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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Without enough language – a word gap – a child is seriously limited in their enjoyment of school and in their success both within school and beyond it. The Oxford Language Report: Why Closing the Word Gap Matters , which brought together the thoughts of a number of leading academics and practitioners, was based on market research with over 1,300 primary and secondary […]
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The last few years have seen us, as English teachers, deluged in pre-20th century literature and non-fiction texts. Simultaneously in the 21st century we have been seriously exploring the treatment of women in society – pay gaps and sexual harassment have been major issues – and rightly so. So how can the male dominance […]
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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 […]
Read moreWhile most know it as ‘DEAR time’, I would be inclined to refer to this Literacy initiative as Role Modelling Reading. The focus is on getting the students to read. However, my belief is that it is what the adults around them are doing that will really have an effect. It was during my role […]
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I have been thinking about negative integers and wondering how anyone I taught ever managed to understand them. Many did, but when I am asked, by KS2 and KS3 teachers, ‘Is there a good task for discovering the rules of negative numbers?’, I find it impossible to answer. There seem to be a few popular […]
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Accuracy in mathematical language I was preparing some revised GCSE booster lessons for MyMaths recently on the topic of Quadratic Equations. In some examples I requested that answers be left ‘in surd form’. By this I meant those irrational solutions coming from completing the square or using the quadratic formula. My editor’s response made me stop […]
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When I meet people for the first time and they discover that I am a maths teacher/author I usually receive one of two reactions: ‘I hated maths at school and was never any good at it!’ or ‘I loved maths’. It is rare to find anyone in between these two extremes. Of those that hated […]
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Steve’s last blog post – Prime factors: Part 1 In my last blog I looked at the number ‘a googol’, which is 10100 and questioned how it would compare to the number of atoms in the universe. Once students have an understanding of standard form including multiplication it is reasonably easy to lead your students through this calculation. It […]
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The square root sign Nowadays if any definition issue or technicality arises my first response is to trawl the internet, which often leads me down diverse paths. This one took me to square root and cube root signs. Wikipedia suggests the tick sign first appeared in 1525, along with + and -, in a work […]
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