Look, when you and I went to school, things were in many ways vastly different than they are today. There were no mobile phones, no ipods, teachers were well respected and classroom discipline was generally first class. If you mucked about, then you were out on your ear and staring down the barrel of some serious punishment. Things have changed since those “good old days” (hey, and many things for the better) but in terms of education across the board, standards have certainly slipped.

Let me take you through a standard 45 minute maths lesson that your child experiences every day:

Optimal situation

• Kids file into the classroom from various other classes, get their books out, pens and calculator out, teacher arrives, now ready to get started. 5 minutes used up, 40 minutes to go.
• Teacher introduces the lesson, explains the concepts clearly with a few worked examples on the board, everybody understands it first time around, there are no interruptions, no discipline problems, no questions. A further 10 minutes gone, 30 minutes to go. Excellent.
• From here then, with 20 students in the class, the teacher with 30 minutes to go, can on average give each student one-and-a-half minutes of personalised attention. Now of course some kids won’t need any help, but I can tell you that there will be plenty who do, and one-and-a-half minutes of help is not going to fix things.

The more common situation

• Kids file into the classroom from various other classes, get their books out, pens and calculator out, teacher arrives, now ready to get started. 5 minutes used up, 40 minutes to go.
• Teacher introduces the lesson, explains the concepts with a few worked examples on the board, some kids understand it first time around, some don’t, there are interruptions, there are discipline problems, there are questions, there are kids texting messages, there are kids listening to their ipods. Another 15 minutes gone, 25 minutes to go.
• Teacher goes over things again as best she can so that more students can understand it, further interruptions occur, class getting noisier, kids who understood it first time around getting frustrated. Another 5 miuntes gone, 20 minutes to go.
• From here then, 25 students in the class, 20 minutes to go, teacher can on average give each student about 50 seconds of personalised attention.

And we wonder why kids are struggling???