Each year, the PNC calculates and publishes the market prices for each of the presents featured in the Twelve Days of Christmas. Their website, which is definitely well worth a look, says: It all started 38 years ago as a way to engage clients of PNC’s predecessor, Provident National Bank in Philadelphia, during the traditionally …
The True Cost of Christmas Read More »
During revision on standard units with Year 9 this week, we dealt with the typical confusions between metric and Imperial – they’re fairly happy with metres and centimetres, but a few are also convinced that inches and feet are too, possibly because they’re still in such common usage.A question that one pupil had was about …
Exploring decimal time Read More »
Today’s prompt was “choose a piece of art with one idea of you might use it in the classroom”. As a maths teacher, I’ve predictably picked my favourite piece of artwork by M.C. Escher – when I was little, someone bought me a postcard book of his work, and I still have the postcards in …
#teacher5adaysketch – Choose a piece of art Read More »
It’s another short(ish) post today because I’m trying to make the most of my first weekend of half term and also because I’ve done something weird to one of my fingers and typing/clicking is really painful today (fortunately, this also puts paid to any idea that I’ll be marking books later). Following my post yesterday about integers, …
Today was A Level taster day, so I spent the afternoon teaching budding mathematicians/further mathematicians about calculus and complex numbers (respectively), and today’s etymology post is all about A Level vocabulary.Calculus is a good place to start. It’s based on infinitesimals, so the original meaning of the word calculus – a little pebble used for counting – kind …
Romanes eunt domus? Read More »
While revising the equation and graph of a straight line today with Year 10, I mentioned the general form y = mx + c, mostly because that’s what appears in many of the revision guides and textbooks. For my part, I’m happy as long as they can distinguish between the gradient and y-intercept and can …
On my way to work this morning, while stopped at a set of traffic lights, I spotted a man travelling into work by unicycle. He was riding admirably well, but I have to say, it’s not the kind of challenge I’d want to start my day with. Taking my inspiration from the intrepid unicyclist, I’ve …
What have the Romans ever done for us? Read More »
The etymology of mathematics absolutely fascinates me. The English language is remarkably irregular, but mathematical language is so close to the original Latin and Greek roots that it really can be broken down into constituent parts to derive meanings. Therefore, I really enjoyed a post from Don Steward earlier this year, pointing out that the word …
What’s in a name? (Fractions) Read More »
I had no idea what to blog about today. I spent all morning cleaning out my garage, just sat down to start writing and was clean out of inspiration. Therefore, I thought I’d plump for one of my go-to activities when there’s five minutes to kill at the end of the lesson. I do this …
So here’s a cute idea I was talking to a colleague about yesterday. I think I got this from Johnny Ball when I saw him present at MathsConf3 last March. I’m unsure of any practical applications but it’s a nice bit of maths. Draw a quadratic curve – the simplest one’s just y = x². …
Quadratic crossover Read More »