Are parents being left out of the maths equation?

By Hannah Richardson

BBC News education reporter

Primary schools need to do more to help pupils struggling with maths, says Ofsted. But have new teaching methods left parents out in the cold and unable to help?

There may be nothing as certain as a number, but the way children are taught to handle them has changed.

As any parent of a primary age child knows, pupils come home with an array of new props in their book bags and terms in their brains to help them tackle their maths homework.

Number lines and number grids have replaced counting on your hands, and perplexing terms like chunking and partitioning represent the new ways of tackling arithmetic.

"Many parents talk about how they try to help their child with their homework and their child says: 'No, no. That's not the way we do it at school,'" says Rob Eastaway, co-author of Maths for Mums and Dads and a former president of the Mathematical Association.

"It's not that parents don't want to engage, but the language of the new methods can be intimidating."

He adds: "There are something like five or six techniques at the heart of arithmetic but it can sound really daunting. And the stuff that teachers send home to parents can look a bit like a management consultancy diagram."

But parents are a key factor in whether children succeed, particularly in the early years, when research suggests their influence outweighs that of schools.

Nick Dowrick, director of Every Child Counts, which helps struggling pupils in 2,000 schools, says it is vital that parents understand the methods that are being used in school.

When it offers support to struggling pupils, it urges parents to come in and watch the one-to-one coaching lessons it gives so they understand how things are done.

This sort of approach can work better than school hall events, which can be uncomfortable for parents, says Mr Eastaway.

He says: "Adults can be really hard to reach. They're afraid they will turn up and the teacher will put them on the spot."

Instead he runs sessions in which children take part in fun games and mind reading tricks in class, while the parents sit back and observe without being seen.

But why has maths teaching changed?

The president of the National Association of Mathematics Advisers, Lynn Churchman, says like most of her generation, she was taught maths in a "very didactic way".

"It's as if they cut off my head and poured knowledge in then stuck it back on again.

"The problem with this is that when they get to the point where their heads are filled up - they can start to struggle because they're not getting that conceptual understanding," she adds.

Mr Eastaway says old methods of multiplication and division are "a bit like a black box - you put a number in and you get another number out."

With methods like chunking and partioning, children get to understand what is going on.

As Ms Churchman explains, modern maths teaching focuses on the key concepts, and a renewed emphasis on mental methods and strategies as opposed to recall.

'Instinctive'

"When you are parents, as adults you have been doing maths for a long time and you have your own experiences and your own already established knowledge that has been inculcated at an early age - it's almost instinctive," she says.

"What you've got to do, and this is where it's hard for parents, is lift yourself out of your own mindset about how you did it and not be worried when your six-year-old can't instinctively tell you what 17 and six is."

She explains that a lot of expectations about what children should be able to do at maths has come down in age range - so they need these new methods to help them understand quite demanding concepts.

She continues: "I think that means that parents have to try to imagine the children developing methods and strategies based on picturing something in their heads."

The methods are actually quite easy, she says, but what can be tricky is changing the parents' attitudes towards them.

And just a few years before the first children to learn by these methods are about to go on and become parents themselves, it seems that ministers could be about to turn back the clock in primary schools.

Schools Minister Nick Gibb has stated publicly that he favours the older methods that he himself was taught by, and that he believes it is not an issue if children do not understand why they work.

Algorithms

Ms Churchman says: "Mr Gibb believes that you can teach standard traditional algorithms and rules, and that it doesn't matter that children don't understand the concepts behind it.

"If he drives through changes backed by that philosophy, that could set primary maths achievement back years."

Mr Eastaway also says there are significant risks associated with returning to the old methods, as many children just "didn't get them".

The Department for Education did not wish to comment on the concerns, saying its curriculum review due shortly would set out its plans for mathematics and other subjects.

Currently four out five children are reaching the level expected of them at the end of primary school, and a third of 11-year-olds are reaching the standard expected of a 13-year-old.

But Ms Churchman says: "We are now ready for the next step change to make sure all children reach the levels expected of them."

