Taylor Swift and Maths

Earlier this year Taylor Swift 'mania' hit Australia as she brought her ‘Eras’ tour to stadiums across our country. I am not really a big ‘music’ person. I don't listen to much music except when I'm driving the family around in the car. I don’t have a Spotify list, and don't ever choose to have music on as I complete cleaning duties around the house, or when I exercise.

In fact I really dislike listening to music as I run. I much prefer just silence and the sounds of the world.

I will always choose a podcast over music, so this means the only 'songs' I am really familiar with are those that I hear on the radio. As Taylor Swift is often on the radio, I have come to know, and quite enjoy, singing along to her 'big hits'.

When Taylor was in Australia earlier this year, I read this article detailing the preparation she put into making sure her tour was a success.

I was fascinated (but not surprised) to read that Taylor started preparing six months before her tour so as to make sure she was physically and mentally ready to perform at the highest level.

I love reading the 'back story' behind elite performers (in sport, art, music, business) and sharing the details of their stories with my family. I really want my children to understand that in any area of life, success is never a fluke…it is because of hard work, persistence, dedication, preparation and practice. 

Not surprisingly they were very interested to hear about Taylor's preparation.

Taylor explained how every day for 6 months she would run on a treadmill singing the whole concert playlist aloud (about 3 hours of content). She commented “I wanted to get it in my bones. I wanted to be so over-rehearsed that I could be silly with the fans, and not lose my train of thought,”.

I love this quote.

Reading it immediately made me think of our students learning maths.

I believe one of the most important goals of maths education in primary schools is to help ensure our students become Numerate citizens. We want them to be confident users of mathematics in 'real life'.

This includes (but is not limited to) familiarity and fluency with basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and division facts. 

I believe our students need to be so familiar with their basic facts that, like Taylor, they don’t lose their train of thought trying to recall these facts when they are tackling more complex problems.

Earlier this week I facilitated a staff meeting at a school where we spent a whole hour looking at the importance of Part-Part Whole from Year F-6.

I cannot emphasise enough the importance of students developing this knowledge.

But often Part-Part-Whole is seen as something ‘Junior’ school teachers need to focus on. I completely agree they do… but it is also critical that senior teachers are aware of its importance, can identify when students display a deficit in this area, and know steps to take to rectify this situation.

In this staff meeting we looked at several examples of when a lack of Part-Part Whole knowledge can hold students ‘back’. Here are two examples:

1. Multiplication- if a student is wanting to calculate 7X50, a useful strategy would be to apply their knowledge of the distributive property. They may break apart 7 and think of 5 x 50 and 2 x 50. Students who are fluent with the Part-Part Whole relationships for 7, can fluently recognise this as a logical step. So while the distributive property is something we may be teaching in Year 5 or 6,  if our students are missing the critical fluency with PPW, considerable cognitive load with be taken up before they even get to thinking deeply about the distributive property.
2. Renaming-When we rename a number, we are not changing its value just writing it in a different way. If you have read my blogs you will know I think renaming is the most important skill we can teach in place value. If we think about renaming 89- we want students to understand we can think about it as:

8 tens 9 ones

7 tens 19 ones

6 tens 29 ones

5 tens 39 ones

While there are other underlying skills here such as appreciating that 1 ten is the same as 10 ones… at the core we come back to PPW.

We want the student to see that I can think of 8 tens as:

7 tens and 1 ten (and then rename the 1 ten as 10 ones)

6 tens and 2 tens (and then rename the 2 tens as 20 ones)

5 tens and 3 tens (and then rename the 3 tens and 30 ones)

This requires fluency with Part-Part Whole relationships for 8. As you can see, renaming is a complex skill comprising of several sub-skills, one of which is PPW.

So while on the surface it may appear to us that our students are struggling with 'renaming', their issue may well be the Part-Part-Whole sub-skill.

Taylor Swift doesn’t want to take up 'brain space' in her concerts thinking ‘I need to twirl and jump next’. She requires these movements to be second nature, coming from long term memory, so she can focus on what she really wants to do- interacting and having fun with the crowd.

Similarly we want PPW relationships to be ‘second nature’ to our students, so they can focus on applying that knowledge to the next skill.

This week I encourage you to keep an 'eye out' for any of your students who may have gaps in their Part-Part Whole knowledge and think about a plan to ensure this knowledge gets 'in their bones' (and as an optional extra you may like to listen to a Taylor Swift song!).

Have a great week!

Ange🎓🎲