Here’s a challenge for you: talk with a friend for 10 minutes and try to avoid any reference to numbers, shape or space. It sounds easy, but I bet you will find it far harder than you think. In fact, I think most would struggle to complete the task successfully without some very careful avoidance tactics.

This is because maths underpins so much of what we do every day. It’s there when we wake and look at a clock, when we count out the dishes and spoons for breakfast, in the shape of the cereal we put in the bowls, in the flow of the milk, in the shape of the toast - and that’s in just the first five minutes of your day.

And yet so many people will still say they are no good at maths or that they dislike it. Meanwhile, maths anxiety seems to be shockingly common. What’s going on?

As a maths tutor and a teaching assistant, I wanted to find out why there was this disconnect between the maths of life and the maths in the classroom, and what we could do about it in schools. So I decided to do some research.

One of the first things I came across was a study investigating and recording the economic activity that primary-aged children engage with outside of school (bit.ly/MathsPrimary). Through diary entries, documenting interactions and a focus group, researchers discovered that children were regularly engaged with selling, saving money and collecting things. Apart from counting change and measuring ingredients, however, they did not associate any of these activities and the processes involved as being “maths”. Indeed, one boy said: “We don’t do anything about our own lives in maths.”

I suspect that counting change and measuring ingredients came up only because they are the scenarios often used in context-based maths questions in schools.

In my experience, this view of the subject as “abstract” is fairly typical: children in primary tend to see maths as outside of their normal, everyday lives - and we don’t do much to dispel that feeling. Is this one of the reasons why so many people are turned off maths? Because we can’t see its relevance?

I asked some of my friends in their mid twenties about their experiences at school and current feelings towards maths. This is what they told me:

“The things we learned often felt irrelevant and lacking in colour … I felt frustrated by it and wished I could do it. It made me feel like I was stupid and not logically minded.”

“[My experience was] very bad, I felt like I didn’t understand anything … [I felt] frustrated, confused, bored. I’m happy to not be doing it anymore! I feel like my brain doesn’t work that way. When I come across maths concepts in conversations, it feels like a road block.”

“I didn’t learn properly for two years and felt really behind when I went to secondary school … I felt like it was pointless for me to learn and saw no use in algebra, but my biggest enemy was fractions, which I still couldn’t add by 16. I still hate maths, struggle with mental maths especially, and budgeting. I get really anxious if I am in charge of a maths situation, such as giving someone the correct change or dividing a bill.”

Would these testimonies have been different if the maths had been grounded in more familiar topics? Maths is complicated enough without making it more abstract: a little more connection to real life, I feel, could break down some barriers.

The Everyday Maths Project - a University of Bristol research study, which aims to increase mathematical conversations in families - thinks so, too. It has many suggestions for talking about maths in everyday contexts:

• Choosing a biscuit: families could do this according to size, surface area, shape, colour, volume, weight and density.
• Swimming: families could estimate the size of a swimming pool, time lengths, understand spatial use of the pool with other swimmers, count lifeguards and their ratio to swimmers.
• Cooking: families could purchase ingredients, consider cooking times, portion sizes and fractions of food, or look at the amount of cutlery needed to lay the table.

The research on maths anxiety demonstrates just how damaging doing nothing about the issue can be. Disengagement with maths leads to a lack of self-esteem in the subject and that can be hugely damaging if it leads to a lack of qualifications in maths. GCSE maths is a requirement for many jobs, and careers in Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) are universally recognised as pathways to success. Prolonging “mathsphobia” experienced as an adult also impacts perceived self-abilities in parenthood when supporting a child, and could lead to a transfer of anxiety from parent to student.

What is frustrating is that the study above demonstrates just how much maths thinking goes on naturally, even at 10 or 11 years old, without the child even knowing it. Ability is not the barrier here.

So, what is the solution? We know that children are using maths all the time, so we need to capture these situations and encourage children to talk about them - much like the University of Bristol project aims to do within families, but in a school and teaching context.

Children can certainly talk very passionately about something when they want to, so if we work to extrapolate the maths within their experiences, this will be the key to unlocking understanding and increasing confidence.

How might we do that? The following points outline a suggestion for intervention group work with Year 6s that utilises conversations surrounding maths.

1. Leading in

As with all topic learning, it is useful to have an engaging activity or presentation of ideas as an introduction. The key difference here is making it about an innocuous topic.

A seemingly non-maths context that is instantly recognisable and accessible for all learners should be established clearly. For instance, pupils could be prompted to recall a shared situation, such as a class play activity or a recent school trip, or an activity that everyone has their own experience with. It’s key to encourage input and contribution from everyone, and to treat every response as valid. This sets the scene for mathematical thinking embedded in the context.

2. Problem solving

The teacher then poses a problem to the group within the context that requires multi-step mathematical thinking. The idea here is to not only introduce mathematical thinking but to develop mathematical language in a social and familiar environment as well.

Let’s say the teacher has introduced the concept of collecting specified trading cards. The teacher has purchased a starter pack that contains two rare cards, six cards of average worth and two cards of low worth. How would the teacher - who presumably has no prior knowledge of these cards - go about increasing the value of their collection?

Children should discuss in pairs. “Value of collection” is open to interpretation - it could be understood as increasing the total number of cards in the collection or trading in order to maximise the number of cards with a designated higher value. Trading in order to increase value involves thinking about ratio - one rare card may be worth three low-value cards, for example.

What if the teacher then wanted to buy some more cards? How much money would they need to triple their collection and how would they go about doing this? What would be the best collection to have in order to be able to trade and expand?

Trading card collecting is a particularly interesting example because the teacher will not know the ins and outs of collecting these specific cards. It means that those in the group are required to explain and share knowledge in their own terms, which can only be an added beneficial practice.

3. Collaboration

There should then be a regrouping exercise to share ideas about approaches to the problem. These should be discussed for their merits and disadvantages as a collective, but it’s important to remember that there are alternative ways to tackle problems and that these depend on what suits the learner best. It could also be a case of correct methodology but an incorrect answer so, again, it’s important to make it clear that mathematical thinking and methods are just as valid as “the right answer”. Pupils need to talk through their thinking and be encouraged to break everything down step by step.

4. Reflection

It’s vital for everyone to reflect on the group work. Here are some questions to ask:

• Which method do you find hard?
• Which method do you find easy?
• Can you think of another example you might come across that is similar to this?

There is huge potential for where else this could go. Nurturing and encouraging mathematical communication could tell us more about delivering maths knowledge and how to improve the teaching of concepts. It also tells us more about maths examples that children can lock into, which provide information for the wording of maths questions in exams and textbooks.

Introducing more talk about maths can happen anywhere and it is a tool that all types of educators can use - teachers, parents, tutors and teaching assistants to name a few. So let’s start talking about how maths is used in everyday life. Let’s use enquiries and questions to discuss how we use maths, and how we understand maths. Let’s share knowledge and talk about what we’ve learned. Let’s talk about what we find hard and why this could be.

The important thing is that we start talking about maths.

Isobel Waite is a maths tutor and teaching assistant

This article originally appeared in the 24 January 2020 issue under the headline “Making maths less scary is as easy as pi”