She Wasn't Looking for an Easier Maths Lesson

What one student's journey taught me about dyslexia, dyspraxia and the importance of high expectations.

When I first started teaching this student at the beginning of Year 10, she was working at around a Grade 5.

She was dyslexic and dyspraxic and her handwriting could sometimes be really difficult to read. In maths, that caused problems. Numbers could become muddled, fractions were squeezed into tiny spaces and sometimes even she couldn't work out what she had written a few lines earlier.

So one of the things we worked on was simply giving her maths more space.

I was forever telling her to spread her working out across the page rather than trying to squeeze another calculation into whatever tiny gap she could find. It wasn't about improving her handwriting. I wanted her to find a way of laying out her work that worked for her.  And eventually, she did.

What I particularly liked about teaching her was that she would often arrive at a lesson with her own questions. If something at school hadn't made sense that week, she'd bring it along and ask, “Can we go through this?”

And of course we would. And once she understood it, I'd usually give her another question like it.

She wasn't asking me to make the maths easier. She wanted to be able to do the difficult maths herself.

Over time, I started to see a real difference. Topics that had once seemed quite separate began to connect. She could see where algebra might help with a graph, or where something we'd learnt months earlier suddenly became useful in a completely different problem.

By the spring of Year 11, our lessons had changed enormously.

We were now spending whole lessons working on Grade 9 questions.

They were hard and sometimes she'd be exhausted by the end of the hour. But she enjoyed being challenged and, by then, she knew she was capable of tackling them.

That summer she achieved a Grade 9 in GCSE Maths.

I think about her quite often when people talk about supporting students with learning differences.

Her dyslexia and dyspraxia mattered. They helped me understand some of the difficulties she was having and meant we needed to think differently about things such as how she presented her work.

But she didn't need easier maths.  She needed support that allowed her to access harder maths.

There's an important difference between the two.

A student can need help with handwriting, organisation, processing or memory and still be capable of exceptional mathematical thinking.

Sometimes our job is simply to remove the thing that's getting in the way, and then see what they can do.