Grown up maths

The children in my classes (and sometimes the parents too) have often commented that they don't know why they need maths because "you don't use it when you grow up."

I don't know how to counter that, because to me it's so blindingly obvious how we all use maths.  I normally manage to blather something about working out budgets for shopping or saving for a holiday, about measuring garden fences or cooking ingredients, about laying tiles in hypothetical bathrooms.  And all of these things are true, but these are just the tip of the iceberg.

I've just spent an entire evening using maths.  And maths that's more complex than just adding money values or reading a measuring tape.  This is because I've been assessing reading all day.

Those of you who are familiar with running records will understand that seemingly tenuous connection - I've been working out percentages - often from some rather odd numbers.  I must also add that I've been using a calculator to help me, just for the speed.... but I do still need to know what order to put the numbers in and what operations to use.  I also created graphs to show the progress children had made - again on a computer programme, but I still had to know what terms like axis, horizontal, vertical and scale mean, and how to input the data in order to achieve the desired result.

I used my concepts of time to put together a timetable fitting in a range of tests (all of different durations) around a complex variety of swimming lessons (30 minutes), soccer training (1hour 10 minutes) and cycle safety training (45 minutes), a basic facts test (6 minutes 30 seconds), assembly (20 minute) and a whole raft of other events.

And I also used scale to make a rice pudding..... because my ravenous teenage boys have such enormous appetites the standard recipe is just not enough, so I double all the measurements - or maybe even, like today, multiply them all by 2.5!

The third thing I did using maths was to make the name labels for some books and folders.  This was an exercise in geometry, as I tried to find the most efficient way to arrange the labels on the page without making them too close to cut out easily or so far apart that there's a lot of wasted paper.  I needed my estimation skills, and also an idea about tessellation, rotation, translation (but no reflections as I don't want the words the wrong way round!

So next time one of the children in my class asks me what the point of maths is, I might just direct them to this blog post for a start!  I'm certainly going to make sure that there are a huge range of authentic contexts for maths in my classroom this year.