Is Anyone Learning Anything?

After teaching grade 5 maths for a term and a half, I can’t help but ask myself, have any of the learners learned anything? Actually, the more accurate questions is, have any of the learners retained anything they demonstrated an understanding of at one point in time? Have they moved anything from their short-term to their long-term memory? Most of the time I think the answer is unfortunately, no.

At the end of class nearly every day, I do five random problems from any topic we have studied. I just write them on the board and ask learners to volunteer answers as we go through the problems. An extremely small number of topics always go smoothly (comparing two numbers, addition, writing a number in expanded notation). A few things never go well (writing the analogue and digital time, multiplying a three-digit by a two-digit number, finding the next number in a pattern involving subtraction). On Fridays, instead of doing them orally as a class, every learner must write the problems and the answers on a half sheet of scrap paper and turn it in so that I can get a feel for what may still be a problem in the class. Unfortunately, the results are always scattered. This past week, the total number of points a learner could have earned was nine. No one earned a nine. Two learners earned an eight, another two earned a seven, and most of the rest earned fours and fives. That was the best they could do. A learner that can make a tally table, struggles to convert cm to m correctly. A learner that can convert length without a problem, fails to identify shapes correctly. It’s as if everyone can do just about 50% of the material, but each learner has got their own combination of topics that make up that 50%. So as a class, nothing has been mastered and everything needs to be re-taught. Which is neither practical nor feasible, so the challenge becomes what to choose as a focus.

For now, I am spending most of my time and energy on more complicated arithmetic, as most things seem to come back to that. Adding multiple numbers and carrying to the next place value. Recognizing when to borrow when subtracting and doing it correctly. Multiplying multi-digit numbers. Long division. Rounding. As I see it, these are the “big five.” Nearly every other type of problem uses one or more of these skills. So even though they won’t quite master the rest of the curriculum topics, if they can do the “big five,” they will have a strong foundation for moving forward. If at the end of the year, every learner (or let’s say 90% of the learners) can correctly do these five things, I will feel like the answer to the question “Has anyone learned anything?” can honestly be “Yes.”