Saturday 15 September 2012

Try these sites, see if they help. I think you need to click around on each site to explore what's there and see if anything attracts you or seems as if it's headed in the right direction for you.

SickMafs.

Maths learn.

Exams solutions.

Revision box.

Monday 30 April 2012

Work out a suitable weekly budget for food only.

Your budget must provide the following:
  • a filling breakfast - hot when it's cold, cheering when you're miserable, filling when you're empty. In other words, worth getting out of bed for.
  • a variety of midday meals - proper food, please, and include carbohydrates, proteins, vitamins, minerals. To set you up for the afternoon
  • tea-time snack
  • supper - not too heavy or sweet. If you can manage a cooked salmon, watercress, glass of white wine, that would do nicely.
You have our recent experiment, living on 20 - 15 - 10 - 5 pounds a day to guide you.

Also read this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/jan/22/fruit-vegetable-consumption-poorer-families

Saturday 18 February 2012

Go to math goodies, choose some lessons, see what you can do with them. Let me know.

Then chocolate all round, eh?

Wednesday 4 January 2012

Maths for girls?

Shark, Squirrel, Tiger. I'm speaking my mind.

I HATED maths at school. I dreaded the subject, and not because of the maths.

Mrs Davis ensured the lesson contained ritual humiliations. Explain yourself. Stand up. How can you be in this class? Why are you so ignorant? Come to the board, take the chalk, show everyone how foolish you are. What is wrong with you? Stand at your desk while I throw chalk at you because you insist on defying me by giving the wrong answer.

But the rest of my family were all maths competent! Your great-grandfather was a tool-maker, your grandmother could amass numbers in her head quicker than I could draw breath, and even your uncle - the one who went to the duff school and lives in the shed - he could talk in light years.

WHAT WAS WRONG WITH ME.

I was USELESS.

Well, I don't think anything was wrong with me. It wasn't me that was useless. I think my natural child curiosity for wondering about numbers, seeking out patterns, and wanting to imagine stories for how 1,2,3 might work in the world - it was methodically beaten out of me by the dreadful experience that was school maths.

Years later - watching you children grow, listening to you talk, coming to know how you interact with your world - I believe you are naturally inclined, as humans are, to look for patterns, delight in problems, and enjoy the thrills of your imaginations.

My maths teachers at school did the opposite. They adopted the I AM RIGHT YOU ARE WRONG approach to their subject. They stopped me imagining, dreaming, and exploring. I could never take control.

Despite my crushing humiliations (and there were many), I still want to tell you, Shark, Squirrel, Tiger, that numbers can be as anything else that is beautiful in the world - your 1,2,3 can be a lovely, curiosity-inspiring human creation as bright and sparky and delicious and dreamy as a blue sky, or the way a river jumps over rock; your numbers 4,5,6 can be like the flow of sand, the colour of your eyes.

These days I am free of maths teachers, right and wrong, and I can look at art, nature, a person's face, a handful of sand, and I can imagine how maths is part of a magical mix.

So if I have any message to a mathematician, it would be that the worse thing you can do, with your right and your wrong, is to kill wonder.

Now I don't care if you think I'm misguided, how I foolishly look for patterns in nature; I don't give a rat's arse if you believe that I'm deluded to be delighted by fantasy or story; I don't care one jot if you position me as a failure for wanting to build meanings in life, or find intrigue in another person's face. I'll explore what I want on my own terms. I'll use nature, pictures, stories, patterns, take your numbers from you, and I'll imagine.

Kids, I want you to do that, too. I want you to enjoy exploring numbers; I want you to use them as you like, build meanings into your life, and make 7,8,9 as magical as you wish.

Ah. I have that off my chest.

Shark, Squirrel, Tiger. Here's a maths assignment. Watch the Vi Hart videos several times over. Pause them, repeat them, enjoy them. Take your doodle book outside, and wonder.

Spirals and Fibonacci
.

Vi Hart Doodling.