I’ve been wanting to write another blog post for a while now. Throughout this year, I have been inspired by my students to get typing and start sharing my thoughts online. It’s been great, but now that they’ve finished up, I feel the need to have a look back to see what the year entailed.…
Last Friday, we took a massive leap in what we hope is a forward direction. The Maths coordinator (@Jason_Loke) and I gave our students a summative assessment task that could potentially change the way we assess students in maths. In South Australia, we have two main types of assessment in mathematics: Folio Tasks (Mathematical Investigations) and…
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…
I’ve been learning more and more that students’ opinions about maths are actually related to the feeling of “not knowing” than maths itself. Sure, many students have a wall firmly built that keeps their anxiety about learning maths in perfect condition. I do believe, however, it’s a developed expectation to be saved by the teacher…
Recently, I have been utilising Open Middle problems more and more. What I particularly like about these problems is the sense of challenge that drives students to find a possible answer. After using many awesome problems directly from the Open Middle website, I decided to have a go at writing my own and use these develop…
A new semester meant a fresh start to try some new things in my maths classroom that would hopefully turn the dial of cognitive demand to appropriately awesome. Here’s what I did with my clean slate: I read The Classroom Chef These guys (Matt Vaudrey & John Stevens) hit the nail on the head repetitively without…
Reports… What would you want your report to look like? Reports, the time of year when we, as teachers, have to flawlessly write comments that are less descriptive, less critical, and less meaningful than the conversations we have with our students about their actual progress or overall performance in our classes. What is more important…
I can honestly say that the social media platform that I thought was absolutely useless has significantly changed the way I teach. This wasn’t the first time this has happened in my short experience as a teacher. If you have read my blog, which most people apart from myself haven’t, you may know about the…
Yes, if you were one of the few that have read my blog before, and possibly even noticed the name of my blog, whenwillineedthis was the previous title and url. This question is one that not only wrangles its way into students’ minds but even their teachers. This post originally came from a very negative…
Through teaching, I’ve learnt many mathematical concepts at a much deeper level and I am often left asking myself, “why didn’t my teacher teach me like this?” The ways students are learning maths at school has massively changed over the past 5(ish) years. What students are doing in lessons has been influenced by the availability…
How I teach maths. 