Giving My Unschoolers a Maths Test

I had this brilliant idea. Well, I thought it was a pretty good idea until this morning. It was all to do with maths. How do you prove your children are covering the required maths syllabus, and achieving the necessary outcomes, when they don’t use a formal maths program? I’ve been thinking about this for a while.

My husband is a school teacher. Every year his year 3 and 5 students have to sit the dreaded NAPLAN test. (National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy)

NAPLAN tests the sorts of skills that are essential for every child to progress through school and life, such as reading, writing, spelling and numeracy.

So I had this idea: if my girls do the maths part of the NAPLAN test and pass, then I can say they have age appropriate maths skills. (They would be in years 3 and 5 if they attended school.) I could file the results in my records book as proof they are learning maths despite the lack of a formal program. I could continue tempting them with real books about real maths, finding maths games for them to play, looking for every opportunity to expose them to real maths in our everyday life…

So I asked Andy to bring home some NAPLAN papers, and this morning I asked the girls if they’d like to do the test. I can’t say Sophie and Gemma-Rose jumped up and down with excitement when I explained what they had to do. But they were agreeable. They’d never done a test before. This was a new experience.

Ten minutes into the new experience, Gemma-Rose had had enough. She was making a lot of unhappy noises. She did lots of huffing and puffing. She was clearly unimpressed. I don’t think she saw the point to all the questions. Sophie just got down to work.

Some time later they’d both finished. I marked Sophie’s paper first. She smiled as I gave a tick to one question after another. Then she got a few wrong, and by the time I got to the last page, she was crying.

“But you did okay,” I assured Sophie. “You got 85% right. That’s good.”

But Sophie wasn’t convinced. She is used to working at a problem until she gets it correct. Today her time was over. She couldn’t go back and try again. Her final score is unchangeable. No one cares if she puts in further work and perfects her score and learns from her mistakes. That’s the way of tests.

By this time, my enthusiasm for the test had waned considerably. I had two unhappy girls and I hadn’t even marked Gemma-Rose’s paper.

“Let’s forget the test,” I told Gemma-Rose. “We don’t need to mark it.”

But Gemma-Rose surprised me by saying, “You might as well mark it and see what I get.”

So I marked the paper and she got 77%, which didn’t please her or displease her. Marks don’t really mean much to her.

What do I do next? Am I tempted to pull out the maths textbooks so the girls can fill in the gaps in their maths education? Or am I satisfied with the results? Will I be giving them further tests at regular intervals to prove they have age appropriate maths skills?

As I mull these questions over, I wonder about the value of testing. I am sure that the ability to take a test is a skill of its own. Working out problems in real life has nothing to do with how you fill in a paper under a time constraint. I’ve also just realised that students usually revise before a test while the material is fresh in their minds. My girls only got a few seconds warning. So was the test really fair?

“Shall we start studying for the next test?” I ask Sophie and Gemma-Rose. “We could grab those textbooks off the shelf and start work.” They look at me. Am I serious? No. I’m smiling. They look relieved.

It would be so easy to take those textbooks and insist the girls use them. Maybe everyone wonders why I don’t do this. I could satisfy the educational authorities. My girls would learn maths and I wouldn’t have to worry about proving it.  Easy.

But I know I would be saying, “I don’t trust you to learn what you need to know. I need to interfere just in case. I am more concerned about outside expectations than I am about you. I don’t really believe in the principles of unschooling.”

Will I be giving the girls any more tests? I spent years trying to remember things just to pass tests… and then forgetting… I want something better for my children. No. I won’t be giving them any more tests.

So I will continue strewing maths in front of the girls, and I will take delight in their delight as they learn.

And I will look for another way to satisfy the educational authorities