This year will be one of challenge and growth for students and teachers of Mathematics at Merici College. The Maths Faculty are offering real opportunities for all the girls to participate, to improve their confidence, knowledge and problem solving skills. To do this we are embracing change while refining our core practises.
After our successful trial of Mathspace in the latter half of 2016, we have invested in this powerful digital resource for all currently enrolled students. Mathspace provides a store of adaptive exercises, as well as a thorough e-book covering the National Curriculum for the junior years, and an expanding repertoire addressing most of the senior courses. Students and teachers can easily track their progress as they gain mastery of core skills and knowledge in all content strands while parents may also choose to have their email address added to their child’s account to receive regular updates on assigned work and to get a sense of how their child is progressing. It will be expected that students in the junior years will engage in regular, rigorous application of Mathspace as part of their home studies throughout this year.
While Mathspace will assist us in providing a solid grounding in knowledge and skills both in and out of the classroom, the learning of Mathematics requires that students flex between skill mastery and the discovery of new concepts and styles of thinking. With this in mind, students will be given access to tasks and activities which are problematic and open ended. The aim here is to encourage students to discuss and model, to experiment and hypothesise about mathematical situations. Using this ‘inquiry based learning’ approach, students will learn to take academic risks, to delight in error correction, to refine models and to learn to communicate their learning journey, just as professional mathematicians do.
Middle school years can be a difficult and anxious time for many students. Social and academic demands are often compounded by the adolescent desire to define themselves and project themselves towards their aspirations of adulthood. The study of mathematics should be an empowering element in their schooling journey but for many students a fear of failure can hinder progress, particularly where formal testing is involved. With this in mind the Mathematics faculty has carefully chosen Year 8 in which the girls will move away from formalised examinations in place of the creation of a body of work. In this year, collected exercises, activities and recordings both physical and digital which will serve to demonstrate student’s increased mastery and understanding. This year should help the girls to re-evaluate what mathematics is to them; to see themselves grow at their own pace and to understand that a single exam does not define them as learners.
In Year 9, classes have been created to accommodate learners’ needs; 9 Core classes give students a chance to engage with course content with a focus on support and encouragement. These classes have been designed to re-kindle a student’s interest in mathematics, repair gaps in their knowledge and build their confidence in this subject. 9 A classes offer a rigorous application of the same content while challenging students with complexity and novelty meant to challenge them and sharpen their skills and understanding.
In the senior years, the rollout of the Australian National Curriculum continues with four courses completing their third and fourth units in Year 12 while two new courses are being introduced for our Year 11 cohort.
Students from all Year groups will have the opportunity to compete in competitions and challenges including:
- Mathematics Challenge for Young Australians (MCYA): the Challenge Stage, the Enrichment Stage and the Australian Intermediate Mathematics Olympiad (AIMO)
- Australian Intermediate Mathematics Olympiad (AIMO)
- Australian Maths Competition
- UNSW Competition
Information will be disseminated through classes, Moodle and What’s On.
Our faculty’s teaching techniques continue to expand with a continuation of Flipped Learning in many classes, Coding as a means of exploring key concepts in geometry and functions as well as Sketchup, Geogebra and Active-Inspire digital resources for modelling mathematical concepts and relationships. More than this, our teachers have generously indicated that they will continue to volunteer their time to run group tutoring sessions before, during lunch breaks and after school to all students. Students often use this time to get extra assistance from a teacher for new concepts and processes, to fill in gaps in their knowledge or to just use the extra time to work on their core skills in a quiet and focussed environment.
The proposed timetable is as follows with classes to be held in the Pentony Centre or as advised:
Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday
Morning (8:10am-bell) H Walker H Walker G Ryan G Ryan
Lunch R De Puit
Afternoon (3:45-4:45) F Game T Lyons H Walker
We are all very excited to see this year unfold and hope we can deliver the very best opportunities to our Merici Mathematicians.
Huckleberry Walker, Mathematics Coordinator
