I do not hate maths however I would not say that I particularly enjoyed it. I view it as something that we just have to do in order to be able to do things in life. I do believe however that maths at primary school is enjoyable.

I always loved maths at primary school. I do not know if this is because my teacher made it fun or just because it was something that I found easy to do. In primary 6 and 7 I had the same teacher and I have I had a vivid memory of the ‘times table pyramid’. This was an ongoing task in our classroom. The way it worked was the numbers from 2 to 12 were positioned in a pyramid on the wall in the classroom, every pupil in the class had their name on individual cards which they were able to stick on. You would position your own card at the times table you knew up to but you had to know all the previous tables as well. Our on going task was to learn the table above the one we were on so that we could move up. If you believed you were ready, you had to stand up and say the times table as well as answering muddled up questions in the table. If you done this successfully you moved up. I remember reaching the 12 times table and being at the top of the pyramid, this filled me with a great confidence in my timetables and I continued to love to do them. My whole class enjoyed this task because there was a sense of challenge to keep climbing the pyramid and getting better which I believe encouraged people to try. This was when I loved maths.

High school for me was when maths became less fun and less enjoyable. It became the same all of the time which was learn a topic, do a test then move on. In 4th year when I was sitting my National 5 maths I had an amazing teacher who helped me a lot. I found it really hard but her methods of learning and her positive attitude that we were able to do it made me achieve the grade that I did. As much as I still did not enjoy maths at this time, I did it all of the time because I wanted to do well. Higher maths is when I really lost all enjoyment of maths as I do not believe I fully understood any of the work that we did. I passed the unit tests but I believe it was because I memorised the process that we followed in the examples to get the answer. There was not any real understanding as when we put the maths we had learned into problem solving questions I did not know what to do. As Haylock mentions it is not about systematically solving problems the same way, it is about finding various solutions to the same problem and understanding why it is that we use these. This is what I did not experience in higher maths.

In relation to maths anxiety, I do hear often young people and many adults say that they hate maths and they cannot do it. I do not think this is the correct way to view it as like we discussed in our inputs maths is required for every day life. I believe that while I do not hate it, I do need to view it in a more positive light as I want the pupils I am teaching to be excited to learn maths and enjoy it.