She brings home ratio and proportion questions and I show her the way I was taught, cross multiply and solve. The answers are right and the working gets a line through it, because the school wants bar models. Now she thinks one of us is wrong and she is confused in two directions instead of none. Do I keep teaching my way, or shut up and learn the bar model thing myself?
Parent of two, learned bar models under protest, now use them myself for anything with mixtures or percentages. Draw the total as a strip, cut it into the number of parts in the ratio, label one part, done. The genuinely useful thing is that when the question changes shape - one part is 12 more than another, find the total - the drawing still works and cross multiplication needs rearranging first.
This is the bit that convinced me. My son could cross multiply fluently and could not tell me what the answer meant, which showed up the moment word problems got two steps long.
I did what you are about to do and taught mine my way anyway. She got right answers all year, marks came back covered in red, and she quietly decided that maths at school was a game about pleasing the teacher rather than a thing that made sense. Undoing that attitude took longer than learning any method. Not worth it over a notation preference.
Slightly against the grain: method marks in Year 6 are partly bureaucratic and it is fine to say so out loud to your kid, because pretending the school is always right also has a cost. The reason to go along with it here is that she has to sit an assessment where the marker wants a specific working, and arguing that with an eleven year old in the middle is unfair on her. Teach her both, tell her which one to write down, and be honest that it is a rule of the venue.
I would only add that most of us are not being bureaucratic on purpose. If a child writes an answer with no visible reasoning I genuinely cannot tell whether they understood it or copied it, and at that age half of them copied it.
Email the teacher and ask which working gets full marks. Two lines, no complaint in it, and you will get a clear answer plus goodwill. Most of these standoffs are two adults guessing at each other.
@schema_drift_lu · 2w ago
Learn the bar model. It takes about twenty minutes and it is not the school being precious - at that age the picture is what builds the idea of a ratio as parts of a whole, and cross multiplication is a rule with the reasoning hidden inside it. She will get your method in two years and it will land properly because the picture is already there. What you can do tonight is show her both and say the picture is the explanation and yours is the shortcut.
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