On Friday, my group and I were asked to role play a meeting, each of us received a piece of paper with our character and some extra information on it. We were role playing a meeting about a child called Jack who has various issues and we had to try to find a solution to. The characters were:
Jack’s Mum
Jack’s Dad
The Head Teacher
The Class Teacher
The Health Visitor
Jack’s Mum’s Social Worker
It was really interesting to watch the scene play out. I was Jack’s Dad and I knew that Jack was not receiving enough care from the mother, that the mother had lost her job and that this was for stealing.
Among all the other discussions I found myself focussing in my head that the mother was clearly not capable of looking after Jack and, as one of Jack’s issues was stealing at school, I thought this behaviour had been learned from the mother. In the end it turned out that the mother had not been stealing but had lost her job due to too many absences because she was not coping. This really got me thinking, and what I realised is that nobody in that group had all of the information. Because of this, there was not an easy way of making the necessary decisions.
If this was a real-life meeting, I would imagine that the mother would feel ganged-up on by the father and all of the various professionals. Our group decided that Jack should go to stay with his dad to allow his mum to get back on her feet, but I know that in reality this would not have been so easy a decision and the mother would not have let this happen so easily.
What I have learned from this activity is that there are always two sides to every story and we need to be able to put ourselves in other people’s shoes. Another observation I made was that Jack was not included in any decisions we made, and it seemed that none of the adults had even asked him his opinion. This shows that there is a real need for childrens’ voices to be heard by those who hold the power to make huge changes in childrens’ lives. I will keep this in mind when it comes to my own practice, and in the classroom while teaching.
Nearly every time I log into Facebook nowadays, I am faced with yet another post about the Named Person Act. Somebody always has a problem with it, often people who are not children and do not have children themselves! The same thing happened last night, a good friend of mine bemoaning the legislation, and now I am going to put my own opinion across!
To be fair on some people, simply being told that your child has a ‘Named Person’ surely sets off alarm bells. I don’t have children myself, but I can completely understand how a parent may feel, it does sound like there is someone who is in charge of a child over the parent, so I can see why they may panic. I asked my mum recently and she said “No one has my child’s best interests at heart more than me”. The problem comes when people stop there and don’t put any effort into finding out.
First, I’m going to try to explain what exactly the Named Person Act is and what it offers us. The role of the named person is to support children through the various trials and difficulties of their childhoods, be that moving school, bereavement, disabilities or something more serious. They are a point of contact for the children and families they work with. Before starting school, the named person is a child’s health visitor, and once they start school it will usually be the head teacher at their school, or possibly their guidance teacher.
The Scottish Government’s Website explains:
“What will a Named Person do?
The Named Person will be available to listen, advise and help a child or young person and their family, providing direct support or helping them to access other services. They can help families address their concerns early and prevent them becoming more serious.
They can also respond to requests for assistance from other services in situations where this may support the child’s or young person’s wellbeing.”
Does it say that the named person will take over from parents? Does it say that they will have children removed from their families? Does it say that the named person is in charge of the child in any way?
The answer is definitely no to all of these questions.
Now, my own understanding of a ‘named person’ is that the named person is the individual whom anyone who is concerned about a child can go to to share their concern. This means that concerns are shared with the appointed professional, who then has a full and more rounded picture of the life of the child in question.
For example, say a child’s teacher notices something in a child’s behaviour changes, then the school nurse notices something that causes them to have a concern, a social worker involved with the family is made aware of a change in the family’s circumstances, and finally then the child tells their scout leader something that raises their concern. If this information is not shared, the circumstances could become worse and cause something significantly more serious to happen. The Named Person’s role is to receive this information and build up a picture of the life of the child and inform the relevant professionals, deal with the problem themselves, or simply keep the information on record for future use.
To find out what people think of the legislation, I asked a few people I know for their opinions, here are some of their responses:
“Good idea for vulnerable children to give them neutral support if there are other professionals involved with the child. Not necessary for all children”
There are countless services out their like social workers, Childline which do similar things & I think improving those services would be much more beneficial”.
