Why?

A few annoyances with Maths education in the UK, that I would like to change, wherever possible if I were a Head of Department or higher. The biggest annoyance is the amount of tricks that are taught in place of proper understanding. “But two negatives make a positive sir!” “To divide by a fraction, leave,…

1 to 9

When we were discussing how to grade the new GCSE specifications as a department, I thought about how the exam boards do it, and tried to replicate that as much as possible; I used a normal distribution. The premise is simple if you have some knowledge of statistics; use the mean and standard deviation from FFT…

My depression and how it effects my career in teaching.

This might not be the most appealing topic to read about, (and to be honest, I’m not sure that anyone will read this) but it is therapeutic to me to write this. Last year I had a breakdown and couldn’t go to work for a fortnight, due to massive feelings of inadequacy. I did not…

Assessment without Levels

Firstly, let me say, I am glad that levels are going. I feel that it is a step towards getting pupils to be good mathematicians, rather than trained monkeys we get to jump through hoops to get certain grades(we can save that for Key Stage 4 and the new GCSEs). The only issues I have…

Grouping pupils

Seating Plans are something that can take seemingly endless amounts of time and effort, particularly if you are going to include data for observers. I have often found that I have over-thought seating plans and they haven’t really worked, so I decided to take the thought out of it and develop a seating plan generator….