The Answer Series recently launched Maths Majors, a new facebook community forum for Maths teachers to share knowledge, grow confidence and work together to overcome common challenges in the classroom. TAS aims to bring Maths teachers who utilise TAS study guides together.
Maths Majors also provides free e-books for teachers as well as video lessons for Grade 12s as part of its mission to further education in South Africa and Maths Majors have their own Facebook page where more information can be found.
The purpose of this Maths Majors group is to pool and share experiences and to help one another in navigating the curriculum and helping learners prepare for their exams.
Anyone can join the group so long as they send some form of proof that they use TAS in the classroom (be it a class selfie, evidence of an order, etc) as the pre-requisite of joining the group is to use The Answer Series study guides for your learners.
Anne Eadie, co-founder of The Answer Series and -Mathematics author, with 45 years’ worth of experience, explains:
“For Grade 12 Mathematics learners to confidently attempt more difficult questions,
teachers need to challenge their students.
This starts with developing confidence in teachers.”
One of the aims of TAS is to build teacher confidence.
In this way better performance amongst learners is inspired.
In 2020 this has become even more important as usual as it has been a particularly challenging year
with remote learning, increased substitutions
and a need for greater tech-savvy, amongst many other things.
Anne Eadie continues:
“Knowledge is extremely important for building teacher confidence. For teachers to impactfully educate their students and inspire interest in Mathematics, they need to have knowledge of Mathematical language, theory, concepts and contexts, and be able to apply this with ease. Only then can they successfully transfer these concepts to learners and help them to develop recognition for mathematical logic and ultimately self-directed learning. However, this all begins with confidence.”
What Anne Eadie says, is supported by the latest research conducted by the Department of Education, which found that fewer students opted to write mathematics in 2019 compared to learners between 2014 and 2018. At the same time, academic performance amongst learners who did write Mathematics decreased significantly, with 54,6% of candidates achieving 30% and above in 2019, and a mere 35% of learners achieving 40% or above.
Anne Eadie puts it all into perspective: “The reason for this poor performance is that students do not fully comprehend key areas such as functions and graphs, calculus, probability, geometry and trigonometry. Learners do not understand the logic behind these Mathematical concepts, which is compounded by an over-reliance on past examination papers for revision. Hence, we see students struggling with complex procedures and problem solving, which together form 45% of the exam.”
On the TAS – Maths Majors Facebook page questions raised that aren’t sufficiently handled within the group, will be formally responded to on a regular basis. This will also be the platform to communicate special features, special content, exposure opportunities, etc.
George Eadie, CEO of The Answer Series, concludes:
“By helping teachers, we jointly raise the standard of education in South Africa. Key to this is imparting confidence in teachers, which we aim to do by providing learning resources and materials for both staff and students, so that they can overcome their fears and become masters in their subject.”
