Everyone is Special
<< An ATM publicationThis is a fantastic publication that allows pupils to access many areas of mathematics from a problem-solving angle. I have used the activities with mixed ability and pupils in sets. Even less able students are able to gain something from the activities.
It is hard to choose a favourite but if pushed I would go for the fraction to decimal grid which gives access to families of fractions, gradients of lines and an introduction to trigonometry. Although some may not like the fact that there are no particular guidelines on how to use the activities or what they may be used to teach, nor are there any answers. However, I actually think this is a strength of the booklet as it has allowed me to consider more carefully where an activity might be used in my classroom and what the outcomes might be.
It could also be used in department meetings for discussing what the activities could be used for, as many teachers will use the activities in different ways. I think every maths department should have a copy.
Yvonne Scott
Second in Mathematics, Cox Green School, Maidenhead
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Everyone is Special
This slim, glossy A4 booklet contains a collection of mathematical tasks that the author, Mike Ollerton, used at his workshop at the 2002 ATM conference ‘Maths is Special’. Mike explains his mission: avoid categorising students by so-called ‘ability’! instead open opportunities by providing “accessible-to-all starting points&rdsquo; for mathematical activity together with extensions from the basic task. All the tasks provided in the booklet have been used in Mike’s teaching, and many are variations on well-loved ‘starting-points’ in the spirit of other ATM publications, like the ‘Points of Departure’ booklets.
Had I been part of Mike’s conference workshop, I expect that I’d be very pleased to have this collection: it reminds the reader of the conference event and communicates, nicely, a sense of fun that the workshop must have engendered. And that is the atmosphere that ideally school and college students should be able to inhale too.
As Mike knows, a looseness in the expression of a mathematical task, together with some physical equipment available, and colleagues intending to share a gaze on a task that might provoke mathematical thinking and communication, are excellent materials for a successful ATM workshop. None of these tasks, as set out, could be ‘lifted’ straight to a school maths situation where the students have not already been disciplined in learning from exploratory tasks as exemplified in the booklet; it would have been interesting to know what equipment was available or suggested for each task (I guessed some equipment, but, for example, finding volumes of cylinders relative to a constraint, will need some electronic tool, but none was mentioned).
As a school-teacher participant in a workshop, my experience has been that you latch on to one or two specific tasks that you rework for your own students in your own classroom. The tasks in this booklet need such re-working for practice - that’s no bad thing! And that requirement brings into focus the centrality of the teacher in his or her classroom: his or her values, beliefs and skills.
Mike said in his introduction “the heart of the workshop was the issue of access&rdsquo; and, while I believe that the conference workshop participants may well have been inspired, nitty-gritty ideas - ‘tips’ - on how to present these tasks, and to encourage and extend actual mathematics students in the real context of their learning is quite absent.
Many conferences do publish their ‘proceedings’. While I hope that ATM does not start on a road to producing ‘Easter records’, sometimes a publication from a workshop is worth doing. I think that it was in this case, especially for the people who were present!
Melissa Rodd
Centre for Studies in Mathematics and Science Education, University of Leeds
Everyone is Special
Mike Ollerton
ATM
ISBN - 1 898611 19 X
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