Rambling Teacher's Blog

This post will show some beautiful and simple arithmetic. We will represent a seemingly complex question using triangles and and see how, at 8 years of age, famous 19th century mathematician Gauss added all the whole numbers from 1 to 100 in seconds.  How many dots in the triangle? Here are a few triangles, drawn with dots only:                          A triangle with 2 levels and 3 dots                   A triangle with   3 levels  and  6 dots      A triangle with  4 levels  and  10 dots Notice that each triangle answers the question, what is the sum of the whole numbers from 1 to the last level of the triangle?  The triangle with  2 levels  has 1 + 2 = 3 dots The triangle with  3 levels has  1 + 2 + 3 = 6 dots The triangle with  4 levels  has  1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10 dots Th...

Today, we had a professional learning day where we concentrated on 5 principles of curriculum implementation. The final principle was: Is it beautiful? Immediately, I thought of some 3D animations that some students were creating. My second thought was: Cryptography! Bear with me, I will explain it! If you cannot "bear with me", feel free to skip to the section: How I know it is beautiful !

In this blog, I want to discuss one of the issues in Maths education: The focus on one method to solve problems of a particular type. The example I will use throughout is the unitary method : When you work out the cost per unit of an item. The unitary method The following illustration of the unitary method comes from a very good textbook (Lipson et. al., 2022):  Students can apply this method to compare "cost per unit" when deciding which of the following to buy: Hopefully, students realise that 100g would be a good unit here, rather than feel compelled to use 1g. Using one method: The good and the bad It is a good thing to practise a method that applies in as many contexts as the unitary method does. It gives the student a strategy and enables them to master it. It also gives the teacher direction on how to teach. I am all for explicit teaching and it is difficult to teach explicitly in the absence of a repeatable method. The bad thing about emphasising one method is that i...

In the last semester, I taught a new Year Nine elective at my school, "Out of this world: Technology to take us to Mars." I am writing this post to force myself to evaluate my practice and to document what I learnt from the experience. DJI Robomaster EP Core, programmed as a simulation Mars Rover

In the last instalment , I reviewed Conrad Wolfram's diagnosis of what is wrong, or outdated, about Maths education today. In this second part, I will review his "Math(s) Fix".

The Math(s) Fix is Conrad Wolfram's case for teaching mathematics with the assumption that computers exist! To be clear from the beginning, Wolfram is not advocating that we solve the same problems but with a greater reliance on computers and calculators. He wants us to recognise that computers have revolutionised the discipline of mathematics and that we need to reflect this change in our curricula. In the following lines, I will present a summary of Wolfram's thesis, as I understand it. My aim is to give you enough of an idea so you can decide whether you want to read the book for yourself. This part will concentrate on the case that the book builds for a radical change of the maths curriculum. Part 2 will explain the alternative in more detail.