# What I did in mathS today...



## Bend The Light (Oct 15, 2011)

skittles by http://bendthelight.me.uk, on Flickr



PS. I am the teacher.


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## Meekminx (Oct 15, 2011)

Brilliant!


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## Heitz (Oct 15, 2011)

Hahahahah!  Is that real?  I would have expected it to be much more uniform.


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## 480sparky (Oct 15, 2011)

So is what they say about green M&Ms also hold true for green Skittles?


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## GeorgieGirl (Oct 15, 2011)

Excellent work!!!:thumbup:


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## Bend The Light (Oct 15, 2011)

rheitz1 said:


> Hahahahah!  Is that real?  I would have expected it to be much more uniform.



It IS true, yes...was only a small packet from a party multipack sort of thing. But I only ate them after, not before! 

In all seriousness, we do do a small statistical project that involves packets of smarties or M&Ms, or skittles and the relative numbers of the different colours. The kids work harder knowing they can eat them afterwards!


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## Bend The Light (Oct 15, 2011)

480sparky said:


> So is what they say about green M&Ms also hold true for green Skittles?



Yep!


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## Bend The Light (Oct 15, 2011)

GeorgieGirl said:


> Excellent work!!!:thumbup:



Thanks.


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## cgipson1 (Oct 15, 2011)

A teacher that contributes to cavities and sugar overload! WOW! Where were you forty years ago, when I needed you?


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## Bend The Light (Oct 15, 2011)

cgipson1 said:


> A teacher that contributes to cavities and sugar overload! WOW! Where were you forty years ago, when I needed you?



I was nearly 2. 

I make sure that the kids only get the sweets at the end of the lesson...basically, "wind them up, then let the go!" ha ha!

At the end of the day, if they learn some maths because of a few sweeties now and again, then my job is getting done...motivation is the key, and it is severely lacking in all but the very top end of kids these days, I'm afraid.


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## tevo (Oct 15, 2011)

I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE.


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## Bend The Light (Oct 15, 2011)

tevo said:


> I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE.



Yeah...ha ha.


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## tevo (Oct 15, 2011)

Bend The Light said:


> tevo said:
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> > I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE.
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reply to my PM!


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## BlackSheep (Oct 15, 2011)

Bend The Light said:


> cgipson1 said:
> 
> 
> > A teacher that contributes to cavities and sugar overload! WOW! Where were you forty years ago, when I needed you?
> ...



I so wish that you had been my math teacher when I was young, a teacher like you would have saved me a ton of struggling with math in my adult life! Hope those kids (or at least their parents) appreciate what you do.


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## Bend The Light (Oct 15, 2011)

BlackSheep said:


> I so wish that you had been my math teacher when I was young, a teacher like you would have saved me a ton of struggling with math in my adult life! Hope those kids (or at least their parents) appreciate what you do.



Got to try and make it interesting these days...we're competing with Facebook, xbox, Playstations and trash TV. Every kid believes they will succeed in life as a winner of X-factor or on the lottery. Reality doesn't hit until too late...just ask the late teenagers still trying to pass their maths exams for the third or 4th time because they found out too late that they need a grade C to get a job stacking shelves!

I hope I succeed, at least with some, and I hope I do it in an entertaining way whilst delivering the results. It also helps my sanity to "ring the changes" once in a while! 

Do they appreciate it? Hmmm, maybe about 5% of the kids I teach will appreciate it. To 5% of the kids I am a legend. To maybe 50% of them I am just "there" to be tolerated, and to the remaining 45% I am their nemesis! not only a teacher...a MATHS teacher! The worst possible fiend from hell!


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## Overread (Oct 15, 2011)

Bend The Light said:


> The worst possible fiend from hell!



No no only the 3rd 
The sports teacher still has a place above you and above that is the purest of evil --- a sports teacher that also teaches maths (such horrors do exist - rare thankfully, but they are out there!!)


