Monday 12 March 2012

Royal Institution Maths Masterclasses

Significant lengths in a pentagram...




...are related by the golden section.

I've been fortunate enough to be involved with these for the last couple of years. The Lincolnshire masterclass series for Year 8 pupils is organized by John Slater, with support from Yvonne Croasdaile of the Further Mathematics Support Programme and Robert Heathcote of Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School, Horncastle.

It was my turn to deliver on Saturday 10th March: my class is called "What Happens Eventually?" and is basically about iterative processes, with refreshment stops at the Golden Section and Stupidly Large Numbers! However, I've been finding that there's a lot of unused material left over, so I think next time I'll do the remainder, once I've checked it will work standalone.

The masterclasses run from 10am until 12.30pm, with a short break; we had just over 50 students in one of the larger maths classrooms at Lincoln Christ's Hospital School. The two-and-a-bit hours seemed to flash past and student engagement seemed high - I'm awaiting feedback!

Friday 2 March 2012

National Numeracy



According to the National Numeracy website, "Poor numeracy is a huge and neglected problem. According to the most recent Skills for Life survey, almost 17 million people in the UK have numeracy skills below those needed for the lowest grade at GCSE – for literacy the comparable figure is 5 million…"

The new charity was launched this week. Their website contains sections on what numeracy is and what the issues are surrounding current attitudes to numeracy in the UK. The resources section has links for teachers/tutors, parents/carers and learners; the resources for teachers currently comprise links to government and Ofsted documents, rather than "chalkface-ready" teaching resources, but there is an invitation for users of the site to contribute in this regard.

I've signed up for regular updates, so I'll keep watch and comment on anything I deem of interest...