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Posted: 02-12-2011 19:03 Post subject:

I've been saying that for 20 years, but no-one took any notice of me. Not even my own father who was headmaster of a school. I feel vindicated.

Posted: 02-12-2011 20:14 Post subject:

The obviousness of this and many other things in education has led me to the conclusion that there is no serious intention to educate the majority of people in this country.

Nothing short of a curious war situation which required its cannon-fodder to be literate and numerate would spur us into National Emergency Mode to rectify things. Then, it would take very little time to find out the best practices and apply them.

No will. No need really. Probably, the next conflict will be civil. I think, at a low level, it is already happening. Sad

Posted: 24-01-2012 11:07 Post subject:

How to learn to love maths
New advice suggests children should study maths until they leave school. Don't be scared though, numbers are wonderful, fascinating things
Alex Bellos
guardian.co.uk, Monday 23 January 2012 20.00 GMT

Britain is about to fall in love with maths. Well, that's the dream. Yesterday one of the government's top advisers on further education said that maths should be compulsory for all students until 18 or 19 – no matter what else they are studying. Professor Steve Sparks, chairman of the Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education, also said that he wants a new maths qualification between GCSE and AS-level to be introduced by 2016.

Maths is justified in this country because it is useful. Sparks said his proposals were necessary because young people need a better grasp of maths to compete in the job market, where an understanding of technology and numeracy are increasingly important.

I agree. But maths should also be studied for the same reasons we study Shakespeare – it is our intellectual and cultural heritage. Maths makes us more creative and gives us a deeper understanding of the way things really are.

Most other developed nations have non-specialist maths courses beyond GCSE and Sparks said that we need to follow suit in order to compete on the global market. The British have traditionally seen maths as an uncool subject, unlike countries such as France, Germany and America – where geekdom is revered rather than derided – and it would be wonderful if by increasing maths education the subject loses its stigma here.

In all countries, however, the need to pass exams and the emphasis on number-crunching often makes us forget how fascinating maths can be. Here is a list of 10 morsels that, I hope, give a taste of the pleasures to be had.
If we're all going to be doing a lot more maths in the future – we might as well enjoy it.

1 Pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter – in other words, the ratio of the length around a circle to the length across it. It is the most famous number in maths, and the one whose name is most susceptible to puns. Pi's deliciousness, however, comes from the cacophony of its digits. It begins 3.14159 and then continues for perpetuity in disarray, obeying no order and following no pattern. How such a simple ratio – the simplest ratio of the simplest shape – is also the most unruly and irregular is a mystery that still provokes awe and wonder.

etc... (including some topics already mentioned on this thread)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jan/23/how-learn-love-maths

Posted: 30-01-2012 21:18 Post subject:

Maths as comedy? Oh yes, with the incomparable Milton Jones on t'radio: Very Happy

Another Case of Milton Jones - Series 4
- 2. Brilliant Mathematician

Milton Jones bestrides the globe as an expert in his field, with no ability whatsoever.

Milton is a mathematical whiz-kid who gets tied up in knots and rings trying to solve the equation of the mysteriously disappearing geniuses.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00r7n2p/Another_Case_of_Milton_Jones_Series_4_Brilliant_Mathematician/#programme-info

Posted: 31-01-2012 12:29 Post subject:

The only important caveat about maths - where the math and the real world disagree, remember the real world is not negotiable Smile

Posted: 31-01-2012 13:57 Post subject:

Sorry if this is going over old ground, but IMHO I think that the teacher is vital in whether or not a child "Get's" maths. I always hated maths at school - due in part to having dyslexia in numeracy, which was called "being slow/stupid" by my teachers - and I couldn't understand even the simplest sum. However, as an adult, who's had to learn math's themselves, I've discovered that I actually enjoy it!

I'm sure I'd never be able to pass a GCSE or A-Level in the subject, however, I enjoy sorting out figures, etc in my job! I can't see, even now, what the teachers at my school were trying to teach me. Nothing they ever said has come up in my life, and they gave me, and many others a real set back by making us hate maths. Sad

I also find it odd that many people I've known over the years, who claim to be good at maths/enjoy it etc, can't work out odd's on, say, the Grand National. Maybe it's a fluke, but working out bet's seems to come all to easy to me! Laughing

Posted: 31-01-2012 14:51 Post subject:

There are 10 types of people

those who understand binary

.. and those who dont.

Posted: 01-02-2012 10:24 Post subject:

Posted: 14-03-2012 09:43 Post subject:

'Pupils should learn maths through using it'
By Judith Burns, Education reporter, BBC News

Teachers should allow pupils to learn maths by using it rather than focusing on abstract concepts, says an expert.
Professor Dave Pratt of the University of London argues innovative teaching techniques and technology could help more pupils engage with the subject.

