How Many Hours Should a Grade 8 Student Study Maths?

Homework and practice are not the same hour

Homework is set at the level the class reached, for thirty students at once, and it is due tomorrow. Practice is set at the level this student is stuck at, it is due to nobody, and its whole purpose is to be aimed. Parents count the two as one activity, which is why 'he does two hours of maths every night' so often sits next to a falling grade.

The test is simple. If every piece of mathematics a child does is due to somebody, none of it is aimed at them. A Grade 8 student who completes an hour of homework on simultaneous equations while still counting on their fingers to multiply has spent an hour without touching the thing that is actually costing them marks.

So the three hours in the answer above are three hours nobody is collecting. That is the point of them.

What thirty minutes looks like on a Tuesday

Five minutes on something from a month ago — three questions, no notes, chosen by whoever is supervising rather than by the student. Twenty minutes on one topic, at the level where about eight questions in ten come out right. Five minutes marking, and writing down what went wrong in words rather than ticks.

Mark it the same day or do not do it. An unmarked page of practice is a page of practice you may have got wrong twice, and a thirteen-year-old who has spent twenty minutes rehearsing a sign error is worse off than one who did nothing. This is the rule most families break, because marking is the boring half and the child cannot do it alone at this stage.

• 5 minutes — three questions from a topic covered last month
• 20 minutes — one topic, at a level where most answers come out right
• 5 minutes — marking, and one written line on what went wrong
• Nothing else. No rereading of the textbook, no copying out of notes.

Where the extra hours stop paying

The ceiling is per session, not per week. Four thirty-minute sessions beat one two-hour session decisively, because what is being built is the ability to retrieve something after a gap, and a two-hour Sunday block contains one gap while four half-hours contain four.

Beyond about forty-five minutes on a school night, most thirteen-year-olds shift from solving to copying — working through examples with the book open, producing pages that look like work. It feels productive, it is the least useful activity available, and it is what fills the second hour of a two-hour session.

The weekly ceiling is much higher than families expect and much less important. Nobody has been harmed by five hours a week. Plenty of children have been harmed by five hours in one sitting on a Sunday, because that is the arrangement that makes a child dread the subject.

Why Grade 8 in particular

Grade 8 is the year in which arithmetic stops being the subject and algebra starts being it. Index laws, negative numbers inside expressions, expanding and factorising, rearranging, linear equations with brackets and fractions, and the first serious work with straight-line graphs all arrive in the same twelve months, and each of them assumes the layer underneath is automatic.

That is why hours spent shoring up the layer below are not remedial in this year — they are the highest-return hours available. A student who is still working out 7 × 8 in the middle of factorising has spent their attention on the wrong thing and will usually have lost the thread of the question by the time the answer arrives. It will look like an algebra problem in Grade 9, and it will be treated as one, and the treatment will not work.