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## Bend The Light (Oct 15, 2011)

Overread said:


> Bend The Light said:
> 
> 
> > The worst possible fiend from hell!
> ...



Hmmm, maybe. All my worst kids seem to like their PE teachers, though. mind you, most PE teachers in our school are young and fit...maybe that has something to do with it, as I am neither (whichever use of the word "fit" you choose!)


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## BlackSheep (Oct 15, 2011)

I bet that most of that 50% you think are just tolerating you are going to look back in a few years and then appreciate what you taught them.

How old are the kids you are teaching? These days I've been doing my best to help my 11 year old niece with her homework, but it's a bit of a struggle even though she is a very, very smart young woman. I do wonder if Facebook and the rest of the instant media has limited her ability to focus on doing her homework..... she just doesn't know how to do the research for herself, I find. But perhaps she's a bit young for me to expect too much quite yet, I'm not sure.


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## Overread (Oct 15, 2011)

Eh its not just the distractions of life (always had them) but the school system itself that I blame - at least in the UK everything up to and including A-level for each subject basically comes out of one text book (the subject textbook) and because the papers are marked by random teaches to a syllabus points system (worse now we have tickboxes appearing for many!) any student that actually researches outside of the textbook can risk getting a lower score because their points/arguments/facts are not in line with the taught content.


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## Bend The Light (Oct 15, 2011)

BlackSheep said:


> I bet that most of that 50% you think are just tolerating you are going to look back in a few years and then appreciate what you taught them.
> 
> How old are the kids you are teaching? These days I've been doing my best to help my 11 year old niece with her homework, but it's a bit of a struggle even though she is a very, very smart young woman. I do wonder if Facebook and the rest of the instant media has limited her ability to focus on doing her homework..... she just doesn't know how to do the research for herself, I find. But perhaps she's a bit young for me to expect too much quite yet, I'm not sure.



I teach 11-16 (sometimes 18). A big issue over here at the moment is "Independent Learning" and the kids inability to do it. We are working on ways to improve that situation.
11 is a good age here - we get them from primary school at 11 and my current Year 7 group is lovely with mostly bright-ish but nice kids who are prepared to work and prepared to learn. The trick is keeping them like that as the hormones kick in! I have a couple of extremely bright classes, too, aged 12-13 and 13-14. They are my reason to work at the moment...I love the challenge of stretching them, of managing to give them something mathematical to marvel at that doesn't appear on their TV screens!
I admit to failure where the kids are less bright, and less well behaved. There are members of staff in my department who are excellent at this, whereas i am not. my forte is with the higher achievers, where my colleagues often can't cope. Horses for courses, as they say.

With your neice, the only thing to do is to keep at it...if the attention span is short, keep the sessions short...I often have 2 or 3 different activities in a 50 minute lesson. Have the niece explain to YOU what she is doing rather than you explain to her. She may well know more than she thinks, and explaining may draw that out...
And focus on basic skills...in the old days we used to chant our times tables, we did our calculations on paper. If this stuff becomes second nature as it is to me, then the harder/different things she will be doing can take precedence. One of the barriers to our teaching all the kids need to pass their exams is that they can't do the basics. no point teaching the solving of quadratics to someone who can't add two 3-digit numbers together!


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## Bend The Light (Oct 15, 2011)

Overread said:


> Eh its not just the distractions of life (always had them) but the school system itself that I blame - at least in the UK everything up to and including A-level for each subject basically comes out of one text book (the subject textbook) and because the papers are marked by random teaches to a syllabus points system (worse now we have tickboxes appearing for many!) any student that actually researches outside of the textbook can risk getting a lower score because their points/arguments/facts are not in line with the taught content.



That's not the case in so many places. I rarely use textbooks, other than as consolidation of work done. I TEACH the subject matter myself, from my head, using methods I have shown to work. I use resources from the internet, from books other than texts, and again, resources myself or my collegues have devised.
In some schools I KNOW that the subject is taught with a book, and that in some schools the subject is taught by temporary staff, by unqualified staff, etc., but that is not the case in the main.

