It might seem like I’ve been a bit quiet on the resource front.
Except in the last month or so, I’ve published the following on TES.
Missing Terms In Arithmetic Sequences
Perpendicular Lines (equations of)
That’s a lot of stuff.
Most of it isn’t new. Most of it is iterated.
When I first learnt to teach, I was in survival mode. I’d find out what I was teaching, then desperately trawl the internet for a lesson on that topic and “teach” from that.
Needless to say, most of my lesson were crap. Without any form of consistency or idea of how I wanted to teach and work.
So one year I just deleted everything in my resources folder. And I started again.
I started making some of my lessons1 from a place of thinking ‘what do I want the kids to know?’ and writing my own PowerPoints. My lessons were still crap.
I look back at some of the lessons I first published on TES and they’re awful. Full of animations and over-wordy. Some horrible design language, too. I’m sure I’ll think the same thing about the things I think are good now in fifteen years.
But every year they got a little bit better. Because every time I taught with them, I improved them and changed them. I updated the examples to be a little better. I added a new example-problem pair when students needed it. I added more whiteboard work. I cut and trimmed out the stuff that was superfluous. And now, after several iterations and changes and tweeking and proofing, some of my lessons are alright.
But this iteration effect gets lost if you’re just searching for a lesson every time. You have to pick something and get tweaking eventually.
So iterate away, people. (Or just click the menu at the top and use my stuff).
- Not all of my lessons. Starting from scratch for every lesson is a mammoth task. Even now, if you watch me teach, you’ll find bits of other people’s worksheets or presentations every now and then. I use MathsPad quite a lot. Because the people who run MathsPad often have better ideas than me. ↩︎