8:33am I’ve just finished a conversation with a colleague to frantically finish/start planning how the hell I was going to teach solving quadratics to my Year 10s and 11s at 8.40am. I posted this photo on Twitter the night before the lesson, probably while procrastinating from actually planning the next morning’s maths lesson: This is…
Just over a month ago, Jason Loke (@Jason_Loke) tagged me in the video below and asked me, “What can you do with this?”. It wasn’t the first or last time that Jason had done this, but I thought that I could actually do something with it. I later found out that there was a hashtag…
Sometimes a Professional Learning workshop can make you think. Sometimes they can make you so sleepy that you question whether there was any caffeine in that triple shot latte latte you just finished. Sometimes they can make you question how you teach and excite you to try new things. Luckily for me, I went to…
On Friday, I invited a first year teacher from my school to sit in on one of my Maths lessons. When I mentioned it to her, she leapt at the opportunity to see how someone else taught. I didn’t really have much of an idea about whether the lesson was going to be overly exciting,…
For the past eighteen months (three quarters of my teaching career), I have been teaching at least one “All-Boys” Maths class. Many of my pondering posts have been about teaching such classes, with some explicitly referring to the context in which I teach them; Year 10 and 11 students in the same class, sometimes sharing the…
Creating wonder in the classroom is even better when you’re discovering things with the students. My terrible habit of preparing for lessons 5-10 minutes before they start is becoming more frequent, and scarily, more successful. Yesterday morning, in the ritual dance of having a shower, getting dressed, and making my coffee before leaving for work,…
They say that one of the best ways to learn something at a deeper level is to teach it to someone else. Over my first three years I have been doing exactly that, learning through teaching. Through my four year teaching degree, I learnt a lot about the different contexts that my students may…
Whether it’s picking the trigger happy judge on The Voice or the next raw egg in Jimmy Fallon’s Egg Roulette, television shows are rich with potential lessons for your classroom. As a Maths teacher, I use my powers of finding what the students enjoy and ruining it with what they hate – maths problems. I…
Investigating the mathematical prices of pizzas
Lesson here. So today I asked my Year 12 Maths Studies students if they have ever bought a Mars Bar during the “Free Bars” Promotion where 1 in every 6 bars wins a free Mars Bar. A few hands around the classroom went up and we were discussing who had the longest run of free…
How I teach maths. 