Hi Pam
I can understand your concern with this approach, especially if the children are young and if the free taster session pitches the workshops in an unclear way. In my experience the "free show for all - some parents pay for after-school club" model is the norm of most of the commercial STEM after-school providers (ie not externally-funded).
Being a commercial STEM outreach company ourselves, I obviously have no problems with the notion of making money from sci comms as such - most people on this this list do - but the strongly commercial franchisee business model does seem open to problems which are less often encountered in the strongly passion-driven business model.
There's not enough information on their professional-looking website (www.magicalmathsclub.com) to assess the educational and communication components of what they do. I'm happy to accept that the entrepreneurial founder (a Maths with philosophy graduate) is passionate about maths and may have the best of intentions about inspiring primary school pupils about maths , but there are a few potential red flags for me:
- (personal soapbox warning) the site portrays a "making maths fun" philosophy and claims that maths is seen as boring "to primary school children" - the more that we assume that maths has to be *made* engaging (code for - "maths is inherently dull ... obvs") and that *all* children find it boring, the worst we are making the problem.
- they claim that their presenters "are the most passionate, enthusiastic, excitable maths lovers in the country!" (ahem), yet bizarrely having an interest in maths was not mentioned in the franchisee criteria lists I saw.
- it concerns me that their public website is much harder to find on google than their numerous franchisee pages on various sites.
- Consistency of training and the monitoring of standards are problematic enough in mainstream STEM engagement. In franchised businesses they are even more variable (just look on YouTube for any of the main franchised science outreach companies). Yet, in an advert for actors, this company say that with no previous teaching experience and after only a half-day training session you will "know everything you need to know" about running their maths workshops.
- they suggest earnings of £76,680 in year 2 for franchisees.
So, given these concerns, I'd be interested if anyone has seen one of their shows or workshops.
Making maths fun. No interest in maths required. Half-day training. £76k a year.
I've obviously been doing it wrong all these years! :-)
All the best
Paul
--
Dr Paul McCrory
learn differently ltd
Unit 11, Farranshane House, 1 Ballygore Road, Antrim, N Ireland, BT41 2RN
t 028 94488415
e [log in to unmask]
w http://www.learn-differently.com
**********************************************************************
Commands - send an email (any subject) to [log in to unmask] with one of the following messages (ignoring text in brackets)
• set psci-com nomail (to stop receiving messages while on holiday)
• set psci-com mail (to resume getting messages)
• signoff psci-com (to leave the list)
• Subscribe here https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=psci-com
Contact list owner at [log in to unmask]
Small print and JISCMail acceptable use policy https://sites.google.com/site/pscicomjiscmail/the-small-print
**********************************************************************
|