Preparing students for the new A-level exams The first cohorts for the new linear Maths A-Level exams are well over halfway through, so our attention is now turning to how best to prepare for the upcoming exams. I’d like to reflect on some of the changes in A-level Maths that I think we should all […]
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From last year’s headline figures and the increasing grade boundaries it seems that most pupils are being prepared well for the new(ish) 9–1 Maths GCSE. A benefit of the course is that it provides welcome additional challenge for the most able pupils, preparing them better for future study. However, some teachers are concerned about how […]
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If a week is a long time in politics, then 21 years must be an eternity. Yet I can still remember the furore when Stephen Byers – then education secretary – was interviewed on the radio about government plans to improve numeracy in school and got his calculations wrong. No journalists have tried to trip […]
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Written by Louise Pennington, Professional Development Leader for maths at Oxford University Press. The Multiplication Tables Check The Standards Testing Agency (STA) published the Multiplication Tables Check Assessment Framework in November last year. This document contains some key information about the Year 4 testing that will be statutory from June 2020: Voluntary pilot 10-28th June 2019 3 week window in June 2020 […]
Read moreCongratulations on surviving your first term in teaching! Now that you’re into Term 2, and are getting used to proceedings, here are three suggestions that have always served me well in my teaching: Don’t plan lessons That was a little misleading, of course you need to plan lessons. But, as you may already be realising, […]
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When Euclid wrote about ratios of lengths and areas and similarity, without algebra, theorems were dependent on spatial representations. Five diagrams, all related to each other, appear in his text in various places, so I designed a ‘Match the theorem’ task in the manner of Malcolm Swan’s tasks. There isn’t a one-to-one correspondence and you […]
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Exponentiation I was prompted by a recent tweet to think more about exponentiation. The problem being posed was how to convince students that the laws of indices apply even when the exponent is not a whole positive number. There is a deep issue lurking here, which is that the more abstract the mathematics, the less […]
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Like almost everyone else in Maths education, I have recently decided to broach the ‘mastery’ word. It does feel a bit odd to do so, given that it’s been around at least since at least the 60’s, and I’ve never felt a need to use it before – despite having been an advocate of the […]
Read moreLines, squares or plain? The pages of maths exercise books, I mean. For years I have insisted that pages have to have squares. Without vertical lines as well as horizontal ones how could my students possibly draw all the right-angled triangles and bearing North lines and coordinate axes and so on that I would tell […]
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I thought I’d write today about the framework of Singapore’s School Mathematics Curriculum. The framework is captured in a well-known diagram that I’ve attached above, and it provoked a lot of interest among teachers when I was last in the UK in November. This was great to see, because this diagram really is at the […]
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