Catriona Agg

Yes I was surprised too! I guess because an angle problem already feels visual… but it’s not as familiar as the bar model, and you need the implicit knowledge of what the sum should be.

I’ve found bar models really help with angle problems. I like how it makes the 180 explicit too

Two straight lines, one with two angles at a point, the other with three. Underneath are two empty bar models with 180° written in the top bar of each.

I used another #BlankIsBest slide this week to introduce angles on the straight line.

The bar model underneath each diagram really helped some of my Y7's make sense of the problems I made up.

#MathsToday

Another bit of AI coding this morning. This one for visualising Normal approx of a Binomial distribution. I like being able to specify exactly how I want it to function rather than making do and clunking around with pre-existing stuff. I just don't have a convenient place for public sharing 🫤

Books by and about Women in Mathematics Checkout out this list on Bookshop

International Womens Day is this Sunday, so I thought I'd compile a list of books by and about Women in Mathematics.

The most important question I have for you is: What's missing?

uk.bookshop.org/lists/books-...

#Mathstoday
Year 8 did bar charts today and got to use the scaffolded worksheet I made 4 years ago when doing my teacher training.
Since then added some questions where they have to spot the mistake.

Is there a good source of homework style questions somewhere for mechanics and statistics that are split into year 1 and year 2? #AlevelMaths I have been using Jethwa maths a lot for homework for pure, wondered if there is something similar available for mechanics and statistics. #MathsToday

I like your isosceles triangle solution; I wouldn’t have thought of that approach.

An arrangement of seven squares. Six of the squares are identical and are arranged so that reading from left to right they form three stacks that abut and are of heights 2,3,1, with each base square aligned with the second square in the stack to its left. A tilted larger square overlays the six and shares a vertex with the lower right vertex of the bottom-most square. The top left vertex of the uppermost of the six squares lies on an edge of the larger square. A line is drawn from the left-hand vertex of the larger square to the lower right vertex of the rightmost small square. The angle formed by this line and the left-hand edge of the larger square is marked with a question mark.

notes.mathforge.org/notes/publis...

#geometrypuzzle #UKMathsChat #mathsky

What warning signs could students pick up on that they might have gone wrong in an answer?

e.g.
- an unexpected negative/decimal answer,
- an answer requiring many more/fewer steps than the number of marks would suggest,
- an answer that would be weird in context (e.g. a taxi costing £3000)
...

That Voice In Your Head When I work with students one-on-one, I get a unique window into their thinking.  Everyone has a test this week, including several students who are taking the AP Calculus exam.  As we are preparing…

YES thanks. It's nice & concise, gets students going on problem-solving when they "don't know what to do". Good general framework for math & more.

I have a list of things I want my Ss to be thinking when they tackle problems, wrote about here:
karendcampe.wordpress.com/2017/05/10/t...
#iTeachMath

In #mathstoday, we are discussing u-sub vs guess and check when evaluating integrals #calculus #iteachmath

But I guess that element of doing things ‘in reverse’ is what makes it feel like a fun puzzle, rather than a procedural question

This kind of puzzle always makes me reflect on how one-directional my teaching of circle theorems is. It’s always “here’s a circle, so the angles follow this rule”, and never “the angles follow this rule, so there must be a circle here”.

A grid of 16 practice questions involving generating difference types of sequences from their nth term.

A strip of practice questions involving recurrence relations - generating sequences, writing recurrence formulae and solving problems.

A strip of practice questions involving solving problems with quadratic sequences, including deciding whether numbers belong to sequences, finding nth term rules given some of the terms, and finding nth term rules for harder sequences.

A strip of practice questions involving solving problems with arithmetic sequences, including finding nth term rules given some of the terms, arithmetic sequences with algebra, and solving worded problems.

Lots of new sequences resources added to the site today:
✨Problems with arithmetic sequences
✨Problems with quadratic sequences
✨Recurrence relations
✨Generating different types of sequences
All freely available at www.draustinmaths.com/sequences
#MathsToday #UKMathsChat

Variation on a theme.
Two squares. Show that the red point bisects the green segment.

