Summer Updates

I know that many of you have been off having wonderful adventures over summer so may have missed some of my updates. I've summarised them all here so you can start the new school year knowing exactly what's changed on resourceaholic.com.

Resource Libraries
My big job over summer was to totally rewrite my A level resource libraries as they were still aligned to the legacy specification. I have now published the following new libraries:

Year 12 Pure Maths

Year 13 Pure Maths

Statistics (Year 12 and 13)

Mechanics (Year 12 and 13)

They're all accessible from the top menu. I hope they are helpful to A level teachers. Thanks to Ian Tomkin who kindly volunteered to help me rewrite my mechanics page (I don't teach mechanics so I needed help with this!).

I also did some work on my Key Stage 3 and 4 resource libraries (algebra, number, shape and data). Where there were gaps, I added lessons from bossmaths.com. If you haven't seen Boss Maths before (I blogged about it in Gems 89) then do check it out. You might like lessons such as 'Conventions for labelling the sides and angles of triangles' and 'Drawing diagrams from a written description'.

I also made a start on adding resources from variationtheory.com and mathsvenns.com to my resource libraries, though this is still work in progress. And I know that some of my longer topic listings need to be shortened and improved - again, I will get to it (perhaps next summer!).

Conferences
I updated my maths conferences page for 2018/19. Please let me know if I've missed anything. I will update it throughout the year when events are announced. Have a look now and see if there's anything you want to attend. There are so many great events to choose from!

I will be speaking at #mathsconf17 in Birmingham on 13th October. Here's a description of my workshop:

If you're coming to #mathsconf17 and looking for somewhere to stay on the Friday night a few of us have booked the Premier Inn near New Street Station.

Blog Posts
In case you missed it, I wrote Gems 92 right at the start of the holidays. It included loads of lovely stuff, particularly on ratio. In early August I also wrote Gems 93 which featured lots of great tasks and resources.

In conjunction with Craig Barton's latest podcast, Slice of Advice: First Lessons, yesterday I published a post on Year 7 Maths Activities in which I shared six tasks which might work well in a first lesson of the year.

Do have a listen to Craig's podcast for loads for great advice on first lessons.

For those of you who are planning your first Year 12 lesson, check out my post from last year 'Planning for September: Year 12' in which I shared some lesson slides that you might find helpful.

#Latemaths
I launched my fourth maths social event and have already sold a quarter of the tickets. #Latemaths takes place in London during half term on Saturday 27th October. It features a book launch and loads of mathematical fun so do book tickets now before they sell out. Bring your colleagues! All the details are at latemaths.weebly.com.

Displays
If you enjoy putting up a couple of new posters at the start of a new school year, or if you work in a school that insists on fresh corridor displays for Open Evening, you can find my updated displays page here.

I'm currently loving @jaegetsreal' s lovely 'First 1000 Digits of Pi' display which really brightens up dingy school corridors and is a great talking point for passing students. Importantly, it's also very quick and easy to put up!

And finally...
I wrote the MA August e-News which you can read here for the latest news from The Mathematical Association. I also wrote a magazine article about teaching indices and an accompanying resource which (hopefully) will be published at some point in the next couple of months.

Before anyone tells me off for working over summer instead of relaxing, I can assure you that I did a huge amount of relaxing! Because I'm starting a new job, I had no school work to do over summer for the first time in ten years. I spent the first two weeks of the summer break away on a wonderful family holiday, staying in a cottage near Hay-on-Wye. I had a lovely time in the remaining four weeks - highlights included an amazing night out with friends at my first ever Secret Cinema event, enjoying two awesome escape rooms with lovely colleagues, watching numerous films with my husband (A Quiet Place is so good!), and enjoying lots of drawing, jigsaws and days out with my two daughters. I also got the chance to catch up with some friends from Twitter, thanks to Dr Frost.

Megan, Adam, me, Stuart, Chris, Nikki, Colin, Jamie and Daniel.
Photo taken by @CantabKitty at Jamie Frost's summer drinks.

My youngest daughter is starting reception next week and I'm going full-time after six years of working part-time... So I guess it's nearly time to switch the alarm clock back on. Like most people, I'm feeling very sad that summer is over but I'm sure that within a week or two we'll all be back in the swing of things.

Good luck with new school year everyone!

Highlights of 2016

2016 has been truly awful... The best way to cope with so many terrible things happening in one year is to focus on the positives. In the world of maths education, there's been loads of fantastic stuff going on. Although we continue to face challenges relating to workload, behaviour, curriculum change and recruitment, there's still plenty to celebrate. In this post I share some of my favourite moments of 2016.

