World Maths Day

Tomorrow, Wednesday 7 March 2012, is World Maths Day by UNICEF. And what a great time it is to be a Maths teacher!

Today we had Years 3, 4, 5 and 6 from Primary come up to Secondary for a Maths activity on population growth with our Year 7 and 8’s. It’s so satisfying to see children enjoy ‘doing’ Mathematics. Today’s activity involved going on a Mathematical adventure to an island where the population doubled each day ultimately leading to students (yes even the Year 3’s) drawing the graph of ‘two to the x‘.

I was recently lucky enough to take six students (U15) to Singapore for the South East Asia Mathematics Competition 2012 (known as SEAMC 2012). This is an annual competition held in SE Asia (surprisingly?!) that is now attended by 240 students from over 40 schools in the region. It’s a wonderful event and is all the more special given that schools have no common connection (some American, Canadian, Chinese, British etc.) other than a group of students who love (and are pretty good at) Mathematics. It is inspiring as a teacher to walk into a hall where there are so many students enjoying Mathematics working on various individual and group challenges, puzzles, problems and activities all with a smile on their face.

Each year at this event there is a guest speaker who gives a talk to the students as well as the staff over the course of the weekend. This year that guest speaker was Douglas Butler. A tremendously creative, innovative and experienced Maths teacher with a passion for using technology to teach children Mathematics that is infectious to all those that meet him. He is so good at what he does that he is part of the team to have written ‘Autograph‘, a piece of Mathematics software being used by schools all over the world now. What is so wonderful about this software that does all sorts of graphing and modelling is that it has been written by a Maths teacher rather than a software engineer so is designed with teaching in mind.

Software packages like Autograph and others like Geogebra have helped to make Maths a little more interactive and bring the subject more to life. Through being able to easily model popular games like Angry Birds into Mathematics, illustrate matrix transformations geometrically so swiftly and having the ability to display difficult concepts such as 3-D vectors and planes to make it easier to visualise what is happening behind the algebra.

 

Use Mathematics to model the birds path

So, a little insight as to why it’s a great time to be a Mathematics teacher, oh, and I haven’t even mentioned the upcoming ‘Pi Day‘, 3rd month 14th day…

Do you enjoy Maths? Do you teach Maths? So many people say they hate maths or were no good at Maths at school. Are you one of them? If so, why?

If you are a Maths teacher and have a similar passion for the subject and think we are in exciting times, leave a comment (we even have a vacancy in our department!).

-PlaneSimple

Beijing Report: Teaching Mathematics

Last week I had the privilege  of attending an International Baccalaureate  workshop conference in Beijing on teaching Higher Level Mathematics (Category 3). Upon my return to school I have been asked, a number of times, “How was Beijing?”. I have two responses to this, both of which I will go into further detail in during this post.

The first is Beijing, the city. The second is, the course.

As a city (Warning! sweeping statement is coming!) Beijing was not impressive. Granted that my opinions were heavily influenced by the appalling levels of pollution throughout my stay. But that surely is a fair reason to like a city or not! If you can’t breath healthy air then there is not much point in enjoying the non-essentials of life that a city can offer is there?

So how bad was the pollution? Well this website gives readings of pollution levels in Beijing. To give you some background here are the classifications of pollution levels;

Good	0-50
Moderate	51-100
Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups	101-150
Unhealthy	151-200
Very Unhealthy	201-300
Hazardous	>300

As a guide, Singapore has a level that is almost always around 30. i.e Singapore is considered good. But then that doesn’t really mean anything – Singapore is a normal city and is actually quite clean. However, when considering that the lowest level of pollution during my stay in Beijing was 45 and that was after it had just rained, well maybe that gives some context.

OK, hopefully that is some context. Now wait for this…. prior to the rain on Sunday lunchtime that reduced it to that level of 45, it was above 420! That’s right, 201-300 is Very Unhealthy and above 300 is Hazardous yet it was 420 while I was there! It really was as shocking as it sounds.

