I went to Mathsconf13 at the weekend. It was a lot of fun. I would highly recommend attending one.
I will be the first to admit that I am not always the most well-behaved during CPD time. I often find it difficult to see the purpose, and it’s often way too generic to be useful. I’ve found this at every school I’ve worked at.
It was great to find really useful sessions that I could see the value of straight away. I enjoyed the keynote by Matt Parker, who talked about how to cube numbers easily and how we could use this to discuss the merits of expanding triple brackets, which I was teaching that week.
Ed Southall did a great session on question design, something that interests me greatly and there was an awesome session by Stella Dudzic on the large data set which I thought was superb. I always like listening to Stella speak. I once attended a session where she talked about the random walk and came away with loads of stuff to talk about and do. I even got my picture taken with the world’s biggest prime number.
The fact that these sessions had breaks between them was even better. There were interesting stalls and lots of people to talk. I had a load of fascinating conversations.
Some of the conversations made me feel bad. I talked a little bit to Jo Morgan from resourceaholic and Jonathan Hall from the magnificent mathsbot. Both of these people are amazing. They’ve contributed so much to the profession and they have a big impact in classrooms every single day. They create and share, for free, a huge amount. I don’t.
Most of the stuff I create I keep to myself, or I hide away on TES behind a £2 paywall, thinking that one day it might earn me enough supplementary income to be able to afford a house with a proper garden. This isn’t quite right. For a start, the income that I earn from TES is minimal, and it’s also not quite fair to the wonderful people who share stuff for free. So…
I am going to start updating this blog more (I’ve said that before!). I’m going to add more resources that I’ve created than before. They’ll be up in the top menu. Most of the resources I create are called ProjectALessons (I love a bit of branding). They’re a full lesson with explanations, tasks and learning checks. I also try and add a problem solve-y bit to every lesson. I put it at that end of the PowerPoint. Don’t feel you have to do it at the end (Mr Barton had a lovely bit on his podcast where he talked about the difficulty of doing a hard task at the end of the lesson, destroying student’s confidence).
October half term I’m off to Carcassone. I’m going to withdraw my TES money to take the missus for a nice meal, and then that’s it. They’ll be gone. And all my resources will be on here. For free. Shared properly in the nav bar at the top.
I’m starting now. There’s some stuff there (and it’s only doing this that I realised I had less than I thought) if you look now. Mention if you used one and it went well. Or if you used one and it needed editing.
I’m off to plan some lessons.
