Mathematics Teaching 165 - December 1998

Editorial - Barbara and Derek Ball

We are faced with a world which wants quick and universal answers and sets up endless committees and working parties to produce them.

Letters - Sue Pope; Jon McKernan; Sam Costello

Why not make the arithmetic more difficult: use large numbers, fractions, decimals, negative numbers, irrationals?

Ministerial muddling over mixed ability - Mike Ollerton

Separating children into attainment groups in order to enhance their learning is a falsehood and reminiscent of the slogan from the flour advert: "Graded grains make finer flour'.

Mathematics and self in professional judgement - Anne Watson

My conclusions were based on asking probing questions and listening to the students talk about mathematics, not on accumulated knowledge of the child nor on 'gut feeling'.

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1089 - Alf Coles

Lucy and Shelley wanted to try what happened if the last number was bigger than the first. They got stuck so I suggested they do it on a calculator.

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Pythagoras verses - Mark Andrews and Nick Cheadle

Anti-maths overhears the sadness of the girl and seizes his chance to steal another pupil.

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Some thoughts on constructing a curriculum - Geoffrey Howson

Ensuring that standard techniques have real meaning for individual children may well be more important as a final goal than expecting or encouraging them to determine their own personal strategies.

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Whatever happened to ICT? - Jeremy Richardson

An underwhelming four references to the use of ICT in the teaching and learning of mathematics.

Reviewing the review - Peter Lacey

The money invested in rewriting a new National Curriculum could be divened to developing such a resource. But common sense may prove too radical.

The shade and stick curriculum - Harriet Marland

Shape and space is a powerful context for insight and imagination, analysing and proof, for even the youngest pupils?

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Shape and space -which is important: process or content? - Geoff Faux

The geometry curriculum is, on too many occasions, now reduced to a set of slight, disconnected, uncoordinated, non-challenging activities.

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Maths in a multi-lingual environment - Richard Barwell

Fractions is a complex and many-layered topic which provokes much thought amongst teachers and children alike.

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What is a fraction divided by another fraction? - Swee Fong Ng

The students went on to explore the meaning of the answers they obtained when a whole number was divided by a fraction.

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A word problem - S Parameswaran

Direct or straightforward problems offer no difficulty to students, while a small twist or variation (like truncating the chain) is enough to nonplus them.

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Numeracy, numeracy, numeracy - Alison Price

It had been common in many primary schools for children to work in groups, and for each group to be working on a different area of the curriculum at any given time.

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Reviews - ATM

The number sense; A Dozen Dials; Extending mathematical ability through whole class teaching; Social Constructivism as a Philosophy of Mathematics; Questions and prompts her mathematical thinking

Personal View - Liz Cox

Why is it that there are more students in higher sets with surnames that start with a letter near the beginning of the alphabet?

Political View - Annie Gammon

The mathematics officers at QCA now selected smaller groups to work on the different attainment targets to agree major 'landmarks' which all students should be aiming for within each attainment target.

Congruent dissections of polygons - Derek Ball

I was able to do the eight-piece problem. I was pretty sure there was only one solution, until I was working with a group ofY9 students and one of them showed me how she had cut a regular hexagon into eight pieces in two different ways.

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