Re-conditioning Maths

As maths is my specialism at work, it holds a special place in my heart.
One thing that bothers me is the amount of learners who openly say "I'm crap at maths" and it is met with choruses of "me too", "I hate maths!".
I am often faced with learners who have had bad experiences of maths and who have ended up at our College, not through choice but because their GCSE grades were not good enough to study elsewhere.
They are, by definition of attending our college, not good enough. Not good enough at English, Science, History, French, DT and of course, Maths.
And of course, these are learners who have had it drilled in to them for the past 5 years, how important maths is to succeeding, to getting on the course you want, to getting the job and career you want. The result of this, is that low self esteem surrounds and is embedded in maths for these learners because their "failure" in it at school is what they associate with it.
So, my first and most difficult task is to try and help them re-condition their attitudes towards maths and make them feel positively about the subject and their own abilities related to it.


I try and make maths relevant to them first of all. So they can construct a meaning to the skill being learnt in their everyday lives.
I use a lot of positive reinforcement, for example, a star system, whereby learners could earn stars for positive behaviour and hard work, to eventually win a prize.
They need to be given external motivation for doing maths, in the form of games leading to rewards but I also need to find out what their internal motivations are and see if I can use them to motivate them in my class.


I also do a lot of work outside of my own classroom, helping other tutors embed maths in to their core curriculum because it is not just students that shy away from maths, it is tutors as well. I gladly deliver maths based sessions in curriculum areas to show the students that maths is relevant to their core programme and to show tutors that it can be done in imaginative ways.