Category: General Interest

Freddy: “Mr Pearce, we found your blog.”

Me: “Yes?”

Freddy: “It’s all about teaching.”

Me: “What did you expect?”

Freddy: “Some mathematical nuggets?”

Me: “I’m a teacher, not an entertainer.”

OK, so I’m still quite happy with my last line, just because I like the ring of any line of the form “I’m not a …”, which I stole from a friend Sam Bartlett who employs it comedically better than I ever could. But I was being rash – a teacher is, to some extent, an entertainer.

I clarified by saying that I think there is rather a glut of mathematical nuggets out there and so I’m looking to provide something different.  However, I do like nuggets, so I’ll allow myself one (and only one) blog post to share some of my favourites:

The Movie Maths Quiz

Don’t work hard…

The Venn Diagram of Bollocks

George Ford on Countdown

Report Cards for Mathematicians

The Three-Switches Problem

An interesting problem

Causes of Death

 

Many of these ideas come from a survey of my pupils at the end of last term. So this starts with a brief summary of that rather long post.

1. Ensure that I’m providing enough guidance and support when asking pupils to investigate unfamiliar problems, by creating more guided resources, and preparing a back up text-book option for certain pupils.
2. Refer more frequently to the skills from Thinking Mathematically to encourage pupils to know what to do when stuck on a problem and other strategies from Helen to help them develop a growth mindset.
3. Make use of mini-tests: Mathsbot looks like it will be a good source for these in KS3+4, I need to source something similar for KS5.
4. Set one or two summative homeworks per class per term, in addition to supporting pupils in choosing their own questions by using Google sheets to share questions which pupils have found difficult and track their progress in re-attempting them.
5. Take opportunities for whole-class interactivity, particularly with year 10, making use of Dan Meyer’s 3 act tasks.

And others which don’t come from the survey.

1. Ensure I always make clear the Headache before providing the Aspirin.
2. Write (type where possible) board notes more clearly and slowly; learning Spanish and trying furiously to copy quickly-disappearing notes down from a board has taught me this!
3. Continue trialling Inquiry Maths lessons, in particular bringing them to sixth form as well as younger pupils.
4. Use shared Google doc with each pupil to track their general progress and targets, alongside my target setting form.
5. Build a website to share my approach to providing summative and formative feedback, both directly to pupils and in written reports.

So I didn’t expect to see this much maths when I went to Ibiza this summer.

I’ve been getting the feeling over the past few years that maths is getting cooler (or at least less un-cool).  Is this a sign of further progress?!