An attempt to follow in someone else’s footsteps.
rio2016 [pdf]
A PDF/worksheet thing about the Rio Olympics. Eight pages covering a range of maths content.
Kind of pointless as we won’t be at school whilst the Rio Olympics are on. I mainly did this for a little bit of practice making nice stuff.
If you use this, please feed back to me. Is it good? Does it work? Do some bits work more than others?
If you visit this website often (which, based on my stats, you almost definitely don’t) you might see that I switch the design around occasionally. I’m constantly fiddling with design and font use, trying to chase that holy grail : something that’s nicely designed. I’m the same for my worksheets and presentations. I’m constantly trying to make things in formats that look nice. I don’t think I’ve achieved it yet. I also think it’s really important. There’s something elegant to good design. An uncluttered clarity. A beautiful zen.
Whilst I haven’t managed it, there’s a lot of people producing lovely stuff (often in very different ways), and I wanted to highlight a few of them, talk about what makes their work nice.
The first person I want to talk about is TES user Dooranran. His stuff is lovely. He uses a lot of themes (particularly superheroes and football) . I’m wary of using a theme. Often I find as many pupils put off by the theme as are engaged by it, but every Dooranran activity I’ve used has been very successful. Especially this Euro 2016 maths activity. I’d say the reason behind this maybe to do with the efforts that Dooranran puts into combining his themes and his mathematical content. They often gel in a really nice way. The maths content of his work is often very challenging, too.
The other person I want to talk about is Don Steward. Again! I’m always talking about Don Steward. So I should. He’s ace! He’s also odd. He’s a fan of unicase, which means that all of work is lowercase. I’m sure this violates some schools’ literacy policy, but it does look nice. I’ve never noticed how capital letters are rubbish before. He’s also a big fan of white space. Have a look at the sheet below.
It’s clean, it’s neat, it’s tidy. I think it can be tempting to cram too much on a sheet and overwhelm students. The other thing you notice about Don’s work is that he uses minimal instructions. I think this is a very underrated and important point of problem solving. Figuring out the problem is part of the problem. Look at this.
I like this. The white space, the presentation. This isn’t a problem to be done quickly and moved on from. It’s a problem to be savoured and worked on.
I really need to work on my presentation. If you want to get involved in chat, what programs do you use? Are we too stuck to PowerPoint and Word when better tools could do a better job? I vaguely want to try InDesign but I feel it’s like taking a hammer to the problem. Am I being too picky? Is bad design perfectly OK. I’ve seen some horrendously designed presentations on TES with great reviews. I content ultimately king?
As I’ve talked about before, I run a nurture group. We often use games to try to make maths learning a bit more fun. Here’s some reviews.
This game is quite clever. You pick up a sum and try to work it out. When you think you have the answer, you rub the heat sensitive panel at the back and the answer magically appears!
You then get to add an ingredient to your cauldron.
The components are very nicely produced, and it’s got lovely artwork. It’s also the game that the children were most excited about playing. However, it quickly got boring because of the limited amount of sums involved. The sums also seem to be odd. There’s mostly two single digit addition and subtraction in there, but also two or three multiplications and a few three single digit addition sums.
In summary: Lovely, but limited shelf life. 3i+7/10
Lots of one digit addition and subtraction sums in this box. A huge amount more than Magic Cauldron, which means they get less repetitive.
Students take a sum, solve it, and get to keep it if it’s correct. However if they get a ‘POP’ card, they have to put all of their earned cards back in the box.
Again, it’s produced really nicely, and the putting all your cards back is interesting from a nurture/learning to lose perspective. However it is possibly a bit too simple and thus its longevity is in question.
In summary : Good for short sessions. I wish they did a multiplication one. 
Your Number’s Up! doesn’t really work as a game. It’s really ponderous and the components in my version are nasty. The cards in particular are horrible. I can’t quite explain how horrible they are. When your fingernail touches them it’s like nails on a blackboard.
There’s also way too many ‘?’ cards, which allow students to go without having to do a sum.
In summary: It’s too boring to make the maths practice invisible. 
I love chalk. It’s really useful.
For instance, I have a nurture group. They are currently practising their times tables, but can find it really boring. A fun way to practice, and something that’s a little different is writing out the times tables on the pavement in chalk.
That’s way more fun and they can make it look as pretty as they want.
If you’re trying to get students to memorise facts, often doing it in a variety of ways is key.
We have also played a game this week. The numbers from one to ten are written in a random order on the ground. A sum is read out and students must run to the correct number. Perfect if you’ve got a small nurture group as it also hits a key nurture target: learning how to lose and win without upsetting people.
