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The Dutch King is in his altogether...

I went the other night to a workshop at the mini-Ws' school which was designed to inform parents about the modern techniques used in teaching maths. Imagine my horror when it became clear it was a practical session. Kids were waiting in various classrooms with games and exercises related to addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

I was feeling particularly tired that evening and hoped to ease myself in with a bit of simple adding up, but was plunged straight into long division. Thankfully one of the mums accompanying me on the tour did the heavy lifting. I threw dice for her to establish randomly the sums that she was due to divide. She seemed to get the hang of the technique and I was thankfully never asked to have a go myself. I was awarded a star by the child in charge of the table, presumably for my assured shaking of the dice.

In the substraction room, I encountered a lady who'd come along from the local teacher training college, who was very enthusiastic about a technique imported from the Netherlands within the past ten years. It allowed children to find the difference between two numbers and it consisted of a line drawn across a page. Not a line with numbers on it though. This was the revolutionary thing about the Dutch strategy. Lines with numbers were old hat. Here, we had a line without any numbers. Just a plain old line that you could hang washing on. You placed one number at one end of it and a second number at the other end. You then leapfrogged your way down this empty line in convenient stages, finding your way to round figures and making a note of how many units you'd covered along the way. By adding up the numbers in your 'leaps', you'd worked out the difference between the two figures you started with.

I was just trying to imagine the conference at which the revolutionary Dutch tool was first unveiled. 'Isn't it grand? Isn't it fine? Look at the cut, the style, the line!'

Comments

  1. We're clearly ahead of the curve here in Colchester, Phil, as we've been using 'numberlines' for a few years. I say "we" as I find them much harder than the old fashioned method. Fortunately my son has moved onto more normal methods (it's considered an introductory technique), so I can cope. Lord knows how they'll be doing it when my daughter gets to school.

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