“I can’t see it being that effective compared to other services”
“a total waste of time”
“it undermines the parents and from what I can tell grants the person access to confidential information about the family and they have no say in the selection “
“I don’t see how this will actually help identify vulnerable individuals when everyone has a state guardian”
“affront to the freedoms of both parent & child”
“we shouldn’t operate on the presumption that all parents need monitoring”
“I guess they are a good thing but if people didn’t understand what level of involvement they would have then I could see why they’d be against them.”
This clearly shows that, while not everyone is in complete opposition to it, most people are not open to the legislation at all. I think that it is essential now to educate people, specifically parents in what this legislation is all about and what it means to them. The GIRFEC documentation refers to the role of the named person, saying:
“The Named Person also needs to help children and families feel confident they can raise concerns and talk about their worries to people who will listen and respect their point of view and work with them to sort things out”
This means that parents need to be informed that the named person is there for them and is not just a faceless professional who’s going to turn on them when things become difficult.
Ultimately, you and your families will probably never need to use your child’s entitlement to their named person, but who are you to deny that right to others, people who need the support or in extreme cases – intervention. To me it is essential the children have as many professionals looking out for them and their wellbeing as possible, and it is equally important that they understand this right and know that they are entitled to all the support they need. As I have already said, the ‘Named Person’ is not there to make parental decisions on behalf of children, but to co-ordinate people and resources, if the Scottish Government are guilty of anything when bringing in this legislation, it’s a poor choice of name for it!
Since today was our third day back after the Christmas holidays, I thought it could do with a post about the beginning of the new module. The module is about Interagency or Multiagency working. This, as you can imagine, is highly important for teachers. In the most basic terms, it means professionals in the lives of the children: teachers, police, social work, healthcare workers, community learning officers… The list goes on but those are some of the main ones.
We have been split into groups of 7 or 8. We are to do group activities and go on community visits together. Having met and discussed this with the rest of my group, I am feeling really confident in our ability to work collaboratively with this group. This is a massive benefit, as we have been told that this is not always the case. Clearly, as professionals, we have to simply work with the other professionals in the childrens’ lives – obviously, we cannot allow children to be put in danger just because we do not particularly like their social worker. I believe that the same logic applies here, as we cannot just decide not to work with each other because we do not like each other. I think that it is essential to remember this throughout the module with the group and to reflect on any issues arising.
I think that the main goal for the module is to keep up with the lectures and tutor directed tasks. Of course it is always good to keep up with these things, but for this module there are 6 other people who will be relying on my to do my share of the work in order to be able to do do their own or to learn their own materials. I also would like to set the goal of building a relationship with the remainder if the group, as I have identified the need to be able to speak to each other openly and honestly, especially if any problems arise between us. Towards the end of the module, I will update this post to see if I have managed this.
At the beginning of this module, I tested myself for maths anxiety and the results suggested that I was ‘fearful’ about maths but that I didn’t have maths anxiety. As this is the end of the module, I have tested myself again and came out as ‘on the fence’, the level below the one I was a before. This is great, because it means that my feelings around mathematics have changed. It means that I am more positive and have become comfortable doing mathematics after having completed this module. Now though, I have to wonder what that means and why my feelings have changed.
The lecturer, Richard Holme, has been great. He is very enthusiastic and I thought that he was really good at keeping us interested and engaged. I also thought that he made us feel that we could ask questions and email with questions or queries to ensure that we really understood the content. This is something I am specifically going to take away from the module as I think that a lot of the feelings children will have about mathematics will come from the teacher. When teaching maths as a teacher, I would like to make the children feel that they can come to me and ask questions. I also would like for them to feel engaged and included in my lessons.
Additionally, I think that the content of the workshops we did were great because they were especially engaging. My most favourite was the ‘Demand Planning and Logistics’ workshop, especially the game we did to learn it. I thought it was a great activity to engage all of us and in response, I decided to us it as an example in my assignment. I think that other activities, such as the Fibonacci in art workshop or the using boardgames, were the same – active, engaging, and fun. I hope to do this for myself when I’m teaching.
