Author Archives: A Maths Teacher

A Picture Paints a Thousand Words

I could spend hours pontificating, explaining and lecturing and still not explain the difference between a Type I error and a Type II error as simply and as effectively as the image above. A picture really can be worth a thousand words. Credit where credit is due: the image can be found in The Essential […]

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University Admissions

A little over a year ago I completed my collection of 15 works of fiction. As a tutor to fifteen Upper Sixth students I was obliged to write a glowing UCAS reference for each one, to support their application for university. My line, above, is of course, a joke – every word that I penned […]

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Adding and Subtracting Fractions

Over on Twitter, @missradders has sparked a really interesting discussion on subtracting fractions by offering the above method to subtract two fractions.  (see the Twitter thread here) I must admit, it is a method new to me and, from reading the replies to her tweet, it was unfamiliar to many other teachers, to. But is […]

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Epiphany on a yoga mat

It was shortly after my standing tree pose had inadvertently become a fallen tree, and I lay on my mat, a crumpled collection of arms and legs listening to the calm, soothing words of my Yogi that it happened, that I had my epiphany, my moment of clarity, when I suddenly understood. A mid-week evening […]

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Holy Venn Diagram

Possibly the best Venn Diagram, ever. Two words – absolute genius. Witty, visually appealing but, most importantly, mathematically correct. Sets and Venn Diagrams have been on the IGCSE syllabus for some time, and made it onto the new GCSE syllabus, so we’ve all got to teach them. Project this image onto your whiteboard, sit back […]

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