It is also not the case that deviations from a set method are marked down (unless they are wrong, of course). Many of the staff in my department are exam markers, and the training is significant and thorough (these days!) with numerous different methods shown on the mark scheme. In fact, the mark schemes are in danger of becoming TOO inclusive of all the weird and wonderful methods that could possibly be marked as correct. No, in the main, the methods taught are the ones that work, the ones that leave as little chance of error as possible...I say in the main because of course, I can't speak for all maths teachers.

Last point: we ARE trying to get out of this "teach to the test" crap that was imposed on teachers many years back. We ARE trying desperately to have the kids thinking for themselves, learning for themselves, and leaving the spoon-feeding behind. SATs have been dropped in most places now, in Y6 and in Y9. Teacher Assessment by the teacher that has taught them for a good while is where the data will come from...and if I see evidence of original or independent thinking leading to a decent (correct) solution to a problem, then that kid gets my vote! 

Cheers


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## Overread (Oct 15, 2011)

Ahh been a while since I was in the system - didn't know that Sats had been dropped so widely, though I know more than a few schools were certainly very vocal about not liking them. Is your school still on the national system or is it aiming to be one of the breakaway groups? Last I heard I know there were a good few which were aiming to break away into their own or into smaller grouped examination systems outside from the exam heavy and tickbox direction that the national appeared to be going


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## Bend The Light (Oct 15, 2011)

Overread said:


> Ahh been a while since I was in the system - didn't know that Sats had been dropped so widely, though I know more than a few schools were certainly very vocal about not liking them. Is your school still on the national system or is it aiming to be one of the breakaway groups? Last I heard I know there were a good few which were aiming to break away into their own or into smaller grouped examination systems outside from the exam heavy and tickbox direction that the national appeared to be going



We still do the GCSE's and A levels set by one (or more) of the big exam boards, but we are free to choose. We still have to cover the material, but things are changing all the time. For example, Key Stage 3 is just 2 years, with no exam at the end. KS4 is now three years, to do the GCSE. But we have been doing a modular course, with exams every few months, but now we are going back to a linear exam like we used to do when I were a lad! But we have 3 years...we can enrich, we can digress, we can teach again, and again, in all that time. Bright kids can do it in 2 years and then do other maths stuff, functional maths, Entry Level maths, statistics (yuk!) and maybe even some early A level. We can spend that time teaching kids to learn, as well as teaching them to follow a syllabus.

Our school has come out of local authority control, we are now an Acadamy. Difference? Not much...but we are more autonomous...but we are also (even) more accountable.


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## Compaq (Oct 15, 2011)

Statistically speaking, you haven't got much conclusive stuff there. I'm guessing the choosing of the different species of skittles is stochastic, meaning it's random. So, unless you repeat this, I'd say, 100-1000 times, you haven't got much workable data to be published. What you'd want, of course, is to find out which value between the 0 and 1 the chance of randomly picking up a certain colour skittle converges toward: the Relative Frequency. Like when throwing a dice, the relative frequency approaches 1/6th.

But the school year just started, do 3-4 packets a day, and you'll have a solid data set by the summer.


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## BlackSheep (Oct 15, 2011)

Bend The Light said:


> BlackSheep said:
> 
> 
> > I bet that most of that 50% you think are just tolerating you are going to look back in a few years and then appreciate what you taught them.
> ...



Bolding mine - I love that sentence! Without that, I imagine that teaching would feel very hollow. I've met a few other teachers over the past couple of years, and was saddened to hear them say that their favourite part of the job was getting summers off. I really respect what you do.

