BLOGS WEBSITE

Monthly Archives: April 2016

Let’s

One of my friends and a past MLC staffer graduated from her PhD yesterday (congratulations Jo!). One of my strongest memories of Jo is when she told me something about my teaching that I never knew I was doing, but that she saw as an essential part of what I was trying to achieve at […]

Posted in Being a good teacher | Tagged , |

Leave a comment

Disjointed independence

There are two terminologies in probability which many students are confused about: “independent” and “disjoint”. The other day I was working with a student listening to their thinking on this and I suddenly realised why.
In your standard introduction to probability notation, various notations and terminologies are introduced, usually with reference to the meaning of the […]

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

4 Comments

Quarter the Cross

At the end of last year, the MTBoS (Math(s) Twitter Blog-o-Sphere) introduced me to this very interesting task: you have a cross made of four equal squares, and you are supposed to colour in exactly 1/4 of the cross and justify why you know it’s a quarter. I call it “Quarter the Cross”.

(The teachers who […]

Posted in Isn't maths cool?, One Hundred Factorial, Thoughts about maths thinking | Tagged , , , , |

16 Comments

The crossed trapezium

Recently I started thinking about the properties of the following shape, which I like to call the “Crossed Trapezium”. It has two parallel edges, which are joined by two crossing lines.

Because of Quarter the Cross, I’ve also been interested in areas recently, so of course I had a desire to know more about the area […]

Posted in Isn't maths cool?, Thoughts about maths thinking | Tagged |

4 Comments