The Conferences
La Salle's conferences are always brilliant. I was gutted to miss their Leeds conference in June but I really enjoyed the Peterborough conference in March and the Kettering conference in October. La Salle are hosting even more conferences in 2017 (check out their dates and locations here) so if you haven't been before, do join us.

Pre-conference drinks in Peterborough in March

Teachers enjoying #mathsconf6 in Peterborough

Cake from Julia Smith at #mathsconf6
to celebrate my 50th gems post

Pre-conference drinks in Kettering
- we made Enigma machines!  

Rob Smith's tuck shop at #mathsconf8 in Kettering

The first researchED Maths and Science was held in Oxford in June 2016. It was excellent. I really hope to see this event return in 2017.

A wonderful venue for researchED Maths and Science

Maths teachers meet for lunch at researchED Maths and Science

In 2016 I attended a number of conferences as a presenter, including Edexcel's Warwick conference, the FMSP's London KS5 Network Day, and Coast2Coast TSA's maths conference.

Peter Mattock and I presenting at
Coast2Coast TSA's maths conference

Meeting my maths hero Hannah Fry at
Edexcel's Warwick conference

The Social Events
I really enjoy meeting up with maths teachers who I've chatted to on Twitter. A highlight this year was our trip to Bletchley Park in the summer holidays. We were so lucky to be treated to a tour of the grounds and a private demonstration of an Enigma machine.

Summer day out at Bletchey Park with fellow tweeters

Some of #teambletchley

La Salle organised their second summer meet up for maths teachers - Pie and Maths.

Summer drinks at #pieandmaths

I had a lovely time at one of Old Andrew's blogger curries.

Out for drinks with edubloggers, organised by
blogging legend Andrew Old

In December I hosted #christmaths16. 110 teachers got together for festive mathsy fun at the Science Museum followed by a night out at a Kensington pub.

Post-museum drinks at #christmaths16

Maths teachers enjoying #christmaths16

The Grassroots Events
This year I've attended a number of events at local schools. I presented at Maths in the Sticks which was an A level day run by Stuart Price, and I presented at Paul Collins' MathsMeet at Oakwood School. I also travelled up to Oldham to present at Lindsey Bennett's LIME event. I hosted my own event too - MathsMeet Glyn took place on a Saturday morning in March and starred one of my maths heroes, Don Steward.

Paul Collins at Oakwood School's MathsMeet

Ben Sparks presenting at Stuart Price's 'Maths in the Sticks' Event

With colleagues at lunch after #mathsmeetglyn

With Don Steward
at #mathsmeetglyn

The Websites and Resources
During 2016 the world of maths resources went from strength to strength.

Clarissa Grandi's artfulmaths.com is a beautiful new website, providing inspiration and resources for both classroom displays and creative maths lessons.

New website mrcartermaths.com is highly valued for its ease of use. Excellent websites such as mrbartonmaths.com, corbettmaths.com and mathsbot.com have continued to develop new content.

For A level teachers, undergroundmathematics.org arrived on the scene, providing high quality rich tasks from the team at the University of Cambridge. We also discovered the IYGB papers on madasmaths.com, providing a large bank of challenging exam style papers for A level students.

The prime game from Christian Lawson-Perfect provided hours of entertainment - and fierce competition - amongst maths teachers.

Throughout 2016 maths hubs all over the country supported teachers in both primary and secondary schools. The White Rose Maths Hub shared excellent schemes of work and assessment resources for Key Stages 1, 2 and 3.

Craig Barton's podcasts were a wonderful feature of 2016 - if you've not discovered these yet, they are well worth a listen. Look out for more of Craig's podcasts in 2017.

The Networks
Since joining Twitter in 2014, my career has been transformed. Its incredible network of teachers continues to provide an endless supply of support, advice, resources, ideas and encouragement. During 2016 I was fortunate to become involved with both the AQA Maths Expert Panel and the TES Maths Panel too.

Some of the AQA Maths Expert Panel members
sporting Christmas jumpers at our December meeting

School

I can't talk about my 2016 maths education highlights without mentioning my wonderful school and my awesome colleagues. They're a real pleasure to work with.

Lizzie and I with Year 13 maths students on their
last day at Glyn. They don't normally look so scruffy!

Celebrating results on the first day of the new
school year with colleagues Harry and Farah

With trainee teacher Sarah
at Glyn's staff Christmas party

With colleague Rachel at Glyn's
 staff Christmas dinner

Joint Heads of Maths Christina
and Catherine, with NQT Amelia 

Looking Ahead
2017 brings the first sitting of maths GCSE 9 - 1. The successful delivery of this new qualification will be something for maths teachers to celebrate. I worry about how the media and public will react to low grade boundaries and falling 'pass rates' though. I also worry about our poor 'guinea pig' year groups who won't be funded to resit if they get a Grade 4, even though it's likely they'll need a Grade 5 for future career opportunities.

