Part of the responsibility of being a Governor at the
Infants School is, occasionally, to visit officially to examine an aspect of
the school’s work. I haven’t done one for a long while and have not pressed to
do so as I never feel entirely in command of the facts, struggling even to
remember the names of the Teaching Assistants (I think I’ve memorised most of
the teachers). But I was in school yesterday to look at how it was managing
maths. I had an initial discussion with the headteacher who handed me a sheaf
of background paperwork which she knew full well I should have in a file
anyway but also that I wouldn’t be able to find, and then went touring around
the classrooms watching what they were doing. The children, as well as the
teachers, were obviously expecting that I might turn up and chatted with me
about their work. Apart from a group in one class who were working on
their standard tests, most children were embroiled in the start of (breathe in)
Pirate Maths Week, an in-house initiative intended to make maths more
attractive to pupils who might not feel very enthusiastic about it. There was a
range of pirate-themed maths tasks which will produce a series of numbers that,
at the end of the week, will allow a treasure chest to be ceremoniously opened
in Assembly and the treasure distributed.
What actually struck me most was moving from one class which
contains mostly Reception children with a smattering of Year 1’s and which was
bedlam (‘Ethan, you’re not on-task, are you?’ hollered the class teacher more
than once) to the top Year 2 class which was a silent oasis of 7-year-olds
completing their Science projects (not Pirate Maths). ‘It happens with every
group and every time we marvel at it’, the headteacher told me. ‘It’s as though
over those two years they become completely different creatures’.
Pirate-themed school activities lend themselves to ribald
comment. As a parishioner said to me, ‘It’s good to know that the children are
getting a grounding in the Three Aaarrrgghs’ …
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