My Approach

If I were to pick three cornerstones on which I base teaching, they would be:

Curiosity: From my experience in teaching, it seems that by and large, the potential for learning can be greater than imagined, even if a little hidden. I have seen enough people say they are not good at maths to follow a thorough exploration of Fibonacci in nature to see this to hold some truth, and if that seems a stretch, I met a singing teacher convinced that everyone could learn how to sing if the enthusiasm was strong enough.

But enthusiasm and attention can disappear in subtle ways - from teaching that lacks relevance, to gaps in our understandings that grow, to the fear of being wrong, to a resistance to authority, to the idea that an aptitude for something is simply not in our nature.

So fundamental to my approach is the facilitation of the curiosity of the student. Often this involves building around fun activities and practical real-life projects devised with the student, or with an understanding of what makes them tick. This could be anything from blackberry picking and cake baking; to design and craft projects like building a table; to a game of darts with the score counted on a DIY Roman abacus at one of my Curiosity Workshops. I also like to spin a story, with or without the camp fire.

Communal Exploration: It can be frustrating to find that a message isn’t getting across. The typical sentiment may be ‘You’re not listening to me’, with an implication that it is their responsibility to do so, and that you are being hard done by in some way.

In the Navajo language, such a situation might be a little less common. In Navajo, the verb takes center stage - what is happening, rather than who is doing it. Perhaps an interpretation of the message not carrying would more closely resemble ‘Communication isn’t happening’, rather than ‘You’re not listening to me’. This is different to most modern languages which are based around the doer of the sentence (the subject) and what it’s being done to (the object) - the process (or verb) takes centre stage, rather than the individuals.

I like this example as it highlights how there are different ways to paint a picture, but that the representation can carry great significance. Showing how different cultures represent things differently, and how these representations have changed over time, can be particularly revealing to people who are struggling to adapt to social norms and learning techniques.

I also like this example with relation to teaching, to highlight that Teaching and Learning can be a communal process, where both teacher and student are learning together how to navigate and communicate on subjects that may have been challenging in the past. I’ve found such a spirit allows a more friendly, patient and cooperative dynamic in which new realms can be explored.

Understanding the Systems: Once I was working with a student for whom 19 + 12 = 211. It took a little bit of eyes wandering around to get there, but once they landed on 211, they didn’t want a pen and paper to check their answer, and they weren’t budging when it was questioned. They were very sure.

It turned out that their mental arithmetic process was to visualise the steps of the ‘column maths’ technique that many are familiar with when using a pen and paper. Only, when ‘carrying the one’, it had been misplaced between the tens and ones columns, rather than added to the tens.
12
+ 19
=211

I’m all for having different processes to be able to draw on, and enjoy sharing the highly visual technique for multiplication often taught in Japan to make the point that there are many ways to approach a situation, whether with maths or indeed with languages. But both techniques work for reasons rooted in the design and evolution of a number system built on groupings of 10, and for me, understanding these systems goes hand in hand with being able to use appropriate processes to navigate them effectively and reliably.

So whether the focus is around getting answers to a test quickly and reliably, or having a broader and more functional sense of scale and numeracy, building on solid foundations can be hugely beneficial.