The Nightmare Y11 Maths Class

The students who went from zeros to heroes

Two years after I retired, I was asked by a local school to help out for 5 weeks in an emergency. On December 1st, the 2ic Maths, had taken ill. They had expected her back at the beginning of January, but now it would be after February half term. During her absence, they had not managed to find a supply teacher and a non-maths teacher had supervised some classes.

One of these was the Y11 bottom set, whose teacher had been taken to teach a Set 1 group. I had been told that this group were all expected to be ungraded at GCSE. They had been fairly unteachable and generally spent at least half of each lesson playing computer games.

When I first met this group of 7 students they were, as I expected, resentful, furious at being abandoned and determined to be a problem. The three pleasant kids were out at FE College for my first lesson.

I took in a box of Quality Street and told the remaining 4 students that I had thought it might be fun to play some number games with the sweets as prizes. They grinned – they thought that they had found a sucker! We started with simple number problems and they had to get 7 out of 10 correct to earn a sweet. Slowly I ratcheted up the difficulty and the number they had to get right. They thoroughly enjoyed themselves, even when asked to work out fairly difficult problems. They could no longer pretend that they could not do arithmetic and I had found out a lot about what they already could do.

The next lesson I took in my laptop and a CD that contained the Y11 Idea book (GCSE Foundation Level). I switched on the Interactive White Board and opened up a topic called ‘Powers and Efficient Calculator Techniques’. Each section in the topic was one lesson for this set. The first part of each section is called ‘WORKING TOGETHER’ and the students enjoyed coming out to fill in the answers on the white board. When this was completed, the students were given problems to do ‘ON YOUR OWN’. As these contain interesting puzzles using the ideas just developed, they were quite willing to do them. Sometimes they even did some for homework!!

Each section develops the ideas in order of difficulty. The sections at the end of each topic are at Grade C. There is a contents list and a mental arithmetic list at the beginning of each topic.
Y10 Idea and Y11 Idea Foundation texts have also worked well as ordinary textbooks.

The 5 weeks turned into more than 5 months. I stayed until the GCSE exams.
In their GCSE maths, this group got 1G, 3Fs, 2Es and 1D.
I was so proud of them.

Both of Jugglers’ GCSE textbooks have worked exceptionally well with students, motivating them and raising their levels of attainment. Students who have worked with Spoton (GCSE Higher Level), which has a lot of extension material, are very well prepared for A-Level.

Idea and Spoton do not need much extra material
to make them fit for the 2015 National Curriculum.

I will be writing the required new material for both texts during the next few months.

They will be sent out on a CD to all those using/purchasing these texts free of charge.

If you’d like to see more about these innovative GCSE books, please visit my website at www.mathsisjugglers.com

If you’d like to try some of the material in the GCSE texts please visit my website at www.mathsisjugglers.com

You’ll find 4 mini-samples (5-19 pages long) for each of these texts with permission to download and use with your students. There’s also one whole topic for each text to use with your students, as well as teacher resources (and, of course, the answers!).

If you’d like to find out more about the Maths is Jugglers textbooks you’re always welcome to get in touch – you can reach me at barbara.young@mathsisjugglers.com or on 01428 717113.

Kind regards,

Barbara (maths enthusiast, teacher, writer and publisher)