#mathsconf37

Yesterday I spent the day at #mathsconf37 in Sheffield. I've attended over thirty of La Salle's Saturday conferences since September 2014. They are regular fixtures in my diary (they take place in October, March and June) - I always make the effort to attend when I can. I think it's massively important that I keep developing my teaching skills throughout my career, and actively take steps to improve my subject knowledge and keep up-to-date with what's going in in maths education. I genuinely think that attending these conferences makes me a better teacher and a better Head of Maths. I also like the social aspect. Having made a few friends from attending mathsconfs over the years, I always enjoy catching up and chatting about maths teaching with them (shout out to Megan who I often share train journeys with, and David who very kindly gives us lifts). #mathsconf37 was definitely one of my favourite mathsconfs. Even though I live far away in South London, Sheffield is a great location (a straightforward two hour train ride from St Pancras and plenty of cheap hotels to choose from), and the school itself worked really well (I marvelled at the wide corridors, well maintained toilets and double size classrooms). Thank you to Head of Maths Ben Rapley for hosting.

I used to write blog posts about every conference I attended, and back when Craig Barton used to attend, I sometimes did post-conference podcasts too. I haven't done that for a while, but I wanted to write a quick post today to share a couple of things from yesterday's event.

I enjoyed all four sessions I attended. In David Martin's session on Platonic Solids I learnt an interesting fact about the colours on Rubik's Cubes - if you add or extract yellow from any side you get its opposite (more on this here).

white + yellow = yellow
red + yellow = orange
blue + yellow = green

I loved Rob Eastaway's session where I learnt loads of interesting stuff about the Elizabethans' use of numbers. And in Sam Blatherwick's session on Magic Multiplication Squares I did a lot of fun arithmetic and thought hard about grids, ratio and factorising.

In Matt Man's workshop I tried some lovely surds problems and also discovered some new places to find questions. I write a lot of Key Stage 3 assessments every year - it's one of the most time consuming things I do, but I do enjoy it! - and I often struggle to find interesting questions that students haven't seen before. For example for my highest attainers I want really challenging questions with lots of reasoning. And for my lowest attainers I want accessible questions with scaffolding. I use various sources to find questions but I always want more! Matt showed us that on Exam Wizard (which is free to use, as long as you have an Edexcel login) you can choose 'Awards' from the first drop down menu in 'Build a Paper' - there are a whole load of maths questions there that I've not used before. I was vaguely aware of Edexcel Award qualifications but I didn't think to look in a whole other section on Exam Wizard. 

They have everything from Level 1 Number and Measure which has plenty of questions suitable for Key Stage 3 assessments, to Algebra Level 3 which has lots of challenge. There are also loads of statistics questions (including topics such as binomial, normal, index numbers, moving averages etc), many of which will be useful for teaching GCSE Statistics where there's a serious lack of available resources to use in lessons. Here are some example questions from the various different awards:

Note that the last question here is not a surds question - this is just substitution so it's suitable for Key Stage 3.

Thanks very much to Matt Man for sharing this hidden source of questions on Exam Wizard!

At the end of the day I delivered a session on factorising. I shared some interesting questions and techniques from a 1914 textbook. Here are some examples of the kind of expressions we were factorising in this workshop:

The delegates really got stuck into these and I think the session was well received, so I might do a follow up at the next conference.

Thank you to La Salle for hosting a great conference, to Rob and Leonie for running a lovely tuck shop, and to all the speakers for their sessions. 

See you all next time.