Teaching is overwhelming. The only thing that exceeds the workload are the expectations we place on ourselves. We get sick in the holidays because not even our immune system knows when to take a day off during the school term. We do a thousand jobs on one salary. It’s exhausting. This year, I haven’t been…
I had a go at creating a “Visual Pattern” after having so much fun attempting Simon Gregg’s pattern from Fawn Nguyen’s website. It looked like this: Can you see how it grows? Is there a rule to how it is growing or is it random? Stage 4, 5 and 6 might make it easier, but…
The more I recommend certain resources or websites for people to check out, the more I learn about the challenges faced by those who go to the internet for teaching materials. The biggest and most prevalent issue I’ve noticed is being able to find your way through the abundance of resources available. This makes it…
One of the most daunting things about doing anything for the first time is not knowing whether or not you’re doing it right. For beginning teachers, this is a very common and uncomfortable experience – I know, because five years ago I was in that position. Luckily for me, I was a part of a…
There is so much talk about Explicit Instruction vs. Inquiry Based Learning, I’m actually becoming turned off discussions about it. I now think there is a different debate arising from the pedagogy battlefield: Mutually Inclusive vs. Mutually Exclusive. What I mean by this is that some people believe that both forms of instruction have their…
I now know why everyone loves using a John Mason quote. I was listening to a Mr Barton Maths podcast where Craig (@mrbartonmaths) is interviewing Anne Watson and John Mason. These two are like the equivalent of a Jedi in Mathematics education. This particular episode caught my attention because of a book John co-authored, Thinking…
As I’ve mentioned in a couple of blog posts, I’m no longer in the classroom. I’ve been working in the Department for Education leading out a professional learning program for Senior Years maths teachers for nearly two months now. The change of pace and scene has given me time and space to reflect on my…
On Tuesday, I finally turned some thought into a problem. In pretty typical fashion, I put out this problem to the Maths Twitter Blog-o-Sphere (MTBoS) for advice about how to better present it, as I felt the wording wasn’t quite right. Here’s the revised problem (thanks to @DavidKButlerUoA for reframing the question): I then started…
Today, I said goodbye to teachers, students and SSOs from Wirreanda Secondary School, where I’ve been teaching for the past couple of years. It wasn’t just those people I was saying goodbye to, however. I was also saying goodbye to teaching (well, not forever but for the next year or so). Tomorrow, I start my…
Allow me to attempt to generalise our current curriculum in a way that hopefully makes some sense and explains why Year 10 Quadratics (or parabolas for those on the other side of the Atlantic) is a topic that I can say, more than anything else, I teach differently to how I was taught. Imagine solving…
How I teach maths. 