Category: Maths
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Q & A: Maths teacher Christine Utber
Christine Utber reflects on the difference a maths teacher made to her career, dispels the myth of the ‘maths person’, and discusses why she hates when students say “I don’t get it!” Where do you work and what is your role? I am a mathematics teacher at an all girls independent school on the Mornington…
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Maths for Everyone: Why there is no such thing as a ‘maths person’
‘I’m not a maths person.’ That’s a statement you’ve all probably heard many times. However, the skills that students learn in mathematics are among the most practical taught in school. Mathematics underpins the world we live in and it teaches our children valuable problem-solving skills. Mathematics provides us with a language to explain much of…
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Maths teachers can help students avoid financial pitfalls in the future
First published by EducationHQ. Following recent scrutiny of the banking sector by a Royal Commission, there have been calls to end the practice of allowing a financial institution, such as the Commonwealth Bank, to “invite itself” into primary school classrooms through schemes such as the “Dollarmites” children’s banking project. The bad press directed at the big…
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Global trends in the teaching of mathematics
By Annie Facchinetti “After 30 years of doing such work, I have concluded that classroom teaching … is perhaps the most complex, most challenging, and most demanding, subtle, nuanced and frightening activity that our species has ever invented … The only time a physician could possibly encounter a situation of comparable complexity would be in…
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Maths trauma is real, but it can be avoided. Here’s how.
By Oxford Insight Mathematics author and lecturer in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at UNSW Sydney, Daniel Mansfield Maths trauma, the issue highlighted in the US edition of The Conversation, is real. If a student never masters irrational numbers then when they come to trigonometry (which involves lots of irrational numbers), they will receive…
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Q&A with award-winning maths lecturer, Daniel Mansfield
It took being laughed at during class for Daniel Mansfield to set his mind to improve his maths skills. Starting out as a good student, he became an excellent one to prove his teacher wrong. Mansfield went on to achieve a PhD in mathematics and to be named ‘Most Inspiring Lecturer in First Year’. Can…
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Maths teachers will only achieve ‘light bulb’ moments if they have the confidence to take risks
By Peter Sullivan, author of Challenging Mathematical Tasks I have asked many teachers, ‘What gives you joy when you are teaching mathematics?’ It is very common for teachers to respond with the answer: ‘Light bulbs’. I presume they mean those delightful moments when students move from confusion to clarity, when they see the pathway to…
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Lost without atlas skills
By Annie Facchinetti The digital native, tech savvy students in our classrooms today have no need for traditional skills such as knowing how to use an atlas or to read a map, right? They’ll just use Google to get fast information about places or to find their way around. While it’s tempting to think that…