Jonathan Dunning

@mayorofsimpleton.bsky.social

Fitness Consultant in the Negative Zone

If you were starting from scratch with a Key Stage 3 intervention programme for children who weren’t ’secondary ready’ (for a want of a more suitable quick description) in maths, what would it be? Imagine money and resource no object.

Anyone fancying a change of scene or first new job could come work with Catriona and me. Great kids, caring SLT, fun supportive department. Essex/Cambridgeshire borders, easy reach of Cambridge. Ad says KS3-5 but would be also be happy to hear from anyone who would rather not teach A-level.

Catriona Agg@catrionaagg.bsky.social · 6mo ago

My school is hiring a maths teacher for September! www.swchs.net/blog/?pid=37... Come and work with a brilliantly supportive department, with loads of high quality shared resources, in a school that takes staff workload and wellbeing really seriously.

#mathstoday Saw a colleague doing a cute version of a classic. Old Boniface he took his cheer, Then he bored a hole through a solid sphere, Clear through the centre, straight and strong, And the hole was just six inches long. Now tell me, when the end was gained, What volume in the sphere remained?

#MathsToday -ish. I failed to convince everyone in my Y12 class that finding the nth term of p-gon numbers was a suitable end-of-term activity - part of my ongoing campaign to stop them cranking out algebra and consider structure first. But maths did win the fancy dress, so that cheered me up.

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#MathsToday I have been skiving lessons to go on a Heads of Maths beano. Currently on the way back to school where tonight there will be the second mathsy-sounding music event in recent weeks. Missed the Moog Ensemble to go to MathsConf, looking forward to Year 9 with Sö this evening.

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#MathsToday A day of parameters. Year 11 happily chomping through parameters as coefficients. But Year 12 confuddled by this question, which needs to graduate to its own lesson rather than being tagged on the end of the circles topic - there must be a nice family of questions in there somewhere.

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#MathsToday Quadratic formula with Y12, thinking about where the -b/2a bit is on the graph and what it means to +- (b^2-4ac)^0.5/2a to get to the roots, even if roots are complex. Looked at 'phantom graphs', had fun, but next year I really need get around to planning a task not just a discussion.

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#MathsToday Variation, baby. Ended up wishing I'd done it on the flat first. Also wished I'd squeezed q1-4 onto one line. Was interesting which students drew little triangles and which kept expanding the angle from the slope past 90 degrees. A q between 5 and 6 would have been helped draw this out.

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