I couldn’t workout why Beijing Airport had such an awful smell upon my arrival on Thursday morning. It wasn’t until later on I realised that this was the pollution. Later on when I ventured out from the hotel it only took about 15 minutes of breathing the poor terrible quality air until I got a sore throat and a metallic feel in my mouth. Yup, it’s as horrible as it sounds.

I ventured out to Tiananmen Square and The Forbidden City on Thursday afternoon and although they were quite impressive – their over-awing size and the fact they were located in the middle of a busy city – the fact they were surrounded by smog that looked like a foggy UK winter morning took away from their potential.

A final word on the pollution: the smog was so bad that I was able to point the camera directly at the sun at midday and take a picture of it. The sun wasn’t bright, it just glowed – looking like a typical picture of the planet mercury.

The other point I’d like to make about not enjoying Beijing was the silly internet restrictions. I knew before I travelled that I would probably not be able to access facebook and twitter. It was still very frustrating though and there were numerous other sites, including this blog, that couldn’t be accessed. It was all the more frustrating when trying to share resources when at the Maths course and not being able to see websites that would be of great use.

Although I am sure governments from across the world do so on a much smaller scale, it is disappointing to know that a government is telling over 1 billion citizens “don’t look at that, nope don’t look at that either, or that….”. It really goes against my purpose as a teacher; to encourage students to enhance their skills for life and be creative thinkers in a continually adapting world. How can you do so in the modern world where technology, social media and communication tools play such an integral role, if your government prevents you from using a wide variety of websites?

Now, talking of technology brings me on to discussing the main purpose of my visit to Beijing, the IB HL Mathematics workshop. I don’t want to send the majority of you readers to sleep talking about the ins and outs of the course so here are just a few points. The course was excellent. The other participants were all great (although one did get thrown out on the first morning, but that’s a story for another day…), the workshop leader and other leaders there were very experienced and extreemly helpful. It was a very insightful few days.

Probably the one aspect of the workshop that really kept occurring and gave me lots to think about and take away was the use of technology in the HL Maths classroom. To give you a bit of context, there is a video clip below which lead to many of our discussions we had (although fairly long it is worth a look if you are interested in the use of technology in schools):

So what technology can we use in the classroom even for a budget strapped school such as the one I work in? I saw some great use of a programme called Geogebra which will now be making regular appearances in my classroom. Then of course there is Autograph. But beyond that the use of wiki’s and even file sharing systems such as dropbox should help with sharing resources and communication with students.

I am aware that this post caters for two different audiences but hopefully that means I will get some responses! It may also mean I never get a visa for China again but….

Have you been to Beijing? What was your experience of the city? Are you a Maths teacher? What technology do you use in your classroom? How can both students and teachers be encouraged to embrace technology?

PlaneSimple

Hello world!

Hi. Right, I’ve decided to start a blog! So what? There are about 75 million words on wordpress from today’s blogs alone! Well, that doesn’t matter. Last week I read a really good F1 blog on wordpress (I was going to link that but haven’t been able to find it since, bad start!) and also Martin Brundles excellent blog / column on the BBC Sport webiste. I thought hey, he’s said a lot of what I think.

Now, I’ve been tempted to start a blog for a while, but never been able to decide upon a topic. And, even though I liked a few blogs I read about the last F1 race and agreed with many points, I know that my blogs won’t be as well read and published as those!

As I thought about it I decided I’d be better off writing something even if once someone visited and read my blog they never returned (please come back!), than not write anything for anyone to read at all. So then I decided actually, what I write about really doesn’t matter.

I also read some good comments and blogs about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and one such blog that was the first time I saw a public comment echoing my thoughts – that the US are not squeaky clean and innocent in all this mess. Who guzzles ridiculous amounts of oil each day and demands for it to be so cheap?

So that is what helped me to decide to start a blog about whatever I want to talk about. Sometimes sport sometimes business, one week about interesting plane stories (yup, that’s where the name comes from!) and the next week about the difficulties my Maths class are having. Sometimes you’ll (hopefully) like what you’re reading and be interested by it and other weeks you may not relate to what I have to say. But hopefully, you’ll return quickly to read the next one and see if it is more your cup of tea.

So I leave you today with a light hearted story. If you are feeling grumpy, it’s worth taking a look.

PlaneSimple.