My seventh year of teaching and I got to teach moments for the first time this week! I've taught A Level every year but somehow never taught this bit of the spec.

Some fun deriving the mean and variance of the geometric distribution with 12FM today. Next week we will try and derive the Poisson distribution!

A long discussion with Year 13 today about why we can't say a calculated 95% confidence interval has a 95% probability of containing the mean. Gosh I wish we just taught Bayesian statistics instead!

Big change from Oxford University! For 2027 entry onwards they will use the TMUA (October sitting) for maths and not the MAT. I am off to update SUMS magazine for current Year 12 students 😂 @meimaths.bsky.social www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/u...

I marked some homework on chi squared tests today. It really frustrates me that students have to do these sorts of tests by hand when of course in reality they are all done by computer.

Marking Year 10 trigonometry homework - one of them has accidentally had his calculator in gradians! First time for everything...

There's been some good ones this year. If I had to choose it would be Everyone in my Family has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson. I loved his second book too and looking forward to the third next year.

Unexpected email from Jonny Griffiths telling me there's a new 2026 update of his RISPS book, that's great investigations for impressionable A Level students. Download it now from www.risps.co.uk with links to Geogebra and Excel files @jonny-griffiths.bsky.social

Solutions for 2001 STEP III now on my website! That's now 1994-2001 done. Once I've done 2002 and 2003 it should become easier as 2004 is when official solutions become available. swintonmaths.co.uk/indexphp/ste...

On a walk today I got to see the rather impressive Colne Valley Viaduct which will carry HS2 trains in the future.

Year 10 homework this week included the classic question "how many piano tuners are there London?". Answers ranged from 6 to 4000!

Happy/Merry/Blessed Halloween/Samhain/Spooky Season to all who celebrate!

Fun with Y12 FM today!

Just a few days now until the 2025 National Cipher Challenge opens for registration! If you know someone aged 11-18 who might like codes and ciphers (or who might not yet know that they do!) then get them to take a look at www.cipherchallenge.org on Thursday.

Some fun for Year 10 homework this week

Just found this gem! On the Y10 homework today.

Tofu scramble 😋

I see all these posts about Banda machines and even with Google I'm still pretty clueless about what they are.

Not bad!

Dinner at speed!

I won a coconut on a coconut shy today! What an exciting village fete.

Some help for my students who forgot calculators for a test today

I'm very happy at my current school with no intention of moving but it is still fun to have a peek at the jobs board on TES every now and again!

I've written a practice paper for OCR H245 further maths statistics. It's on my website along with the Edexcel spec papers I wrote a couple of years ago. I'm planning to do a mechanics one in the next week or two as well. swintonmaths.co.uk/indexphp/a-l...

Union executive election ballot paper sent!

Scout Camp this weekend - it's looking like a balmy 22 degrees tomorrow! Makes a change from one I ran a few years ago at the same time of year where it was below 0...

As we move into revision season, a reminder that I have written a set of practice papers for Edexcel FM (CP1, CP2, FM1). swintonmaths.co.uk/indexphp/a-l... I'm now at a school that teaches OCR, and I'll probably do a similar things for FM mechanics and statistics this year.

In #ALevelMaths #MathsToday (yesterday actually) we started with this lovely activity that someone shared at the maths conference last year. We went on to look at geometric and matrix proofs of the addition formulae.

Adolescence on Netflix. I watched all four episodes on Sunday. It's incredible. Watch it.

Update: this is fantastic. No fluff, just hundreds upon hundreds of good, well-designed questions.

OCR FM June 2019 Mechanics Q7. Yuck!

I think I've taught compound angle formulae every year since I started 5.5 years ago, using this diagram from the Edexcel textbook. I still remember how awfully it went the first time! It's nice to be able to look back and think that I have improved my practice over that time.

I'm very pro maths being assessed by (handwritten) exams, but I despair at students having to do things like this by hand. I taught chi-squared tests last week and it's the same problem. Most exam questions are fairly sensible and only make them do a small subset of the calculations, but even so...

A very exciting arrival into my pigeonhole. I particularly love the comment about un-italicising ds in differentials!

Some fun today. Doing some work on domain and range of functions with Year 12. I asked them to come up with a function with (largest possible) domain [2, 3]U(4, 5). It took them a while!

Logarithms intro with L6 further mathematicians in #MathsToday. #ALevelMaths

At least in maths, the thing I am fairly hopeful is only a few years away is a reliable ability for AI to mark students' (handwritten) work against a mark scheme and provide both individual feedback for students and summary feedback for teachers.

A productive week as STEP II and III 2000 solutions are now on my website! swintonmaths.co.uk/indexphp/ste... Featuring this wonderful statics diagram:

New! My 184th gems post. Ideas, updates and resources for maths teachers. 💎 www.resourceaholic.com/2025/01/5-ma... #UKMathsChat #MathsToday

10pm is definitely the time to visit the supermarket the weekend before Christmas. It's empty!

Term done and halfway across the country to my Dad's house. Hooray!

Does anybody else keep seeing Get Into Teaching adverts online?

I'm in the process of becoming a governor at a local (secondary) school. Does anyone else have experience of this? Two questions: How did you get the most out of it, and how were you the most useful to the school?

I've just had the (in hindsight, obvious) realisation that finding the centre of mass of a plane shape and the mean of a continuous distribution are the same thing! Just in time for my 13FM group this afternoon.

I've just started teaching circular motion this week to 13FM. I've never taught it before and it's been so great to remember all the cool stuff I learnt at university!

An open-ended starter question for my first lesson with my AS Further Maths groups. Some approached it by trying different values of b, others by writing it in brackets first, some went down the discriminant route. Then, I took the opportunity to rave about sliders on Desmos and how great they are 😄

I've made it to the new millennium as STEP I solutions from 2000 are now uploaded. swintonmaths.co.uk/indexphp/ste...

I've found a lot of "general" T&L CPD to be fairly inapplicable to maths classrooms - particularly when it comes to things like revision.

This was indeed nice, and something I'll set to Year 12 when we do polynomial integration this year. I ended up with (8sqrt(6)-9sqrt(3))/6, which I hope is correct!

In very exciting news, I'm teaching further mechanics and further statistics this year (OCR). Are there any particularly good resources out there? I've already got two sets of textbooks and Integral.