After assessing the children’s reading levels, I evaluated their knowledge and skills in mathematics. Again, I wasn’t surprised to find they were all somewhat behind the level expected of them by the NSW curriculum. Unlike their lack of competent reading skills, though, their being behind in maths didn’t perturb me much. I’d found that, given the right opportunities, time, appropriate tasks and encouragement, primary-aged children could quickly catch up and even get well ahead of anything expected of them in this area.
My goals with maths learning mirrored those with reading: success, enjoyment, child focus and child inclusion. Those goals had to sit within the state curriculum, so I didn’t expect we’d be doing much that was dramatically different to what might be seen in any primary classroom.
The curriculum was quite specific and rigid. When the inspector came to call, he would test what the children had covered against each prescribed area, then estimate what they’d achieved under my tuition. I found all the curricula useful, giving me direction and goals, and I planned to be always ready for an inspectorial visit—I didn’t want the kids or me to be found wanting in any way.
Being without colleagues, I keenly felt the need for external, independent benchmarks to assess our progress. What I really wanted was a valid and reliable comparison to other institutions, perhaps through a state or national assessment; this could have provided vital information about my students. How good it would have been to know how we were travelling at Weabonga compared to schools elsewhere.
The maths texts I’d found in the school store would be the basis of most of our activities, supplemented with activities of my own design. In the evenings I developed task cards with graduated exercises and problems for all the major maths concepts and processes the kids needed to master. These cards were intended to build, inexorably, success on success.
As with the reading cards, we kept the maths sets easily accessible in shoeboxes. With my help the children kept track of their progress on a personal chart as they moved from early to later cards. At a glance each knew what had been covered, what they had achieved and where they might go next; with a second glance, an assessment of their attainment of curricula requirements could be made. These charts weren’t meant to encourage competition but to be a picture of individual progress. If there was any competition, it was only from the children challenging themselves.
What we developed was a program for each pupil that depended on having materials organised and close at hand. The content had a local flavour as most of these materials involved activities based on the children’s interests, needs and questions. We held small group instruction for those areas where I hadn’t yet been able to create such individual materials.
All these country kids were fascinated by numbers. The boys in particular asked about them often and were keen to find answers. Jack and Rick would enquire about the numbers of sheep per acre, sheep shorn in a day, and fleece weights. Will and Joe wanted to know what a shearer would earn at one shilling and sixpence per sheep if they shore eighty-five sheep in a day. Mike and Gary asked questions of grain yields per acre, and Mark questioned the number of rabbit skins needed to make a pound weight. Phil urgently asked one Monday morning what might be earned by selling five pounds of rabbit skins to the hide merchant—the rabbit-trapping operation he and Mike ran had a bumper weekend, I presumed.
The girls asked questions of a different nature. Lindie queried the lengths of material needed for a hand-sewn skirt. Debbie asked about the quantity of butter for a marble cake. Vickie queried the time it would take to roast a chicken weighing two pounds two ounces. I treated these questions in the same way as those of the boys; they simply revealed this society’s sharply delineated expectations for each gender.
Some of our maths task cards mentioned a nearby sheep property: ‘What’s the area in acres of Finn’s paddock measuring five hundred by five hundred yards?’
Others were set on a village family and home: ‘How many skeins of wool would the knitter need for a pair of socks if each sock took two and one-half skeins?’
‘Here’s a recipe for Mrs Wallace’s pound cake. When you add the weight of all the ingredients, does it really weigh a pound?’ ‘How long would one hundredweight of laying mash last for the O’Callaghans’ chooks if Phil fed them two pounds’ weight of mash a day?’
Admittedly, as Tom’s lessons came to him prepared, I only had to create an individualised maths program for seventeen pupils compared to thirty, the usual class size at the time, but even at Kegworth I’d been able to individualise much of the maths instruction in my classes of thirty-five students or more. The challenge here at Weabonga was that I had to account for five grades. I was also worried that simply due to their geographical isolation these children were at a disadvantage to city kids, and I didn’t want to add to such disadvantage by not having my pupils achieve as highly as they could. So we voyaged on together, tackling the curriculum in a steady routine, allowing the kids’ interests to direct us whenever possible.
One day we were all fascinated to notice and observe a crop-duster plane distributing superphosphate to an acreage we could see over the creek and up the hill from the school. This was the first time a local grazier had decided to aerial spread his paddocks, and the whole district was focused on the possibilities for pasture improvement.
While we all watched from the veranda Jack asked, ‘What’s the load each trip?’
‘What’s it cost per load?’ queried Tom.
Will wanted to know, ‘How many trips did we see?’
‘So how much super is being spread?’ quizzed Mike.
‘Okay,’ said Jack, ‘how much super was spread on each acre in that paddock?’
‘Which airstrip is the plane flying from?’ murmured Vickie.
‘What distance is that to the paddock we can see?’ wondered Debbie.
Then Joe asked, ‘If there were ten trips, how many miles did it fly?’
Number questions were posed almost ad infinitum—and the kids craved answers. Maths lessons for several days had crop dusting as their starting point, and the children’s interest didn’t wane.
Magic moments like these paid the greatest dividends for me. I found it sublime to observe the children’s minds totally engaged, all synapses firing, concentration at a peak, really working hard because they wanted to know, to understand, to learn, to grow. That isn’t to diminish the genuine efforts the kids were ready to expend most of the time. If I asked them to engage, they did. But whenever I saw the excitement of learning in their eyes or the thrill of an ‘aha!’ moment on their faces, I wanted this feeling to go on forever. Of course, if it had it would have quickly worn us all out. But, oh, it was good when it happened.