC exam next summer with a reasonable fair marking scheme and students will fail like they failed their mocks. Mark it with some contrived scheme like last year's and that will ensure that the results are improving year on year! Another success for project maths .;)

By the way, to answer the original question. I did what I always do and I make a week by week plan for the year allocating chapters of the book to each block of time. If we run out of time we don't finish the chapter. Simple as.

2011abc

teacherhead wrote: »

I had the misfortune of hearing Joe Duffy today, big hoo ha about students failing mocks in maths and project maths being a disaster generally.

Yeah I think that program today was a showcase for whining parents and pupils .Bit of a sickener to think theyve spent 100 mil on the aul Project Maths though ...

evolving_doors

teacherhead wrote: »

I had the misfortune of hearing Joe Duffy today, big hoo ha about students failing mocks in maths and project maths being a disaster generally.

aye, heard it too but in fairness to joe it didn't turn into a teacher bashing session so I'll give him that, but it was obvious he hadn't done any study before the program aired (at least Pat Kenny does his bleedin homework).

I think however the substantive issue that came across was the sham PR spin thrown out by govt.

Ironic that a new initiative that is attempting to teach critical thinking and analysis of stats is hosted on its own petard...

Anyhow my two cent on the upshot so far:

Honours level maths has been devalued thanks to dickying about with the stats by govt. Also it has become more difficult in terms of mixed ability in higher level classes as previously' good 'ol students are clinging on by the finger nails just to get the bonus points (students also twigged that the marking scheme is open to abuse by sec)

As a consequence ordinary level is the new foundation despite the fact that internationally, OL maths in ireland was quite a decent standard.

universities have a case to answer, was it not them that helped design the course? Itll be interesting to hear their verdict after all their havering about previous students only being capable of rote learning...no doubt they'll blame the secondary teachers at the end of the day with some university research study.(and we'll blame the primary schools and they'll blame the parents).

Should be interesting to see how it pans out in about ten years or so,

2011abc

Armelodie wrote: »

As a consequence ordinary level is the new foundation

So true!

boogle

please report posts that are in breach of forum charter

whiteandlight

Everyone please follow the forum charter. In particular that you should attack the post content not the poster