Government figures show almost half the working adults in England have only primary school maths skills.
Mike Ellcock of National Numeracy welcomed the suggestion as a way to help pupils become numerate adults.

One reason why children struggle with maths is that the subject is taught backwards, Professor Pratt will argue in a lecture to the Institute of Education on Wednesday.
"For instance, with a language you learn it by speaking it, but with maths you learn about it first and then use it later," Professor Pratt will say.

"The problem with maths is that it is taught in way that is disconnected from the children.
"They don't see how it is relevant to their lives. It is presented only through abstract concepts, rather than in terms of experiences."

Professor Pratt advocates greater use of the technology-based methods he has developed to enable students to learn maths as they use it.
For example, a project to design a computer animation could help pupils see the relevance of algebraic calculations, he told BBC News.

He suggested that older pupils might be asked to approach questions with moral dimensions through mathematics.
For example, decisions on where to build a village bypass or how to advise someone on medical treatment have a mathematical element - but ethical considerations and social costs that are harder to quantify also play a part.
"I want children to see the power of maths - but also to understand its limitations," he said.

He added that the approach was not the same as old-fashioned mathematical "problems" which were often contrived and irrelevant to children's real life experiences.

Peter Lacey from the Association of Teachers of Mathematics agreed that too many maths lessons were defined by where they should end rather than where they started.
"Sometimes it is more effective to look at where the learner is starting from and then to take an experimenting, stimulating approach to engage the child," said Mr Lacey.
"We need to focus on the learning of maths and focus our teaching round that."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-17356465

My experience of teaching, both in schools and in sailing instruction, showed me the value of practical experience. In fact sailing is a way to introduce several concepts from maths and physics.

Posted: 19-06-2012 08:20 Post subject:

Numeracy Campaign: What we can learn from China
An eminent Chinese mathematician reveals the secrets of his country’s excellent maths education system to Peter Stanford.
By Peter Stanford
11:13AM BST 18 Jun 2012

'Above all, it is a cultural thing.” Professor Lianghuo Fan is reflecting on the differences he has noticed between maths education in China and Singapore, where he lived and taught for 40 years, and in Britain, where he is now based. “In China, all parents know that maths is the number one subject in schools, and they expect that in a modern society everyone must be comfortable with maths, even if that means they have to work hard at it.

“That attitude is passed on to their children. But here in Britain, you can feel students’ attitude about mathematics is different. They feel all right if they say they don’t like mathematics.”

Professor Fan is not alone in highlighting this national phobia of ours about maths. The government has this week shown itself determined to tackle the problem head on with the unveiling of a new “back-to-basics” primary school maths curriculum, with a renewed emphasis on times-tables, mental arithmetic, fractions and rote learning.

Most people over 40 will see the proposals as a return to the classroom practice of their childhood – but in its introductory remarks the Department for Education claimed inspiration from Asian model that Professor Fan knows so well: “I never heard a child in China or Singapore say that they don’t like maths’,” he stresses, “without a sense of embarrassment.”

We are sitting in a café near Southampton University – where 50-year-old Professor Fan has been head of the Mathematics and Science Education Research Centre since 2010 – as we try to decide if anything lies behind the popular stereotype that Asian children are “naturally” better at maths than those in the West. It is, for example, in the core storyline of Safe, the recent Hollywood blockbuster, starring Jason Statham. An 11-year-old girl, Mei (played by Chinese-born actress Catherine Chan), is a maths prodigy who can decode number sequences at a glance – and therefore has to be protected from the baddies.

If anyone should know the truth about such generalisations, it is Professor Fan, who grew up near Shanghai and was so good at maths that he was sent off to university at 15. After a spell as a maths teacher, and then as a trainer of maths teachers, he did further research at Chicago University before joining the internationally respected National Institute of Education in Singapore in 1998.

He had thought that he was settled there with his family – he has two teenage daughters – when the offer came from Southampton. Why accept when, as The Daily Telegraph’s Make Britain Count campaign has been exploring, there are so many challenges around improving our national performance at maths?

He laughs. “I’d been looking at the British system for teaching maths since I was doing my Masters back in the early Eighties and had to translate a major report by Dr Cockcroft called 'Mathematics Counts’. So it was familiar. And, while it has great strengths as well as weaknesses, the British system is seen as a benchmark for comparisons internationally.”

It feels odd that he is extolling the virtues of our way of doing things, because most of the traffic seems to be heading in the opposite direction. On the question of suitable role models for improving the teaching of maths, British ministers and educationalists say two words with rare unanimity: “look East”.

