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Monthly Archives: June 2017

65536

I have a whole suite of maths t-shirts that I made myself. One of them simply has the number 65536 on it. It’s been getting a bit of attention over the past couple of weeks, so I thought I might write about it.

65536 is my favourite power of 2. More specifically, it’s 216, which means […]

Posted in Isn't maths cool? | Tagged |

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Bodyscale Prime Climb

The game of Prime Climb
Prime Climb is a wonderful game by Dan Finkel (aka @MathforLove), which you can find out more about here. The board is a path made of the numbers from 0 to 101, coloured by an ingenous and beautiful system. Each player has two pawns which they move around the board by […]

Posted in One Hundred Factorial | Tagged |

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The Arts students’ maths brain

Yesterday I talked about one of the common responses to people finding out I am a mathematician/maths teacher, that of saying, “I’m not a maths person.” The other common response I get is, “I don’t have a maths brain.” (John Rowe mentioned this in his comment on the previous post.)
This is how I reacted last […]

Posted in Being a good teacher, Thoughts about maths thinking | Tagged |

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Actually, I am a maths person

I am a mathematician and a maths teacher. Therefore it is an occupational hazard that any random person who finds out what my job is will respond with “I’m not a maths person.” The most frustrating people are my own students who I am trying to tell that my actual job is to help them […]

Posted in Being a good teacher, Thoughts about maths thinking | Tagged , , |

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Childhood memories

Two books I’ve read recently have encouraged me to investigate my memories from childhood. In Tracy Zager’s “Becoming the Math Teacher You Wish You’d Had“, she urged me to think about my maths autobiography to see what influenced my current feelings about maths. In Stuart Brown’s “Play“, he urged me to think about my play […]

Posted in How people learn (or don't), Thoughts about maths thinking | Tagged , , |

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Book Reading: Play – How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination and Invigorates the Soul

Looking back at my blog over the past few months, I’ve done a lot of these “book reading” posts. I really did mean to do some more on other ideas, but I felt I had to get these thoughts out of the way first. So here’s another book reading post, this time about the book […]

Posted in Education reading | Tagged , |

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