A blank parametric equations worksheet displayed as a table. Columns are titled: x = p(t), y = q(t), Cartesian Equation f(x,y), Intersection with axes, Constraint on t, Domain, Range, and Sketch. Five rows contain given parametric pairs such as x = 3 – t, y = –4 + 3t; x = 3t², y = 6t; x = 4 cos t, y = 2 sin t; x = 1 + 2 cos t, y = 3 + 2 sin t; and x = e²ᵗ, y = e³ᵗ, with remaining columns left blank for students to complete

second blank parametric equations worksheet in table format. Columns match the first sheet: x = p(t), y = q(t), Cartesian Equation f(x,y), Intersection with axes, Constraint on t, Domain, Range, and Sketch. Five rows include parametric definitions such as x = t² – 1, y = t(t² – 1); x = 3 cos 2t, y = 2 cos t; x = 1 + 2t², y = –3 + 4t; x = ln(t – 2), y = 1/(t + 1) with t > 3; and x = cot t, y = 3 sin t for 0 ≤ t ≤ π, with other columns empty for completion.

A new A level task.
Really enjoyed watching the students think about this one:
kshancock.co.uk/aleveltasks....
#MathsToday

A graph with three panels all with a shared x-axis. The x-axis is labelled "values" and ranges from 0 to 10. All three panels have a cloud of hundreds of black dots. The top panel is titled "chisquared" and has a cloud of dots more densely packed near 0 and becoming sparser and sparser towards 10. The middle panel is titled "normal" and the cloud of dots is sparse near 0 and 10 and more densely packed near 5. The bottom panel is titled "uniform" and the cloud of dots is more evenly dense across the whole range 0 to 10.

Just an idea I had to get out of my head about how we look at continuous numerical distributions.

There are six small pink squares, and a larger tilted purple square which shares ones vertex with the bottom pink square. One vertex of the top pink square lies on the top edge of the purple square. A line from the bottom right vertex of the rightmost pink square makes an unknown angle with the left side of the purple square.

Seven squares. What’s the angle?
#geometrypuzzle

A slide showing different examples of making questions more engaging by re-wording the instructions for the task. For example, instead of "calculate the following", ask "which of these have the same answer?"

A slight change of wording is a quick win to ask more engaging questions.

Here are a few simple examples.

#MathsToday I used algebra tiles for the first time today, my department love them and i decided to embrace it being new this year. It was a great success (with bottom set year 8 last lesson too!)

My yr 9 class was buzzing today #MathsToday
A normally disengaged student returned from an absence and did the challenge qs, another student pushed through too when normally she gives up.
Just a beautiful atmosphere. I'd take credit but no idea what caused it!

#mathstoday

Y12 are starting hypothesis testing tomorrow and had to come back to this walk through introduction to the goodness of fit test. It's really superb.

My first lesson normally starts with asking students to write down a random letter A, B or C. We look at the distribution and discuss...

#MathsToday

Fantastic job opportunity... my job!

latymer.ciphr-irecruit.com/templates/CI...

This term I've been trialling using sentence stems-classes saying key ideas out loud. In #MatysToday I tried it with year 11 higher tier revision. We all felt a bit silly at first but it genuinely helped them to consolidate their understanding and improved the quality of their explanations.

I used to pride myself on writing questions that assessed what we had talked about, but in new & different ways.

They'd get plenty of "the standard" questions, but I'd regularly mix in extension problems to see how they can apply their understanding.

This was a favorite

#mtbos
#iteachmath

Further maths help klaxon 🚨

What's the difference between a "contour" and a "section"? They both feel like they're the same thing? @susanwhitehouse.bsky.social @themathsbazaar.bsky.social

Someone I follow has a great parabola plotting tool on their website. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Side note: Do any other maths teachers try to avoid the words 'right' and 'too' during conversations with students? Can be very confusing depending on the subject! Isn't English silly 🫠

Screen grab of task from https://undergroundmathematics.org/introducing-calculus/a-tangent-is

Used this from Underground Maths today. (undergroundmathematics.org/introducing-...) Prompted great conceptual discussion around zooming in and looking at local properties on curves. It made differentiation from first principles so much easier to grasp afterwards too. Love UM! #MathsToday