That, for example, was the message of a Royal Society of Arts report, “Solving the Maths Problem”, published earlier this year. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), in its annual survey of global educational standards in 70 industrialised countries, places 15 year-olds in Shanghai’s schools way out in front of all the rest in maths skills, with Singapore second, and Britain 28th.

So what is their secret? “Children study maths as a compulsory subject to 17 or 18,” says Professor Fan. There is a particular emphasis on the subject, and the compulsion that Mr Gove would like to see introduced to ensure all 16- to 18-year-olds continue with their maths here.

etc...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/maths-reform/9338540/Numeracy-Campaign-What-we-can-learn-from-China.html

Posted: 12-10-2012 23:29 Post subject:

A bit of fun with some logic puzzles, etc:

Dara O Briain: School of Hard Sums
Series 1, Episode 3 | 2 days left

Comedian and physics graduate Dara O Briain takes a witty look at how maths underpins everything around us. Dara takes on comic Jason Byrne in a problem-solving challenge.

http://video.uktv.co.uk/dave/dara-o-briain-school-hard-sums/series-1/episode-3

Posted: 19-10-2012 23:22 Post subject:

Tails You Win: The Science of Chance

Documentary in which Prof David Spiegelhalter uses a blend of wit and wisdom, animation, graphics and gleeful nerdery to pin down what chance is and how it works in the real world.

Smart and witty, jam-packed with augmented-reality graphics and fascinating history, this film, presented by Professor David Spiegelhalter, tries to pin down what chance is and how it works in the real world. For once this really is 'risky' television.

The film follows in the footsteps of The Joy of Stats, which won the prestigious Grierson Award for Best Science/Natural History programme of 2011. Now the same blend of wit and wisdom, animation, graphics and gleeful nerdery is applied to the joys of chance and the mysteries of probability, the vital branch of mathematics that gives us a handle on what might happen in the future. Professor Spiegelhalter is ideally suited to that task, being Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge University, as well as being a recent Winter Wipeout contestant on BBC TV.

How can you maximise your chances of living till you're 100? Why do many of us experience so many spooky coincidences? Should I take an umbrella? These are just some of the everyday questions the film tackles as it moves between Cambridge, Las Vegas, San Francisco and... Reading.

Yet the film isn't shy of some rather loftier questions. After all, our lives are pulled about and pushed around by the mysterious workings of chance, fate, luck, call it what you will. But what actually is chance? Is it something fundamental to the fabric of the universe? Or rather, as the French 18th century scientist Pierre Laplace put it, 'merely a measure of our ignorance'.

Along the way Spiegelhalter is thrilled to discover One Million Random Digits, probably the most boring book in the world, but one full of hidden patterns and shapes. He introduces us to the cheery little unit called the micromort (a one-in-a-million chance of dying Shocked

), taking the rational decision to go sky-diving because doing so only increases his risk of dying this year from 7000 to 7007 micromorts. And in one sequence he uses the latest infographics to demonstrate how life expectancy has increased in his lifetime and how it is affected by our lifestyle choices - drinking, obesity, smoking and exercise.

Did you know that by running regularly for half an hour a day you can expect to extend your life by half an hour a day? So all very well... if you like running.

Ultimately, Tails You Win: The Science of Chance tells the story of how we discovered how chance works, and even to work out the odds for the future; how we tried - but so often failed - to conquer it; and how we may finally be learning to love it, increasingly setting uncertainty itself to work to help crack some of science's more intractable problems.

Other contributors include former England cricketer Ed Smith, whose career was cut down in its prime through a freak, unlucky accident; Las Vegas gambling legend Mike Shackleford, the self-styled 'Wizard of Odds'; and chief economist of the Bank of England, Spencer Dale.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00yh2rc/Tails_You_Win_The_Science_of_Chance/

First broadcast
BBC Four, 9:00PM Thu, 18 Oct 2012

Available until
10:54PM Mon, 29 Oct 2012

Posted: 28-10-2012 11:20 Post subject:

Williams F1 struggling to find recruits with maths skills
Williams F1 is “frustrated” over the state of education in Britain today after the majority of school leavers applying for its apprenticeship scheme this year failed a basic maths test.
By Louisa Peacock
8:36AM GMT 28 Oct 2012

Alex Burns, the chief executive of the Formula 1 company, which is racing in the Indian Grand Prix, said he was alarmed and surprised that most 16 to 18 year-olds keen to work for the company could not do basic maths sums and had failed to reach a 50pc score on a range of practical tests.

Mr Burns said the shortage of capable candidates – even at elementary level – was holding back the company’s expansion plans in the UK, with the business only being able to recruit a handful of would-be engineers out of hundreds of applicants each year.

