a first draft of my personal mission statement

I am reading The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. As a result I have been challenged to write a personal mission statement. Here it is, my first version.

I want to draw close to God and hear his voice.
I want to be a best friend to Anthony, and a support to help him grow.
I want to help students experience and explore mathematics with the end of understanding and appreciating it. I want to empower other teachers to do the same with their students.
I want to bless others with friendship and be mutually encouraged and loved.
I want to bless others with whom I interact by listening to them and valuing them.
I will do what I say I am going to do.
I will look ahead to tomorrow's work today.
I will solicit feedback, be reflective, and seek to grow.
I will seek to maintain my health and fitness.
I will be grateful.

maths and vegetables

My two favourite topics come together again! Look at this gorgeous romanesco cauliflower. Its florets make a fractal pattern. Fractals are self-similar, which means that as you zoom in on any section, you see the same repeating pattern as in the larger view. Fractals are quite common in nature. For example, pine cones and ferns both have fractal growth patterns. Also, on a map of the coast you can see a lot of wiggly ins-and-outs, and when you look closer and closer at stretches of the coastline you see the same wiggling line.

back to work

Well, one week done! It was quite a tiring endeavour this week, to motivate myself and 155 students to get back down to some quality work. I am teaching a few new-to-me classes this year, for example, a bottom set of year 9s (fourteen year olds) that I am finding quite a challenge. I didn't realise how much detail I would need to go into when explaining how to round a number to the nearest ten, hundred, or thousand. Actually, I decided after the first lesson, that I'd better teach about the place value positions first. Because if you can't identify the hundreds digit, then you can't round to the nearest hundred. This was a hurdle I wasn't expecting! But now I know not to assume any knowledge in the future. We will be doing lots of times table tests this year, because if these students leave school with any functional numeracy at all it will be a benefit.

Organising my classroom, resources, and mind is always a challenge as well. I have made a lot of hands-on items over the last few years, and it is a collection I want to continue building. So over the summer I reorganised them by moving them all into stackable containers on a high window sill (more than two metres off the floor). The containers are from our favourite oriental take-away food restaurant, and I have been collecting them all year--now I have about fifty, I think. All the boxes are labelled on the front with large stickers; "rounding card sort" is new this week, and a class set of "digits 0 - 9" for use with my new place value mats (laminated 50 cm long grids which hopefully will help students see how to compute 236 x 100 in their heads).

I love organising, but if only I had more time to do it! As the week went on, my desk became the resting place for piles of worksheets, incoming mail, items that my boss asked me to look at, slips of paper, and so on. This mess was compounded by the fact that I managed to run over the bell with almost every lesson this week (I must be out of practice!). So as students were leaving the room, the next set were streaming in, and I was still madly trying to find my next set of slides, worksheets, feedback slips, cards sorts, and mini whiteboards, while tidying away the ones I had finished with. Sigh.

The weekend is a welcome break. But in reality, I might be better served by going to work and trying to get back on top of things before the madness of another week begins.

complete these quotations

Recently I have been struck by two things I have been reading. Both were surprising to me in the way that the sentences ended. (The quotations aren't alike in any other way. Just their surprising endings.) See if you can complete the quotations.

First, from the booklet, Deep Progress in Mathematics:

All students have the right to, and are capable of, full engagement with the subject [of mathematics]. Outstanding features of mathematics which make it interesting, and which make learning easier, are __________....

Secondly, from The Prayer that Changes Everything, by Stormie Omartian:

My desperate plea was that I would never lose the most valuable thing in my life. I can't imagine anything more terrible that to live life again without ________. ___________ is the most wonderful of all the gifts the Lord gives us.

First, I was reading about deep progress in maths and was surprised that the authors were about to tell me what it is about maths that makes it accessible to low-ability learners. I was expecting something about its use in everyday life; that's certainly what the curriculum harps on about at the moment. But instead I was offered a much deeper idea. The quotation finishes this way:

Outstanding features of mathematics which make it interesting, and which make learning easier, are the inter-connections between different topics and representations, and the relationships between and within mathematical structures.

So there is something about maths that I love that is also something that can make it appealing to learners and even ones who struggle with maths. So part of my job is to bring these connections to the fore and help young people discover, or at least, see and appreciate them for themselves.

Secondly, I've been reading (off and on) this book about praising God by Stormie Omartian. It has 45 short chapters about reasons and times to praise God. I knew the ending to the sentence above because of the chapter I was reading, but I was still a little surprised! The quotation finishes like this:

I can't imagine anything more terrible that to live life again without the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the most wonderful of all the gifts the Lord gives us.

I have recently been asking the Spirit to guide me more often. And to prompt me to follow through. I am so excited that I have started being more obedient to the Spirit, and so he is starting to lead me more. So today I was praising God for his most vital gift of the Holy Spirit. And asking him to continue to lead me and help me follow.

books I want to read

Here are two food books I want to read at some point. Or maybe I'll start with one of them.

Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating, Mark Bittman
The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan

Here are some maths books I want to read at some point. They are taken from a list that is given to incoming Oxford maths undergraduates as things they could choose from to read over the summer before they enter the university.