Thanks very much for the advice on helping my neice! So far, I haven't had the chance to do anything really structured with her, as I've been the "smart" aunt who gets called in to help her with the hard assignments at the last minute. Now that she's getting older, though, I'll be working with her more, and will definitely be working on the basics as we go. And, I do have to remember to let her figure the answer out for herself - that's something that I have slipped a bit on occasionally. You gave me a good reminder that she needs to not only learn the material at hand, but she also has to develop the confidence that she can learn it without my help thanks!

Edited to add - sorry for the interuption, I see that the the conversation doesn't quite relate to this now, but I did want to thank Bend the Light! Please do continue as you were.......


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## Heitz (Oct 15, 2011)

Bend The Light said:


> cgipson1 said:
> 
> 
> > A teacher that contributes to cavities and sugar overload! WOW! Where were you forty years ago, when I needed you?
> ...



I also teach statistics.  Not to kids though, college students.   But candy works as well on they as it does on kids!


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## cgipson1 (Oct 15, 2011)

Bend The Light said:


> cgipson1 said:
> 
> 
> > A teacher that contributes to cavities and sugar overload! WOW! Where were you forty years ago, when I needed you?
> ...



Dang.. you are making me feel really old!  lol! (I was good at math.. really! The abacus made it easy!)


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## Bend The Light (Oct 16, 2011)

Compaq said:


> Statistically speaking, you haven't got much conclusive stuff there. I'm guessing the choosing of the different species of skittles is stochastic, meaning it's random. So, unless you repeat this, I'd say, 100-1000 times, you haven't got much workable data to be published. What you'd want, of course, is to find out which value between the 0 and 1 the chance of randomly picking up a certain colour skittle converges toward: the Relative Frequency. Like when throwing a dice, the relative frequency approaches 1/6th.
> 
> But the school year just started, do 3-4 packets a day, and you'll have a solid data set by the summer.



Indeed...and in fact we do just that. We have a "sort of" coursework which involves skittles (or smarties, or M&Ms) and it is done by around 8 different classes, with about 30 kids in each. That's 240 packets, which is getting better, statistically. We pool all our results before eating the evidence!

My favourite bit is when kids are absent...I get to eat...I mean COUNT their skittles. The experiment MUST continue!


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## Bend The Light (Oct 16, 2011)

BlackSheep said:


> Bend The Light said:
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> > BlackSheep said:
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Thanks. We are not often thanked for what we do...appreciate it. Believe me, we EARN those summers!


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## Bend The Light (Oct 16, 2011)

cgipson1 said:


> Bend The Light said:
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I like the "History of Maths" too...I like to show where some of it came from.


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## Overread (Oct 16, 2011)

I had a dream last night where I failed 3 maths papers in a row





I'm scared now


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## Bend The Light (Oct 16, 2011)

Overread said:


> I had a dream last night where I failed 3 maths papers in a row
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I hate dreaming about maths. What's annoying is I dream about teaching...and I am not getting paid! Then I have to get up and do it all again!


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## Compaq (Oct 16, 2011)

I think teaching would be fun. Of course, I should be teaching people that want to learn. University level, perhaps. I'd need a PhD for that. I like teaching, making people understand. But those jobs aren't very well paid here in Norway, going into a private company is much better paid.

One thing I feel about math teachers is this: the more they seem to enjoy what they're teaching, the more do I enjoy it. That counts for all subjects, actually. Sooo, I hope you're being enthusiastic about your subject


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## o hey tyler (Oct 16, 2011)




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## Bend The Light (Oct 16, 2011)

o hey tyler said:


>



Brilliant...you know what my classes will be watching tomorrow!


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## Compaq (Oct 16, 2011)

I can't begin to explain how glad I am for not having to watch this video in class. It was so boring I almost died. Boring man voice, boring dialect, extremely bad humour, bad problems and bad music.  Like, seriously!


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## o hey tyler (Oct 16, 2011)

Compaq said:


> I can't begin to explain how glad I am for not having to watch this video in class. It was so boring I almost died. Boring man voice, boring dialect, extremely bad humour, bad problems and bad music.  Like, seriously!



You missed the entire point


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