Of the 250 applications for its apprenticeship scheme this year, 45 were invited to an open day and 16 made it through to the tests round. Just six young people passed, with 10 failing to get more than half the answers right – a failure rate of two-thirds.

In previous years, the company allowed hundreds of applicants to sit maths tests early on in the recruitment rounds, but this led to such a high failure rate the company abandoned the tests until later in the hiring process.
Mr Burns said that a few years ago, only six out of 200 applicants passed the tests, making it pointless to test so many candidates at once.

Williams F1 is “frustrated” over the state of education in Britain today after the majority of school leavers applying for its apprenticeship scheme this year failed a basic maths test.
The Formula 1 company uses a series of straightforward maths tests derived in the 1960s by Birkbeck College.
The questions are a mixture of adding up, multiplying and division, as well as basic fractions, logarithms and theory.

One question asks candidates to write three quarters as a decimal, another asks for the square root of 81. More complex questions include what is 11pc of 250, and what is 7,713 divided by nine.

Mr Burns said: “It’s pretty frustrating that the young people cannot complete these tests. A few years’ back, we had such a small pass rate that we now only give the tests after we’ve invited them to an open day.”

One of the adding up and subtracting tests is “pretty straightforward”, according to the chief executive, although candidates only have two minutes to complete it.

When asked whether the testing process should be made easier, or candidates should be given more time, he said: “Well, no. We are looking for the best people we can find, and these tests are pretty generic.”
Mr Burns said he was considering whether to update the tests – as they are more than 50 years old – but at the end of the day, “maths is maths”.

He added: “Finding the staff we need to fill the technical roles we have is probably the biggest constraint on the growth of our business at the moment. We’re a cash-positive business, so we reinvest the cash we generate in the business and I see lots of opportunity to take Formula 1 technologies and adapt those for use outside the business. Our biggest constraint is getting the people we need with the skills that we need.”

etc (including a sample test you can try)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/jobs/9638334/Williams-F1-struggling-to-find-recruits-with-maths-skills.html

Posted: 28-10-2012 20:34 Post subject:

Am I allowed a calculator for that?

Posted: 30-12-2012 12:53 Post subject:

Quite Fortean this, with a deathbed dream and a goddess involved:

Deathbed theory dreamt by an Indian maths genius is finally proved correct - almost 100 years after he died
By Mark Prigg
PUBLISHED: 20:21, 28 December 2012 | UPDATED: 12:09, 29 December 2012

While on his death-bed in 1920, Ramanujan wrote a letter to his mentor, English mathematician G. H. Hardy, outlining several new mathematical functions never before heard of, along with a hunch about how they worked,

Decades years later, researchers say they've proved he was right - and that the formula could explain the behaviour of black holes.
'We've solved the problems from his last mysterious letters,' Emory University mathematician Ken Ono said.
'For people who work in this area of math, the problem has been open for 90 years,'

Ramanujan, a self-taught mathematician born in a rural village in South India, spent so much time thinking about math that he flunked out of college in India twice, Ono said.
Ramanujan's letter described several new functions that behaved differently from known theta functions, or modular forms, and yet closely mimicked them.

Functions are equations that can be drawn as graphs on an axis, like a sine wave, and produce an output when computed for any chosen input or value.
Ramanujan conjectured that his mock modular forms corresponded to the ordinary modular forms earlier identified by Carl Jacobi, and that both would wind up with similar outputs for roots of 1.
Ramanujan, a devout Hindu, thought these patterns were revealed to him by the goddess Namagiri.
However, no one at the time understood what Ramanujan was talking about.

'It wasn’t until 2002, through the work of Sander Zwegers, that we had a description of the functions that Ramanujan was writing about in 1920,' Ono said.
Ono and his colleagues drew on modern mathematical tools that had not been developed before Ramanujan’s death to prove this theory was correct.
'We proved that Ramanujan was right,' Ono says.
'We found the formula explaining one of the visions that he believed came from his goddess.'

The team were also stunned to find the function could be used today.
'No one was talking about black holes back in the 1920s when Ramanujan first came up with mock modular forms, and yet, his work may unlock secrets about them,' Ono says.
'Ramanujan's legacy, it turns out, is much more important than anything anyone would have guessed when Ramanujan died,' Ono said.

The findings were presented last month at the Ramanujan 125 conference at the University of Florida, ahead of the 125th anniversary of the mathematician's birth on Dec. 22nd.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2254352/Deathbed-dream-puzzles-renowned-Indian-mathematician-Srinivasa-finally-solved--100-years-died.html#ixzz2GXChQyyR
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Plus, a video trailing a film about Ramaujan, due out in March.