The Music of the Primes, Marcus Du Sautoy
How to Solve It, George Polya
The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, Paul Hoffman (the story of Paul Erdos, which I think might be in the flat somewhere)
1089 and All That: A Journey into Mathematics, David Acheson

learning

Pretty much my favourite thing to do: learn. New ideas for learning:

1. Download podcasts from iTunesU, a part of the iTunes store that has thousands of free lectures, audio files, and videos about loads of things.
2. TED talks. I have seen a few now and they are brilliant and so diverse.
3. Maths Ed connections. I went to a day conference on Saturday and started networking. I heard some interesting talks and plan to continue attending day conferences once per term. The next one is in Cambridge. I also plan to start attending seminars at King's College London as well.
4. The Cornell method of notetaking, that Paul told me about. I love listening to people teach me things. Why doesn't it happen more often?

more maths

Adding to yesterdays post, I found an amazing video today about dimensions (Dimensions by Jos Leys - Étienne Ghys - Aurélien Alvarez). The animations are stunning. I have only watched the first chapter so far, but I was impressed by how the beauty of mathematics was easy to see. The Creative Commons license means it can be used quite freely and it comes in more than a handful of languages.

I am also planning to watch a history of maths show on BBC four tomorrow, hosted by mathematician Marcus du Sautoy. Wow-ee!

some maths links and ideas

Today I just saw this brilliant YouTube video about a chef making very thin noodles. The video illustrated the powers of two really well.

Owen reminded me of the video of James Blunt singing about his love for a triangle.

I also read this article today about how to help your child learn the times tables and a book that explores patterns in the times tables. I have decided that both of my year seven classes are going to get frequent times table tests this year because it's an obstacle that must be overcome to feel confident in maths in later years. I'm also planning on doing a lot more mental maths methods teaching this year. We have been talking about the strategies we use when adding or subtracting in our heads. The questions we have been doing started with 14 - 6, for example, and we worked up to 67 - 38. The first part of the scheme of work emphasises written methods, but I think they are less useful in the long run. Students have to be able to calculate in their head, and know when to calculate mentally and when to use a written method (or a calculator).

the ardabil carpet

Here are two pictures from earlier this week. Sarah and Eric and Dave and I went to the V&A. We saw the Ardabil carpet, which I discovered last time I was there. Dave took these photos to show how massive it is. It is the world's oldest dated carpet, made in 1539-1540. It has very densely knotted pile: 5300 knots in every square with sides ten centimeters.


I want to turn these photographs into a lesson activity involving converting areas.There are x knots per square inch. Find x.

statistics and a city walk

I spent the morning at home, doing some statistics. I am studying the A2 module statistics in preparation for teaching it soon. I managed to avoid statistics during my degrees but now my hatred of it has faded and I'm actually quite enjoying it.

After lunch I headed out on one of my city walks. I walked from Green Park tube past the Ritz Hotel and along Jermyn Street. It's an area of town where there are lots of men's tailors. I was amazed at the window displays--how interesting ties and shirts can be made to look!


Then I popped into Fortnum and Mason, a famous speciality store. This window display surprised me because it looks like there are fresh strawberries in the bowl.


Fortnum and Mason are well known for their jams and preserves. I went and browsed in the jams and jellies section and saw hampers and fresh sweets on sale as well. Check out the chandeliers that were lighting the whole floor.

summer reading, part 1

Today I finished reading The Code Book, the book that I started last week. (Oh, the holidays! Reading!) Last week when I went to Matt's second maths camp to give my topology talk the speaker before me was Simon Singh. He is a popular science writer; Ant has read his book Fermat's Last Theorem a few years ago and loved it. (I also bought a copy of The Code Book and a copy of Fermat's for my head of department and second in charge as summer presents.) The Code Book was an interesting historical tour through cryptography, with little stories about all the people behind the different ciphers. I especially enjoyed the later chapters about encryption systems DES and RSA; I've studied the maths behind them during my degree. And I understood about Schrodinger's Cat for the first time (haha!), discussed during a chapter about quantum computing and cryptography.

appendix: the funniest maths joke of all time

(a) What is a Mobius strip? You could read about it on MathWorld, but it is preferable to make a Mobius strip out a strip of paper and see for yourself why it is so bizarre. You need to tape the ends together after making a half twist in the paper. Then colour one side of the strip red (or another favourite colour) and observe that, in fact, the Mobius strip only has one side. Cool, eh? It also only has one boundary edge; convince yourself by running your finger along one edge and arriving back where you started after travelling around the whole boundary.

(b) What is a Klein bottle? To make the Klein bottle, start with an open cylinder and then paste together the ends with a half twist, identifying opposite points on the boundaries. This is easiest to do in four dimensions. In three dimensions it has to be understood with a pesky self-intersection. You can see that the inside is really the outside; the Klein bottle has no interior. It actually has zero volume. Also, it has only one side, since if you trace with your finger all over the surface you will find that you can reach all of the surface.

(c) What is the joke? I really want a Mobius scarf and Klein bottle hat, and anyone can buy it for me. Choose any one at all, since, you know, one side fits all!

(d) Is that really the funniest maths joke of all time? Are you kidding?! I'm rolling on the floor laughing. There are other funny ones, of course. Would you like to hear some more another time? :)

beautiful maths

I want to get this T-shirt!

my favourite numbers (in no particular order)

2: a prime number, but also even. How beautiful!

pi: every maths fanatic's favourite? It's irrationality is a wonderful mystery.

49: my favourite square number. Recently my students laughed at me when I asked them to write a limerick about their favourite square number. What's so funny about that?

phi: the golden ratio. This lovely ratio of [1+rt(5)]/2 describes the most beautiful architecture and most pleasing forms. Astoundingly it crops up in the Fibonacci numbers as well as the ratio between consecutive terms as the sequence progresses.

e: an irrational number that has on its list of claiims to fame the equation e^(pi*i) = -1, an equation that my high school maths teacher said was proof God existed.

For bragging rights, match the numbers mentioned above with thier decimal equivalents:
1.61803...
2.71828...
3.14159...