Andrew Jeffrey's November 2008
Newsletter
IMPORTANT: (Do NOT click ‘reply’ as I
will never get to see your email)
Instead, please
send all emails to info@andrewjeffrey.co.uk
1. Welcome and feedback
2. Website of the Month
3. Maths Week Ireland
4. Bonfire Maths
5. Top Tip
6. Einstein says…
7. SLOG ON THE BLOG!
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1. Welcome and Feedback
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Dear
Friends,
Welcome back
from Half Term. I hope you managed to get a rest or at least a break – we went
on a TES meeting in London and met up with some good friends at London Zoo. I
also had to buy a new car (well an old ‘new’ car!) as to get my old Astra
through its MOT would have cost more than the value of the car! I now have an
‘almost-as-old’ Rover 200 to get me through the next year…
This month
sees the welcome return of Einstein, whose thought-provoking quote about
sharing good ideas reminded of the TES forum (or at least how it used to be
before the ‘improvements’).
We also have
one of my favourite ‘website of the month’ features to date; I laughed my head
off…
Finally, please
remember that since this newsletter is
sent out automatically, hitting ‘reply’ will not work – your reply will not
reach me. I can always get emails sent to info@andrewjeffrey.co.uk
; please add this address to
your address book.
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2. Maths Website of the Month.
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This is just
fantastic! An amazing starter for those of you lucky enough to have a
web-connected IWB in your classroom…it is a magic maths trick that works by –
no wait, just try it, I don’t want to spoil the surprise!
Click on http://www.quizyourprofile.com/guessyournumber.swf and enjoy yourself!
Those of you
who teach in secondary schools or above could ask your students to recreate
something similar as a cross-curricular ICT project, but this is suitable for
anyone in KS1 upwards. One of my favourite websites of the month so far…let me
know what you think.
Bonus
Website: Those of you who share my strange sense of humour, and who have been
following the scare-mongering of some prophets of doom regarding the new Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland will also appreciate this
site:
http://www.hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/
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3. Maths Week Ireland
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During
October I made a return visit to this beautiful country at the invitation of ‘Maths
Week Ireland’. Last year I went to Dublin, Dundalk
and Belfast and was really inspired by the whole experience. By the time you
read this I will have returned (hopefully). This year, based mainly in Dublin
again at the elegant and lovely Gresham Hotel, I also visited Galway in the
West of Ireland to give talks and shows to primary and secondary children
alike. I was delighted to be working with some old friends - Rob Eastaway,
author, speaker and current president of the Maths Association, Kjartan Poskitt, author of the
Murderous Maths series of books (and very funny man), and Steve Humble, a.k.a.
Dr Maths, an experienced and gifted maths expositor. As you can imagine, the
evenings were far from boring (or cheap
with the way the pound is at the moment).
There were many
highlights, but here are just a few: working with children in a special school
for very severely mentally and physically handicapped children in Galway;
watching Robbie Keane score a winning goal in the World Cup fixture against
Cyprus (See the blog for details); retracing the steps of William Rowan Hamilton,
Ireland’s most famous mathematician and the inventor of ‘quaternions’
(we walked to the bridge where he
famously chalked his newly-discovered formula and there was a short ceremony in
honour of his achievement); attending a lecture as part of Maths Week on
Hamilton Day (16th October), given by the almost frighteningly
brilliant professor Lisa Randall from Harvard who was explaining how
theoretical physics had come up with the possibility of other dimensions and
universes! She had the knack of making very complex ideas sound really quite
understandable, and I even got to ask her a question about non-parallel
universes...
STOP PRESS:
I have just found out that I will be performing at the BT Young Scientist
Exhibition in Dublin next January. I will be unveiling some new material, which
I will keep under wraps for now, except to say that it will involve teachers
and electric saws…!
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4. Bonfire Maths
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As regular
subscribers will know, I am a big fan of applying maths to everyday life
wherever possible. (I have a friend who goes
even further than that – he often asks audiences to name an object, then he creates several maths questions based around it!) With the curious but very English
tradition of Guy Fawkes, why not create a bit of cross-curricular magic and
devise a few worded questions based around Bonfire Night?
(Note: since I am sitting on a train at the
moment and my brain has gone completely blank, I can only think of two
different types of firework, but you can substitute more stimulating ones if
you wish!)
Depending on
the age of the children you teach, these could be based around very simple
ideas. So, in KS1:
I
have 3 Catherine Wheels and 5 Rockets. How many fireworks do I have altogether?
“I have 3 Catherine Wheels but TWICE as many
rockets. How many fireworks do I have altogether?”
“I have 7 Catherine Wheels and 2 FEWER
Rockets; how many fireworks do I have altogether?”
“I
have 20 fireworks. 7 of them are Catherine Wheels, and the rest are Rockets.
How many rockets do I have?”
(This is
cross-curricular of course, requiring good Literacy skills as well as numerical
ability. It is a good chance to introduce key mathematical vocabulary. These
are just some basic examples to get your creative juices flowing; obviously you
can and will build on them.
