Maths Tuition

The main aspect of the Think Pacific project was to provide assistance in teaching maths and English to pupils who were falling behind in class and taking them out for 1 to 1 assistance. Using a range of resources to gauge their ability, such as LADA tests and ORT books, we were able to identify pupils who required our help the most. I'll say now, despite my teaching background, that this was a massive eye-opener in seeing how mathematics and education are taught on the opposite side of the world.

Myself and Lydia were assigned Class 8 which matches the UK standard of Year 8. In Fiji, this would be the last year in the Junior school before moving into Ra High School. We were told, due to personal circumstances from the teacher, that we had to run the whole class for the 3 weeks including teaching English,Science and P.E! After a few days, we noticed some similarities and differences between the two countries in mathematics:

(1) The exam system is similar to the UK that at the end of the year they get assessed to see progress. In particular, for Class 8, they were working towards their final exams which would be used to determine sets when they move into the high school. However, the system heavily relies on multiple choice answers and short answers in almost every subject. Maths has 40% of marks awarded for MCQ which then has approximately another 50% awarded in 1-2 mark questions with the remaining 10% offering 3+ marks. Considering that you need 50% to pass and there are no banded qualifications (i.e no 9-1 or A*-G) it makes passing the year possible through pure factual recall rather than understanding the mathematical reasoning behind a method. This is reflected in the style of teaching but pupils seem to favour this way of learning rote which leads to around a 40-50% pass rate on the final exam.

(2) The exam at the end of the year is non-calculator and due to this pupils are not familiar with how to use a calculator. In the UK, calculators are used from around Year 5 and is evident in SATS and the national curriculum. They did have calculators in the school but only the teachers used them to check working. An unusual case of method without using the calculator was when pupils were asked to work out the area of the circle and only use the approximation of pi (22/7) to work it out. This does develop their use of fractions but with some students having sketchy knowledge of this, it made the process almost impossible to solve. A calculator would be able to assist with this and test their knowledge on applying the formula, rather than adding extra skills which makes identifying the area of development much more challenging for the teacher.

(3) The teachers focus throughout the sessions were mostly exam technique. Looking at each keyword and understanding what each word means was a good strategy so even a highly differentiated class could follow easily what was going on. Drawing a diagram was regularly done and promoting checking the answer too, very similar to UK education. The only downside to having MCQ on practice papers was that teachers had no idea whether students guessed or made a slip in arithmetic. The approach of question,answer,callout,explanation was used often which does allow students to follow their mistakes but most of the time only the upper-bracket students called out the method with other students imitating their response.

Myself and Lydia conducted a range of maths lessons from our strong maths backgrounds including Algebra, Set Theory, Angles, Area/Perimeter and Statistics. We also created 2 lovely posters for the walls to help students remind themselves of the techniques of DMS and Algebra.

English Tuition

English is by far the most challenging subject for them. There isn't much scope in terms of guesswork and the element of creativity is present for the creative writing section of the exam. They learn English through the means of a second language. Just like we learn a MFL at school, fijians learn English through picking up vocabulary and then forming basic sentences and then creating longer texts and dissecting poems and non-fiction texts. The challenge for me and Lydia wasn't the fact that they couldn't read or repeat words, it was the difficulty in understanding the words on the page and again they have tried to learn the language through rote and examinations rather than speaking and immersing within different types of texts and semantic word fields.

One particularly striking part of the final exam was the section on writing a letter. 10 marks were awarded for a perfect letter including Name, Address, Dear.... , The Information, Conclusion and Yours Sincerely. Many students were scoring very highly in this section due to the rote method but when it came to the creative writing section where they had a choice of 4 stimuli, students began writing about cyclones and other unusual topics, most likely carried on from their science lessons. 

Throughout our time, despite English being our weakness, we ran a range of classes including:

• Grammar and Spelling Workshops
• One sentence stories
• Brainstorming
• Comic Strip Stories
• Dictionary Races

Despite challenges at the start, myself and Lydia did start to notice great potential with the students in writing stories. The brainstorming and comic strips really helped them order/visualise their ideas and students were able to write a full side of A4 in 30 minutes by the time we left the project. We hope that when the teacher returns he will be able to see the strategies we used and implement them into class.