2017 also brings the start of the new linear maths A level. Some of the specifications are not yet accredited, and it's with trepidation that I look ahead to the summer term. I expect that there will be a last minute rush to organise schemes of work, teacher CPD, resources and textbooks.

The Smith Report on post-16 education is due to be published any day now and I (nervously) look forward to seeing the recommendations.

There are many wonderful events planned for maths teachers in 2017 - see my event listings for details. I look forward to La Salle's next conference (11th March in Bristol) and I really hope I'll be able to attend the very exciting JustMaths conference at Alton Towers in June.

I'm positive that the many maths teacher networks, including our wonderful Twitter community, will continue to thrive in 2017.

We have a lot to look forward to.

Happy New Year, maths teachers!

#christmaths16

I'm very excited to share the details of this year's Christmaths event, which takes place in London on Thursday 22nd December 2016.

#christmaths15 was a great success (read about it here). We had an afternoon of CPD with brilliant speakers followed by food, drinks, puzzles and a quiz.

I know that many maths teachers are looking forward to the opening of the new maths gallery at the Science Museum, so I decided to organise a different type of Christmas event this year. Here's the plan:

3pm - 5pm: Group visit to Mathematics: The Winton Gallery. Explore this exciting new gallery in the company of fellow maths teachers.

5pm - 7pm: We will have exclusive use of the Media Space Cafe at the Science Museum where you will be treated to a glass of fizz and a mince pie. The Big Fat Christmaths Quiz will return! Tickets for this reception are only £12. There are 130 spaces available and I expect these to go quickly so book now!

From 7pm: If anyone fancies a bit of festive socialising, we'll be going round the corner to The Hereford Arms afterwards. This isn't ticketed so you can just decide on the day if you'd like to come along.

For full details of the event and to buy tickets visit christmaths.co.uk. Please invite your friends and colleagues along too! All welcome.

Christmaths Party!

I'm very excited to announce the details of my Christmaths Party which takes place on Monday 21st December in London.

I got the idea for this event when I was planning a lesson on truncating decimals for my Year 10 class. A couple of colleagues looked over my shoulder and asked what I was doing -  they weren't aware that this topic is on the new GCSE specification. This made me realise that maths teachers need more support. Over the last year we've been overwhelmed with information about the new qualifications and now we're on the front line delivering the content all by ourselves. Over the next two years we'd all benefit from ongoing access to training on the new GCSE content. With this in mind, I decided to organise a training session in conjunction with a Christmas social event. Any excuse for a party... :)

I'm fortunate to be able to offer workshops from a number of enthusiastic and knowledgeable speakers. Between 3pm and 6pm there will be five 30 minute sessions about the new GCSE. The exact programme is still to be confirmed. I've created a website for this event - christmaths.weebly.com - and will update it with full details as soon as I can.

After the CPD is complete the party will start. Sumptuous bowl food will be served at 7pm. There'll be loads of evening entertainment to make this a great night out.

The £25 ticket price covers food, a welcome drink, CPD and festivities. Click here to book - there are only 75 tickets available for this event and I expect these to sell out quickly!

Although there is limited capacity for the CPD, thankfully I'm also able to offer 'party only' tickets for the evening. These are £18 (which includes food) - arrival is from 6pm onwards. Bring your whole team along to celebrate the end of a long and busy term.

The venue is Pause on Leadenhall Street, which is marked with a star on the map below. It's walking distance from six tube stations so easily accessible from anywhere in London. The closest station is Aldgate which is only a couple of minutes walk away.

If you're travelling from outside London then you might want to stay overnight. Of course there's plenty of great reasons to visit London at this time of year, including Winter Wonderland, ice skating at Somerset House and last minute Christmas shopping. There are dozens of hotels within walking distance of the venue, here's a few:

• Travelodge Tower Bridge - currently £44 (book now - it was £39 when I checked last week)
• Premier Inn Aldgate - currently £69
• Qbic London City - currently £78
• Motel One - currently £98
• Hotel Indigo - currently £99

There are also other Travelodges and Premier Inns nearby.

The dress code is casual, but party outfits would be nice!

So, does my Christmaths Party sound good? I hope so! The hashtag for this party, in anticipation of it becoming an annual event, is #christmaths15.  

See you there! I can't wait. Quick - buy a ticket!