Andrew B

It's been a while! Exam season has really worn me down this year. Definitely not helped by one of my groups under-performing in their exams. I've worked hard with them and I'm not sure that has been reciprocated.

Yes, love a sneaky answer check!

Thanks so much - I'll take a closer look!

I feel like this is probably a good place to ask: I'd like to get more into cryptic crosswords. Any advice of where to begin (beyond the excellent minute cryptic)?

On another note, a real shame that this will be the last year of the competition. Same excellent questions and a relaxed environment for getting pupils into meaty, problem-solving oriented maths

In #mathstoday we took 2 teams to our local AMSP Maths Feast competition at @lancasteruni.bsky.social - our kids had a great time and came 5th overall. Not bad for a team from 2nd set!

Year 11 reports written! We are truly in "digging deep to just keep going until the end of term" season!

Haven't posted much because this term has truly been insane. After having just completed year 11 mocks, I'm really thrilled to see 2 of my students getting grade 9s, and another cluster getting 8s. They've been working super hard, and it's excellent to see it start paying off!

Teacher of Maths - Lancaster Girls' Grammar School Teacher of Maths job from Lancaster Girls' Grammar School. Apply by 24 Mar 2025.

#ukmathschat - looks like the Girls' Grammar school down the road from me is hiring a full time maths teacher. ECTs welcome!
teaching-vacancies.service.gov.uk/jobs/teacher...

Churning through some year 7 maths papers today (I know how to have the most exciting half term imaginable!) and it's fascinating seeing which misconceptions crop up.
For instance: 60 / 0.3 = 60 × 3. Totally understandable to see where it comes from, but something to actively "unteach"! #mathstoday

Half term is very important! What a treat it is to take a rest.

In #MathsToday I survived running through the A level mock papers our upper sixth formers sat at the start of term. I find post-exam feedback lessons a real pain - I just hope the pupils find them a good use of time...

Hello lovely #ALevelMaths people, does anyone have any recommended resources for teaching forces and motion in the lower sixth? I have some ideas of how to approach this topic, but any other ideas would be fabulous.

Applied to be an examiner for Edexcel GCSE maths on Monday.
Received an appointment letter on Tuesday.
...there may be a shortage of examiners

Feeling very grateful to have an Inset Day tomorrow to get fully ready for the first day of term proper on Tuesday. Sending positivity, strength, and good brain days to everyone starting again this week!

I AM SORRY - 8 pages on the mark scheme for one 12 mark question?!?! Deeply regretting not printing this out and trying to read it from my phone!

Marking differentiation tests as part of #ALevelMaths and I'm quite surprised at how lenient the Edexcel mark schemes are for notation slips and theoretical errors for proof from first principles. One student followed half the process correctly, tried to divide by 0 and still earned 3 of 5 marks!

Just about to switch off my brain with some meditation via headspace. Sorely needed in a busy week. Teachers in the UK can get access to it for free!

In year 8 #MathsToday we encountered curves after looking at straight lines for a few weeks. It was a lot of fun whipping out Desmos and displaying equations of graphs that they came up with! Interestingly, someone from both classes wanted to see y=x^x, and one class stumbled upon a circle!

It was cute to hear one of my #ALevelMaths students say, "I like maths when I know what's going on."
...I certainly didn't think that when I was planning this lesson on points of inflection!
#MathsToday

In #mathstoday I used this VERY juicy frequency trees question with my high ability year 10s: a cocktail of dividing in a given ratio, calculating percent of and percentage increase.

Backing this up with a desmos visualisation with a draggable tangent to the curve really helped clarify this point, especially when you get to the confusing bit where functions can be increasing, but have negative 2nd derivatives! (E.g. f(x) = x^0.5)

One nice thing about reaching 2nd year of teaching #ALevelMaths is that you can redo parts of the 1st year course with the experience you've gained. For example, when talking about increasing/decreasing functions, I now discuss the gradient of the tangent to the point, instead of dy/dx.

!!!!!!

Here's an interesting observation from one of my year 10s: the surface area of a sphere with radius r matches the surface area of 3/4 of a sphere with radius r (kind of like a pac-man shape thing).
My brain, literally on the floor.

A perennial headache in our department appears to be introducing straight line graphs to our year 8s (12/13 YOs). I think making an explicit connection between linear sequences and their representation as graphs helped as a starting point. Plotting is fine, but interpreting graphs is the issue!

A rugby tackle gone wonky. It happened about 5 minutes before the end of the match which means I had to do basically the full game and then rush to hospital without getting my post-match food. A travesty!

...let's see how writing examples and marking goes this week with my fractured/dislocated finger! On my dominant hand!
I guess it's a chance to learn something new.

No students on AS but we have changed the SOW so all the probability is now all in one block during the first year. It will hopefully make things a touch easier!

It is absolutely WILD that Edexcel makes the absolutely baffling step to cover probability in Venn diagrams during the first year of #ALevelMaths without set notation... after the kids have already seen this at GCSE??? And then reintroduces the set notation in the second year???