Mathematics

The Mathematics Department at Clontarf Aboriginal College offers a whole range of Mathematics Courses designed to reflect the students’ abilities and requirements. The Junior School offers a New Australian Curriculum program going from Year 7 to Year 10 but the student is placed in a class that is suitable for their individual needs not necessarily their chronological age. We offer Foundations, Essentials and ATAR in Year 11 and  Year 12.

There are strong, enduring reasons for the prominence of mathematics in the school curriculum. According to one leading mathematics educator these reasons are:

�?to teach basic skills; to help children learn to think logically; to prepare students for productive life and work; and to develop quantitatively literate citizens.’ – Lynn Arthur Steen

This Mathematics course has been created with this idea in mind. It offers senior secondary students the opportunity to advance their mathematical skills, to build and use mathematical models, to solve problems, to learn how to reason logically.

Students who choose the Mathematics course will already be familiar with the importance of mathematics in their daily lives. In the course, they learn how mathematics is used to describe and model a vast array of scientific and social phenomena. They develop a richer understanding of the role of mathematical techniques and applications in solving real problems in a range of contexts. This course allows students to appreciate mathematics, as well as helping them to develop the necessary understanding and skills to prepare them for productive working lives. The Mathematics course has been designed to cater for the full range of student abilities and their mathematics achievement at the beginning of their senior years of schooling. The units are written as a sequential development of mathematical concepts, understandings and skills.

 The course content comprises:

Number and algebra

Space and measurement

Chance and data.

The processes of planning tasks, checking assumptions, selecting appropriately techniques, tools and skills, interpreting results and checking them for reasonableness, and linking results to contexts can be found throughout these courses

An awareness of the nature of mathematics; how it is created, used and communicated underpins this course. An appreciation of mathematics develops through doing and applying mathematics. The processes include observing, representing, conjecturing, justifying and using methods of formal proof. Mathematics is often an intuitive and creative process. Conjectures, initially tentative and error-prone, require rigorous justification. Mathematical ideas and their appearance and application in our culture, and in historical settings, assist in understanding the relationship between mathematics and contemporary living.

Communication skills are central to the development of informed numeracy. The skills that are needed include listening, reading and watching a range of sources of information about mathematics; talking and writing about mathematics to a range of audiences; and interpreting mathematical terms, notations and explanations.

Mrs Marie Wilmshurst, Head of Mathematics