On a few occasions recently both my oldest children have voiced opinions that they were not very good at something at school – maths, spelling etc. This is an opinion which I don’t like.
I have a postgrad in a maths subject, and being a journalist I guess I can say I’m good at English, but at no point in primary school do I recall knowing that I was good or bad at anything. I just did the work.
But today school is very different. Parents and teachers feel the need to find a child’s strengths early on.
In my opinion this can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If a child grows up believing he or she is rubbish at maths, they are not going to have the confidence to tackle maths adequately.
When I speak with teachers at parents’ evenings I tell them that I want my children to enjoy school work and that that is my focus, not being good at it. Maths is fun (honestly) in the same way doing a crossword or Sudoku is fun. My focus is for them to enjoy maths.
I also think teachers get it wrong. A child who may be a poor speller one year, may have vastly improved the next.
And I’m glad that when I was in primary school nobody told me what I was good or bad at, for I strongly suspect I didn’t impress them all that much with any area of the curriculum.