Of course, if I am being honest, I have not enjoyed absolutely everything in this module. I found my biggest weakness came in the ‘Maths in the Outdoors’ input. I knew I couldn’t read maps before the input, but to be honest I never really thought it was that important as I don’t like the outdoors and was almost certain that I was not about to take up hillwalking. That was before I took part in the workshop and when I realised that everyone around me seemed to know a lot more than I did, knew exactly how to complete the activities we were being asked to do. I hated that floundering feeling of just not being able to access these activities and I now realise that that is exactly how any children in my class will feel when activities are simply too obscure to them. This is something that I will always keep with me and try to use to help me be the best teacher I can be. I also realise that I need to look at my map reading skills, something my friend Kim has assured me that she will help me to do this very soon!
In this lecture on __/__/__ , we learned about probability and chance. We tried many activities in order to test probability and the chances of things happening. One such example of this was the ‘McBuckman’s’ task.
We were asked to work out how many meal combinations were possible using this menu. I struggled with this in the workshop, so I’ve had another go and came up with the following:
It took me a long time to put this together, and I had to get a bit of help, but I completely understand now. What is most striking to me is that there are clear patterns forming in the options. I worked out that each combination would only start with either ‘Starter1’ or ‘Starter 2’, and there were only three options for main (‘Main 1’, ‘Main 2′, or’Main 3’), so I then knew there were 6 possible starter and main combinations. Adding on dessert options meant multiplying the 6 options by 2 to get 12 combinations, and then it was simply a case of getting the fancy pens out!
So where does probability and chance come into it? I’ll admit that I had no idea! The best I can come up with is the probability of getting different things on the menu if left to chance. What I mean by this is:
There are 2 possible Starters, therefore there is a 1 in 2 chance of customers choosing each one;
The same goes for the dessert, there is a 1 in 2 chance of the customers choosing each one;
There are 3 potential main courses, so there is a 1 in 3 chance of each one being chosen by the customer.
I find that this makes a lot of sense and in a made-up example my simple probability calculations are accurate. Except, in real life there would be many more variables to consider, such as popularity of different items, so ‘Starter 1’ may be a lot more popular with people so more people pick it. For example, the most popular meal in McDonalds is the Big Mac meal, less popular seems to be the Fillet-O-Fish meal. This means that realistically, the probability of customers choosing the Big Mac meal is significantly higher than the Fillet-O-Fish meal. Clearly it is significantly more complicated than it seems and this links in nicely to a previous post about demand planning {https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/glowblogs/klduodeportfolio/2015/11/17/demand-planning-and-logistics/}
I’m not sure if that is quite right, but I do know that the second premise is true. Boardgames really do contain maths. On 1/12/15, we were all invited to bring in a boardgame and to play in the workshop, and I’ll admit that I was skeptical about it, but again, I was proven wrong. We talked about where the maths comes into it, and I was not disappointed!
One such example was a jigsaw. We were tasked with finding as many uses for a jigsaw as we could, I could think of:
Grouping
Distribution
Tessellation
Randomisation
Fractions
This makes a lot of sense as when most of us pick up a jigsaw, we tend to split the pieces up by colour, then we look for corners and straight edges and begin to build up the picture. The particular jigsaw we were using was a ‘Where’s Wally?’ one, so we considered distribution in the number people in the picture and then looked for the average number of people in a piece. Another obvious mathematical concept within comes in the form of tessellation, essentially that all the jigsaw pieces fit together to form a continued pattern, which is of course the case with a jigsaw.
