More 3 minute writing

An observation from my own classroom: Students in my lower ability year 10 group recently completed a 'mock' GCSE paper. One of the (closed) questions asked students to describe parts of a circle (diameter and an arc) and to label a given chord and segment. None of the 15 students got the question correct, and the following lesson we found ourselves going through the names for parts of circles. They're lovely kids but retention is not a strong point, so I found myself talking about everyday things - "going off on a tangent ... going off in a different direction", Arc... "Noah's Arc and the hull of a ship", Segment.... "segment of orange.... Terry's Chocolate Orange!", Sector... "Enemy sector on a radar screen for fighter pilots", Chords and guitar strings. And at the end I thought of the images I must be conjurring in these students heads - chocolate oranges, fighter jets, Noah's Arc, guitars, and wondered if they'd taken much away, When marking their books I noticed they had spelt pi as "pie". At least they know it all comes from a circle! 

So a reflection on my practice, and Woody Allen's movie "Annie Hall" comes to mind. It ends on a joke about a guy who goes to his psychiatrist and says "doc, my brother's crazy, he thinks he's a chicken" the doctor says "well, why don't you turn him in?" And the guy replies, "I would but I need the eggs".
Mark Malhan




I was fascinated by the poster activity. What I noticed was that my 'understanding' (whatever that means!) for one part of the poster changed according to:

(a) the way in which I visually approached it: I saw it as part of a particular pattern when my eyes were coming from the 'north', but saw it as part of a different pattern when my eyes were coming from the 'south';

(b) the awareness I had at the time of viewing: my awareness of the geometry (and algebra) of the poster changed over time, partly due to what I noticed but mainly due to working on comments from otehrs. This meant that I kept viewing the same part of the poster in different ways according to my awareness at the time of viewing.

The above acts as a metaphor for me both in terms of learning generally, but also for the challenge of trying to teach mathematics. I can only work with those things of which I am aware. The purpose of working with such a wonderful group is that through such work I have the new exciting possibility of working on my teaching as I am a changed person in terms of my own awarenesses and so similar things now appear different.
Dave Hewitt




What interested me was the power of silence. In my classroom I am always encouraging pupils to discuss their ideas with those around them. Whilst this is a worthwhile activity, I wonder if sometimes it would be useful to just say "look at this image - study it for a minute in silence - and then you can discuss this with the person next to you ". At the start of the day I found the silence slightly uncomfortable. By the end of the day I enjoyed the opportunity to sit and think and ponder - and it interested me how I kept on noticing new things after a considerable amount of time... and this was before anyone had even spoke. How much time do I provide for pupils to sit and think, quietly, before pestering them?!
Lindsay Smith




I will end by sharing some of the Y7 students’ imaginings of a giant from a ‘Giant’s hand’.

My storyline asked my Y7 class to describe the giant from the scanned photo of the hand enlarged on the whiteboard. I was immediately rumbled when one student said, “it is your hand sir, scanned on that”. Nevertheless, I persisted in asking them to imagine the giant. I plied them with Halloween chocolates bought from Waitrose.

They decided that the giant could not be black, could we decide the gender?
Could we decide if the giant was adult or a child? So here we had to decide on the constraints and assumptions to the problem, s/he is an adult.
For homework, I asked them to measure their own handspan on graph paper, and hinted that measuring their own handspan will help us estimate the height of the giant.

How tall is the giant? One overwheliming favourite was, “If my height is 14 times my hand, then the giant’s height is also 14 times its handspan.”

I think of space to connect to range and averages, what if the hand belonged to a baby, a child, an adult giant?
Lawrence Wong