The rapidly advancing deadline for writing this blog (!) stimulated me to think about how over the years several interesting remarks stemmed from one story.
When I was doing my PGCE course (a kind of state-sponsored torture for postgraduate trainee teachers, in my case at primary level) and we were given an assignment to do for mathematics. We had to prepare a lesson plan ‘package’ for teaching about shapes. Having claimed to my fellow inmates that my main aim was to ultimately be a children’s writer I thought that I could try to prove myself worthy of this ambitious goal.* So I wrote a story about 3D shapes in which the main character – ‘King Cube’ – decides to throw all of the spheres out of his kingdom. This is until he learns lessons in empathy and appreciation that is (having briefly become a sphere himself after overeating.)
Our assignments, marked by several invigilators, eventually came back and my grade was spectacularly average. To give him credit our tutor made a special effort to have a word with me and to his further credit, taking into account that the grade given hadn’t entirely been in his control, I think he realised how banal his comment would be. ‘I’m sorry we couldn’t give you a higher mark,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid it was too original.’
I didn’t know what to say.
Several years later, after that story had been the catalyst to me writing a series of maths-based stories to cover the whole of the primary curriculum, it led unintentionally to a teacher suffering a seemingly intangible conundrum.
It was around the time when the curse of the dreaded National Curriculum was at it’s most pernicious and schools were obliged to provide a ‘Literacy Hour’ and a ‘Numeracy Hour’ for the children’s daily educational onslaught. (The subjects to be taught separately with no curricular cross-over by order of HRH - or her DoE representatives anyway!) Happily, despite it seeming radical, rebellious - and possibly even prohibited – back then not all schools had gone off the idea of author visits, daringly resulting in the children having a respite from analytically slicing up sentences or uninspiringly bashing numbers into place all day long. The teacher in question seemed to suffer a terrible dilemma when I explained that I wrote maths-based stories. ‘Oh dear!’ she wailed. ‘I don’t know whether to include you in the Literacy Hour or the Numeracy Hour! What shall I do?’
I bit my lip trying to be polite enough not to offer an opinion.
Possibly around that time, I can’t remember now, I visited a school in Bradford. I worked with a lovely class of children and amongst others shared my story about King Cube. I had incidentally once been told by a maths teaching ‘expert’ that children would not be able to cope with the transformation of a cube into sphere. As with every class I visited over several years the children seemed to manage to cope with this metamorphosis without their heads exploding and they kindly showed their appreciation by clapping when the story ended.
A year or so later I was back in the same school and I realised that I was lucky enough to be working with the same class. Having met them before and remembering how appreciative they’d been last time, I decided to be a bit daring and share some of my more experimental work with them. Bless them they listened politely and attentively but the pieces completely bombed. The stories could have given a lead balloon a run for its money. Fortunately for all of us we were saved by the bell and the by now stony-faced teacher got the children to line up to go out for dinner. I stood by the children, like them ready to gratefully escape, when I noticed one of the boys in the line gently tapping me on the hand to get my attention. He looked up at me and said, ‘We all enjoyed the maths-stories you told us when you came last time, Mister.’
If there is a God I hope that he watches over that lad.
*Like many others before and since I made the mistake of thinking I would be able to write during the ‘long’ school holidays. Ha! As anyone who has actually worked in schools will know the ‘holidays’ are actually just breaks from actual teaching!
Should you be interested to find out how King Cube learns his lessons about spheres the story is included in Using stories to teach Maths Age 4 to 7 Published by Hopscotch ISBN 978-1-90986-002-5
3 comments:
Reminded me of the book 'Flatland' (1884) by Edwin Abbott, where.... "... A Square, whose flat, middle-class life is suddenly given an exciting new shape by his encounter with a sphere..".
Agree with you about the holidays of teachers. My father was a teacher. In term time evenings, he'd disappear off to the study to mark homework. And in the summer holidays, there was the marking of exam papers.
Captured the unpredictability of school visits perfectly, Steve.
Thank you for your comments Andrew and Penny!
'Flatland' is certainly a classic, it would be great if there were more examples of books like this!
Half-term 'holidays' were over in a flash as half the week is spent catching up with marking etc. from the previous half-term and the other half preparing for the next... perhaps two hours of 'holiday' on the Wednesday?
As you say Penny school visits are unpredictable! Every one different!!
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