Another game we had was Monopoly, the related mathematical concepts in Monopoly and I struggled to think of any. Yes, there is the obvious money, grouping of similarly priced properties, but I felt that there should be more, and they should be easier to find. When in doubt, take to google! I found this blog called ‘MONOPOLY MATH’ by someone called Lainie Johnson {http://blog.keycurriculum.com/monopoly-math/} which gave me loads of ideas, including:
Shape (rectangles and squares on the board)
Numerical orders (Properties are laid out in ascending value)
Probability (Dice)
Or as Lainie sums it up, “addition, subtraction, multiplication, fractions, percentages, statistics, probability, interest, patterns, number lines, and basic geometry”
This, to me, is amazing, I love to think that there is still more to discover in the world of mathematics, things that are not abstract beyond my understanding. So from a teaching perspective boardgames are an untapped resource for children. In my experience, the only time we see boardgames in classrooms is during free time or on the last few days of term as a means of keeping children quiet. To me, boardgames could be used far more constructively, to improve maths skills in children. I also think that the activity we did in the workshop, where we had the game in front of us an had to find the maths could be a good co-operative learning activity for groups of children, with perhaps a reward near the end of the week to be able to play the game.
“The impact of conflict, violence and displacement on education in Iraq is nothing short of devastating,” said Peter Hawkins, UNICEF’s Representative in Iraq. “Large numbers of children – those in host communities, displaced from their homes, as well as refugee children from Syria – continue to experience significant disruptions to their education, putting Iraq at risk of losing an entire generation to conflict.”
This quotation from Peter Hawkins, who is UNICEF’s Representative in Iraq. Hawkins is taking about the effects of the current conflict in Iraq. It seems that education is being affected by the conflict from all directions, and the children who are trying to access it are the ones who are losing out.
One major issue is that 5,300, which is 20% of schools, are no longer able to be used for education. This is because they are being used to house refugees or other displaced people. They are also being used by the military or are simply not safe for use due to being in a state of disrepair. The effect of this is that some children will no longer have a school which is close enough for them to attend and therefore they may have had to stop going to school because it’s not practical as it is too far, too dangerous, or costly to make the journey to access education.
On top of this, it has been reported that in the past year “67 attacks on schools and education personnel were reported”. This is a huge number of attacks and understandably will have scared those who work in education and those who access it. This would mean that teachers and other staff members are likely not wanting to go in to work and parents similarly do not want to put their children in unnecessary danger by sending them to school.
Another issue is, that in “northern Iraq, nearly 14,000 teachers have been forced to flee violence.” This means that there are far fewer teachers than there should be teaching in Iraq. This can mean that children do not have qualified teachers giving them an education so they will not learn as effectively, and may also not learn the correct material. The other issue is that it could mean that schools have to close and children begin to receive no education at all. I would argue that this is a massive brain drain for the country.
And what is the ultimate effect of all of the above? Well, in my opinion, in just a few years Iraq will find that they have an entire generation of children without an education. This will mean that they will find themselves without facing a shortage of people to become doctors, nurses, dentists, infrastructure workers etc. Iraq is going to have to work especially hard to deal with this problem in the very near future, so I believe that they need to work on education as soon as it is possible to prevent further issues related to health, crime and other social issues.
If I am honest, I was not particularly interested in learning about the Fibonacci sequence, but I tried to be open minded. We learned that it is a number sequence in which each number is the sum of the sum of the previous two numbers:
To me this was interesting, as there is a very clear logic to the numbers, and it is almost aesthetically beautiful. My own choice of wording surprises me. I like that this
I also was told about Fibonacci coming out a lot in art, which was very interesting to me. when researching this, the most prominent was the Fibonacci spiral. This is a spiral which moves out from the centre by the Fibonacci numbers as demonstrated below:
After our lecture on maths in art, we were told that art containing fibonacci numbers is generally more aesthetically pleasing to us. I decided to try this out, as I did not really see how this could be true. I tested it out for myself, I drew two pictures the same size, using the same colours. One used shapes which were based on fibonacci numbers, e.g. 3×5, or 1×8. The other used random numbers.
The Random Picture.
The Fibonacci-based Picture.
I then set about asking people I knew which of the two pictures they preferred. All of them said that they preferred the Fibonacci-based Picture. When asked why, none could give me a definitive answer. The best conclusion I can come up with is that the Fibonacci numbers in the picture are what makes people prefer the picture.