For KS2, you
can vary the above to include multiplication, division, ratio and proportion,
or even money:
“Catherine
Wheels cost £2 each and Rockets cost £3 each. I have £10. Find all the possible
combinations of Catherine Wheels and Rockets I could buy.” (Or “Find the cost of 7 CWS and 5 Rs”, etc.)
“I
have a mixture of Catherine Wheels and Rockets. One third of my fireworks are
Rockets. If I have 12 Catherine Wheels, how many rockets do I have?
Here is a
set of 3 very similar questions that are useful to put together to help cement
a good understanding of ratios. These are suitable for KS3 or high-achieving
KS2 pupils:
a)
I buy Catherine Wheels and rockets in the ratio 3:2. If 30 are
Catherine Wheels, how many are rockets?
b)
I buy Catherine Wheels and rockets in the ratio 3:2. If 30 are
Rockets, how many are Catherine Wheels?
c)
I buy Catherine Wheels and rockets in the ratio 3:2. If there
are 30 fireworks in total, how many are rockets?
Or, on a different
tack, it occurs to me that a useful transferable life skill might be developed
with questions like:
“To
be safe, we have to stand back at least 10 metres. How far away is that?”
(Do this outside and get the children to
estimate a metre and hence stand exactly 10 metres away from you. Also good for
budding football referees, of course, many of whom appear to have no idea at
all how far 10 metres is!)
In KS3, or again
to stretch your high ability KS2 pupils, why not extend the idea to include speed
and time questions?
“A
Catherine wheel spins for exactly 24 seconds. How many do I need to use to get
a continuous display that lasts at least 5 minutes?”
“A
rocket flies for 6 seconds and travels a total of 45 metres. What is its
average speed?”
KS4 pupils
could try to find the equation of the motion of a rocket, a Catherine Wheel or
a sparkler. (As a starting point, y=sin x must be close to a basic left–to-right
waving motion…).
Nothing
radically new here, but hopefully plenty to think about. Let me know if you come up with any
other ideas. I would be happy to collate them and produce a free resource for
teachers on my website.
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5. Top Tip
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Here is one
of the top tips from ‘100 Top Tips For
Top Maths Teachers.’
The book is divided into 5 sections. The following tip (#21) comes from section
2, ‘Aids to Teaching and Learning.’
“For children who have difficulty grasping the concept of
nets, here’s something to try. Give them some simple 3-D shapes and some sheets
of gift wrap. Tell them that their challenge is to cut out the smallest possible piece of wrapping paper that completely
covers the shape. No overlaps or tabs are allowed. Bingo – you have a net.
The alternative definition of a net thus becomes: ‘the smallest piece of
wrapping paper that could be used to wrap this shape’. Of course you will need
to specify that the paper must be a continuous piece, not joined at just a
corner, etc. It helps to buy sheets of cheap gift wrap; this also makes for a
good display.”
I chose the
above deliberately, with the dreaded Christmas shopping just around the corner
– there is plenty of cheap wrapping paper in the shops already. Get the Sprouts
on…
For 99 more
top tips, click here:
http://andrewjeffrey.co.uk/products.asp#2
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6. Einstein says!
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I was
reminded of this quote when browsing the TES Primary and mathematics forums’
recently, and bemoaning the fact that fewer and fewer people are using them
since the ‘improvements’ earlier this year. This is a great shame, as I have
met such wonderful people on there, all of whom are so willing to share their
expertise with others. I live in hope that the TES will attract people back as it
slowly solves its problems, but it may be a while before it becomes the huge
and vibrant online community it once was. Anyway, here is the fabulous Einstein
quote that might just encourage us to share more of our ideas with other
teachers:
“If I give you a pfennig, you will be one pfennig
richer and I'll be one pfennig poorer. But if I give you an idea, you will have
a new idea, but I shall still have it, too”
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7. SLOG ON THE BLOG!
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I need your
opinions on something. Do check
out the blog – there
have been some pretty personal attacks (now on page
2) on both me and my
work recently from a couple of people (or perhaps just an individual working
under a pseudonym)! I know you can’t please all of the people all of the time…a
couple of friends have asked why I have left the more vicious comments on the
blog instead of just deleting them. I’m not sure. The vast majority of my work
(about 90%) is in state schools these days, but the fact that I used to teach
in independent schools apparently offends this person greatly.
Perhaps deep
down although I don’t agree with them, I am uncomfortable about deleting things
just because they express a different opinion to my own (which is inevitable
and even welcomed); I would far rather try to respond in a calm and reasonable
manner, and maybe hope to persuade the more rude and aggressive posters that
posting insults is not perhaps the best way to move the debate forward…let me
know what you think; should I delete the ruder and more insulting comments or
leave them? I promise to listen carefully to your views before deciding! The
offending comments are mostly on the second page (see “This
Too Shall Pass),
which is maybe just as well!
That’s it
for November’s newsletter. Have a great second half of term.
Until Next
Time, AJ x
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