Maths

One thing we noticed is that we are not actually taught maths at school. We get worksheets and thats it. We are left on our own and have to guess. The teacher is never available to ask questions and ignors one if you put your hand up. Half the time she is not even there a lot of days, never in the afternoon do we see her and when she actually is there she is on the phone.

My mom went through some worksheets with me and we found out I don't even know how to do long division! I have never been shown this at school. All the kids guess and if you get it wrong or leave out an answer the teacher never chats to you or shows you.

We found this cool site with long division and we did lots of examples and it really helped me. I see there is a lot of work I need to do with maths because of this terrible school and the lack of systems that check you do actually understand your work!

I even passed level C last year but that was guesswork and not actually understanding. I see I have to learn my timestables and we bought this cool cube that has them on. I am writing them out often and trying to test on this grid thing my mom worked out on Excel/word.

It looks like this: Its 12 x 12 blocks that are empty

Then you write 1-12 down one side and 1012 along the top. Then you do the easy ones like 2 x, 3x both ways and that fills in a lot of the numbers. 5 x is so easy and so is 10 x and 11x so you just have to work out the rest. I learnt from my mom that there are patterns and you just need to learn to see them and like 6 x is double 3 x and 12 x is double 6 x and it leaves only a few you have to learn really well.

Times tables are really important for long division and long multiplication.

I also need to work on fractions and time and even my understand of 3 digit subtraction and addition has deteriorated in this school and I have been here a year now.

The other school was ok but this one is poor.

I really want to home school now but we have to ask permission from the education authority - how stupid is that!!!

I am not getting taught properly at school and we only found out because I was ill for a couple of months and did some revision at home and unschooled and stuff. I actually got time to chat to my mom instead of being at school from 9-3pm and then doing homework. You dont have to do homework when you home school as you do it all in less time and learn better!