So far in the module, the demand planning and logistics has been my favourite. I enjoyed the problem-solving nature of the activity and I think I was quite good at it.
Ever since, I have been looking for examples of this kind of activity in my everyday life. It is difficult to write about this one, as I am not allowed to mention the company I work for nor the exact nature of my work, however I am going to try.
Essentially this weekend I had a 2-hour slot to go around 11 different pubs in the local area. This was a lot harder than you may think, I had to plan my route around the city as I had to visit in three different post code areas. I admit that one thing I am really bad at is reading maps. I cannot ever seem to understand which way is North, what way round the map is, or where I am on the map. Usually I would just get someone else to do it, but this time I had to do planning for myself.
I decided to use Google Street-View to locate all of the places I needed to go and in what order. The time I had did not allow for doubling-back on myself, so I needed to get it right the first time. Initially I just put all the addresses in and thought it would do, but I found there was a lot of problems as I would have to drive up and down the same roads and it would not work in the time.
I found Google Street-View was a good tool for this kind of activity. I could put in all the addresses I wanted and then I could begin to switch them around until my route became as simplified as was possible and I could do all of the jobs in as short an amount of time as possible. I believe that this is logistics as I had information in the form of the addresses I had to get to and a problem in the form of how to get to them in a short period of time.
From a teaching perspective, this could be quite a good activity as it would teach children about planning routes themselves, especially if they too can’t read maps, it would also be a good problem solving activity, as it is fundamental mathematics but it does not require any maths skills in the academic sense, which could be a great activity to encourage confidence.
On a personal level, I have also learned that I should probably try to gain some confidence of my own in map-reading. This is something I am going tottery my best to do as during the Outdoor Education workshop, I had to sit back and allow the others in my group to take the lead as I did not understand what was going on at all. I am going to make every effort to be able to do this.
Myself and Jenny found that we were quite good at this activity…
Demand Planning and Logistics
This activity was an interesting one for me. We paired up and had to complete the activity, based around demand planning. To explain what demand planing is, I found this video was really good at explaining it:
Basically it is planning ahead how much stock an organisation is going to sell so that there is enough stock available to sell so as to make as much profit as possible. Obviously that is a really simplified explanation, but that is what it is.
We got into pairs and were given a spreadsheet to fill in. We were given €5,000, and had to run a shop. We had to plan what would sell depending on the season and how much of it we should buy. Each season we were told how much of our products had sold and at what price and we then had to decide what to buy more of and what to stop buying.
The mathematics involved was not difficult, but it did require a lot of thought. Some people lost money by ordering the wrong products, such as Christmas selection boxes in the summer season, or ice-cream wafers in the winter season. We also had the option of buying ‘Premium Durian’, which only ever sold around 10-20%, and was therefore not a good buy as it would cost more to purchase than the profit made on them when sold. Also available were items such as beans, bananas and milk, which always sold at a minimum of 70%.
The maths was not the arithmetic involved, we had calculators and it was mostly very simple addition and subtraction. The real mathematics was in the patterns that began to form. It took some of us a a little while to understand this, but we had to be able to see that, for example, bread sales were always high, so investing in bread was a good idea as it always sold, whereas the durian did not sell or only sold very little. Of course it was important to look at the selling price of certain seasonal items in each season, as when it dropped suggested that it was not going to sell as well.
From a teaching perspective this was interest to consider, as on the face of it, it seems to be fairly complicated. However, the more I considered the activity, the more I thought it was one that I may try with children. I think that it could be done as a mathematics activity, but also a business one. It also occurred to e that this could be a really good activity to have children engage in cooperative learning and good to encourage them to take on group roles. I also think that it could be adapted and used in almost any class topic, maybe running a school or a zoo or maybe a park. I think that it would require a lot of build up and the children in the class would need to be given a lot of support. but it is definitely an activity I would try in the future.
Glow Blogs uses cookies to enhance your experience on our service. By using this service or
closing this message you consent to our use of those cookies. Please read our Cookie Policy.
