Demystifying Those ‘Wordy’ Maths Questions

We have all been there – “If the 3:13 passenger train leaves Coventry forty-two minutes late and Customer A pays £1.37 more for their ticket than Customer B and ¾ of the area of the westbound platform is covered in pigeon poo, what is the probability that the blue team will outscore the green and red teams by more than 67% of the number attending the summer festival rounded to the nearest hundredth?”  Say what?

It is obvious that most of the exam boards hire ex Bond villains to write many of the questions for their exams.  These are people (possibly living in medieval castles high in the mountains beneath darkened skies lit only by the occasional fork of lightning) who are employed to befuddle and mesmerise with words and charts so vast and convoluted, they make the mathematics of their questions almost impossible to find.  Most students are left believing they could not possibly have the skills or knowhow to derive the correct answer, so they skip the question or leave on their answer sheet the sad, dejected mark of the exam weary … ‘?’.

This is where private tuition comes in.  One of our roles is to pull back the curtain on questions like this and to show students they do have the skills to take on the multi point questions at the end of the papers.  In fact, once they get the correct guidance and focused repetition, they will recognise these questions for what they really are – a great opportunity to use the basic skills they have been practicing since they were five to gain a whole bunch of marks.

Take this exam question as an example:

Recently, I was working on this question with a tutee and I asked them if they would be inclined to skip this question in an exam.  They said they would skip it and I asked why.  They said it looked too hard.  So we worked on the question together.  I showed them how to rotate and redraw the larger triangle next to the smaller one so they were both facing the same way.  With this simple act, they were able to see the relationships between the sides of the two triangles.  I asked them how many times bigger was 25 than 10, in other words, what do you multiply 10 by to get 25?  And away they went.  They solved the rest of the question themselves using only multiplication and addition, skills with which they were more than confident.

After that we practiced with several related past paper questions and the demystifying was complete.  I pointed out that the question was worth 4 marks and asked them if they would skip this type of question again.  They said they never knew how easy they were, just multiplication and addition, and they would never skip them again.  The confidence the student had gained was not in developing a revolutionary new skill, it was in discovering how to apply what they already knew to a question type which had always intimidated them in the past.  The ability they needed was already inside them and through one-to-one tuition, they were able to realise it.

Jeremy Smith