Talking of nurture, I’ve found it really challenging this year to teach a student who came in with p levels.
I can’t find much about p levels on the net, so if anyone has got any resources please comment and link them here.
I’ve found this by Ben Cooper handy. It’s an assessment for p levels. This is also useful. It’s a description of what students should be able to do at each level.
I’ve also tried to do some p level resources. Here’s my first try. It’s a worksheet talking about key words like left, right, most, all, some and altogether. I’ll be doing more of this kind of stuff.
I think there’s a lot of work to be done on trying to teach maths to SEN students. I would welcome any tips and good resources you’ve found. My approach has been around talking, games and trying to set up a classroom environment.
You type in a number and it presents you with loads of facts about that number, breaking it down into it’s prime factors and some scales. It’s lovely. Try it yourself. Here’s the page for 2048.
Quick starter idea (after showing students this website):
56
Give me some facts about this number.
You could use this often, changing the number every time.
Quick investigation idea: What is the best number? Explain why. Give reasons.
Someone showed me this lately. It made me think about how much a tiny little twist can make a task massively more engaging.
Task One
5x + 3 = 13
7x + 11 = 25
4x + 8 = 32Find x.
Task Two
5x + 3 = 13
7x + 11 = 25
4x + 8 = 32In which equations does x=2?
Task one is boring. I want to do task two.
This thinking has come from Don Steward. My last blog was about his work, and it’s wonderful to dive into. There’s loads of stuff with simple twists like this and the way the work is presented is outstanding (There’s a lot to be said for this). Every maths teacher should check out Don’s blog.
I’ve been thinking about writing this post since the NUT strike ballot was announced.
I had been putting it off because I didn’t want to inject politics into this blog, but I thought the topic was important, and my feelings about the ballot are pretty strong. So here are my thoughts. (They’re mine, not my employers etc.)
I am a pretty hard line union person. I turn up to meetings, I go on the marches, and I remain fundamentally opposed to the direction of travel in current educational policy. But this week I voted for us not to strike. I did so for several reasons.
The first reason is simply question. Why now? The cynic in me believes that the NUT are striking simply because the doctors did, and the NUT want to mimic their success. This thinking is silly, for several reasons. Firstly, whilst the public were generally supportive of the doctors strike, they have recently been against teacher-led ones. This makes sense. The doctors were striking about a change to their terms and conditions about to be introduced. Teachers struck in retaliation on changes imposed. Striking again several years later for the same reason makes no sense at all.
Secondly, I think the original strikes achieved little. Teachers pay is currently deregulated. I seem to pay more for my pension every year. The only thing that was achieved is that a message was sent to Whitehall. Unfortunately that message was that the unions were easy to outmanoeuvre and utterly incompetent from a PR standpoint. There’s no getting around this, those strikes were an absolute failure.
The third reason is another question. Why at all? The official reason that the NUT give is ‘workload, pay and other conditions’ (emphasis mine) but this is vague. You’re never going to win over the public if you can’t nail down why you’re striking in the first place, and you’re certainly not going to win them over with long, tedious arguments that go from pensions to workload* to academy policy. If you want to win the public, and parents over you need to be talking about the effect things have on students. You need to be talking about one or two issues. Not a huge list of vague grievances.
Finally, the NUT seem lost. The things that really effect teachers rarely seem to be talked about, and if they’re thought about, that thought is badly communicated. Where is the discussion with members about OFSTED, about the principle of evidence based approaches? In fact, where is the dialogue with members at all? Sending members a voting form with an instruction on how to vote might just annoy some people.
It annoys me when my union ask me to vote on something and then tell me which way I should vote.
— James Theobald (@JamesTheo) May 30, 2016
Not only am I voting no, but I believe that others should, too.
Then maybe we can start remodelling the union into something that works better on a national scale**.
*As an aside, the focus on workload is absurd. I get that it’s a lot of work, but that’s never going to go over well with a public who work long hours. It’s also different from person to person and school to school. In some schools the workload is unreasonable, at my current school it’s very reasonable. In many ways, it also comes down to how individuals handle it, and are able to stand up for themselves. Teaching is a job which takes up as much time as you allow it.
** The NUT is very good at helping members in school and dealing with school issues. This is why I am still a member.
How have I not seen Don Steward’s blog before? Lovely stuff on there.
I’ve got to give a big shout out to DrFrostMaths.com.
I’ve only just discovered his website, and I think it’s something every maths teacher should have in their favourites.
It’s got brilliantly presented slides on nearly every topic, but what sets it apart is the amount of UKMT and JMC questions that he both adds to his slides and worksheets. These questions are brilliant for pushing students and getting them to think.
The man is a hero!