Inspiring Students With Real-life Context And Core Maths - By Ben Ettridge
On Saturday 27th October, I had the opportunity to attend a talk entitled “Inspiring students with real-life contexts and core maths”, delivered by Elizabeth Hopker-Blunt as part of the Mathematics Teacher Training Scholarships CPD Programme. Elizabeth is a Mathematical Education Support Specialist at the MEI and has been involved in the introduction and promotion of the Core Maths A Level. As a former economics student, one of the reasons I wanted to teach maths was to help students engage with the wider context of where maths can take you – so I was particularly excited to hear what Elizabeth had to say on the subject.
At the onset of the talk, attendees were invited to illustrate their confidence of maths on a diagram of confidence vs time since leaving school. Some key themes recurred in the diagrams, with confidence often dipping when students are exposed to a new level of teaching, be that starting university, A levels, GCSEs, or secondary school. Low confidence means students are often all too eager to drop maths when they get the chance! Elizabeth took some time to explain how the Core Maths A Level has been introduced to help address this. If we believe it is important that students continue to take maths, we need to nurture their confidence with maths – and the Core Maths A Level is designed to do just that, with more real-life context and practical skills than in the traditional A Level Mathematics.
After this introduction, Elizabeth shared a few examples of tasks that could be used to introduce context into the classroom. These were:
- Where’s the maths in that? This is an activity where a photo is projected onto the board and students are invited to think about what maths could be demonstrated. In the session, we used a picture of the Eiffel tower and linked it to all kinds of concepts, including: Geometry, mechanics, forces, tangents, modelling pedestrian flow, statistics of population, the equation of circle and more. This task would be a fantastic segway into a new topic and a great way to get students stimulated and excited about where the maths they are learning in the classroom can be seen ‘for real’.
- Graphs: Slow reveal and what’s going on? After the first task, we then were introduced to slow reveal graphs. In this task, a graph is projected on the board without any title or axis titles and students are invited to interpret it and guess the title! This is a great way to get students thinking, find out what they are interested in and what they know.
- Fermi estimation problems: A Fermi problem is an extreme estimation question, designed to challenge students, for example, how many black cabs are there in London? Or how many computers are there in the UK? The purpose of the question is not to test their knowledge of using mathematical operations, but their understanding of how to make assumptions and the thinking processes used behind the application.
These activities made me think about how I could introduce context into my own lessons and inspire and engage students through this. I certainly enjoyed taking part in all the activities and they really made me think about how I deliver maths content to my own students. Since attending the talk, I have looked for ways to implement what I have learnt, and used a slow reveal graph when teaching statistics. I was amazed at how it engaged the students and sparked discussion in the class. I look forward to trying out the other techniques discussed in the talk and am grateful to the Maths Scholarships and Elizabeth for putting together such an informative and enjoyable session.
By Ben Ettridge
You can find Ben on Instagram @baettridge and Linked In: Ben Ettridge
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