Today I hosted #mathsmeetglyn. I was so pleased that 80 maths teachers turned up on a Saturday morning to see Don Steward's presentation. I was also chuffed to finally meet the man who makes the brilliant resources that I use in my classroom everyday.Don spoke for two and half hours and in that time he covered huge amounts of fascinating mathematics. He had three sets of slides packed full of ideas and resources - these can be downloaded here:
- Part 1: Generalising
- Part 2: Exam Questions Generalised
- Extra Generalising (not covered today)
I thoroughly enjoyed Don's presentations. I particularly liked a moment right at the end when we were all working hard on an enlargement problem. The idea was that we enlarged a triangle with scale factor 2 from point 1, then enlarged that image with scale factor 2 from point 2. Then we had to find the centre of enlargement of our second image from the original triangle. We did this for a number of questions and started to notice patterns. None of us could figure out what was causing the pattern, but then Don said something about how we were all getting a lot of practice of drawing enlargements. And that was when it all fell into place... Much of the generalising that Don talked about was quite advanced, but it all involved lots of practice - ie developing fluency - in the steps leading up to generalisation. We were practising enlargements without even realising we were practising! We were engaged because it was intriguing - because it was leading somewhere interesting. Clever, eh?
After the event, twenty of us had a lovely lunch at La Familia.
Nothing beats subject knowledge CPD. It was like a big maths lesson in a room full of people who love maths.
Thanks so much to everyone who came, thanks to my headteacher for supporting the event, and thanks to Don Steward for delivering a fantastic session.
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