The Darwinian Evolution of Startup Hubs

(from A VC, by Fred Wilson)

This weekend finds NYC in between Internet Week (which I largely missed because of my London trip) and Disrupt NYC (which I will be at on and off this coming week). So the development of NYC as a startup hub is very much on my mind. And so I thought I'd post about the development of startup hubs.

This theory, which I like the call The Darwinian Evolution of Startup Hubs, is not new and I certainly didn't come up with it. But I think it is important for everyone to understand and so I'm going to blog about it.

If you study Silicon Valley, what you see is something that looks like a forest where trees grow tall, produce seeds that drop and start new trees, and eventually the older trees mature and stop growing or worse, die of disease and rot, but the new trees grow up even taller and stronger.

In my mental model of Silicon Valley, the first "tree" was Fairchild Semiconductor (founded in 1957) which begat Intel (founded 1968) which begat Apple (1976) and Oracle (1977), which begat Sun (1982), Silicon Graphics (1981), and Cisco (1984) which begat Siebel (1993) and Netscape (1994), which begat Yahoo! (1995) and eBay (1995), which begat Google (1998) and PayPal (1998), which begat YouTube (2005), Facebook (2004), and LinkedIn (2003) which begat Twitter (2006) and Zynga (2007), which begat Square (2010), Dropbox (2008), and many more.

If I left out important foundational companies of this mental model, please forgive me. That was not meant to be a comprehensive history. It was meant to illustrate how this evolutionary scenario plays out over time.

If you drill down a bit deeper, you see that the founders, investors and early employees generate a tremendous amount of wealth from these big successes. The later employees don't make as much wealth but they do learn a ton and make enough money that they don't need to work for someone else and so they strike out on their own and are often funded by the folks who made the big money in the prior startup. That's how the seed drops from the tree and starts a new tree growing. This continues on and on and on.

If you look at that history of silicon valley, you see that in the forty year history (since Intel's formation), there have been close to ten cycles of maturation and new company formation, and those cycles are getting shorter and the number of important foundational companies that are formed each cycle are increasing.

That makes total sense since this darwinian evolutionary model is non linear. One company begets two and those two companies beget four, and so on and so forth. Of course there are exogenous factors that also play out, like technology changes, financial market cycles, and the availability and cost of talent, and they impact how fast the startup hub economy expands.

This darwinian evolutionary model of startup hub development is not limited to silicon valley. We have seen it play out in other places, most notably Boston, and increasingly in NYC. It is also playing out in markets like Boulder Colorado and Austin Texas and many other parts of the US and many parts of the world.

When I look at a startup hub, I like to figure out what the "Fairchild Semiconductor" of that market was and when it got started. That tells me how far along the development cycle that startup hub is. In NYC, that was Doubleclick which was founded in 1996, the same year as my first venture capital firm, Flatiron Partners, which was founded on two premises, that the Internet would be big and that NYC would be an important locus of Internet innovation. We did not invest in Doubleclick (sadly) but we did invest in a lot of interesting Internet companies in NYC in the late 90s.

So NYC's startub ecosystem is 16 years old now. And we are two cycles in. The companies that are getting started and funded right now in NYC are akin to the Apple/Oracle stage of silicon valley. If you want to push, you could suggest that we are three cycles in now and the companies that are getting funded right now are akin to the Sun/Silicon Graphics/Cisco era. That might be right.

But in any case, NYC's tech sector is not anywhere close in terms of fertility to silicon valley. It will be there in another 25 to 30 years. And silicon valley will be even further along.

Unless, of course, something else happens.

The technological revolution that preceded the digital revolution was autos and airplanes. They were invented in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the first commercial startups emerged in the first decade of the 20th century.  The auto/airplane revolution played out until the 1960s/1970s. That suggests that a technology revolution lasts around 75 years.

The transistor was invented in the late 1940s and by 1958 we had commercial startups working on the technology. So if this revolution is anything like the last, the next big thing will be invented any day now and within a decade or two we will be on to the next technology revolution.

And in that case, all bets are off. Silicon Valley could become the next Detroit and who knows what will be the next Silicon Valley.

But of course, all of this is conjecture. History doesn't repeat itself. But it does rhyme. That comes from Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain). One of my favorite people ever.