BIDMAS is a lie. And your child deserves better.It’s not real maths — just a shortcut masquerading as understanding.Most children are taught to follow it blindly, without ever learning what an operation truly is.Unary. Binary. This is the hidden architecture of calculation — in primary, secondary, and beyond.And it changes everything once seen. But first,…
2025 has been the toughest year of my life. I lost both my mother and my aunt (mother’s younger sister). So returning to MathsConf38 was the ultimate healing I could have asked for. Teaching mathematics is one of the most amazing things in the world, and doing it for a living reminds me of what…
By the time I was 11, I had already lived in five different countries. By 13, I had quietly fallen behind in mathematics and failed my end-of-year exam. It wasn’t for lack of intelligence. It wasn’t even for lack of effort. I was just lost in a cycle of constant school transitions, new languages, and…
We’ve all encountered pupils who stare at test questions blankly despite having a gut feeling on what to do. When pupils encounter a novel question on an exam, the very first emotions and thoughts they have might be something like this internal monologue: What is this question?Where do I begin?How do I decode what this…
La Salle Education are the UK’s largest mathematics teacher professional development providers. Their conferences are attended by around 400 maths teachers, trainers, suppliers, academics, tutors and anyone who lives and breathes maths teaching. #MathsConf28 was an absolute buzz : from Don’t stop interweavin’, going against and along the grain of grids, BIDMAS blues, Robert Recorde’s…
Fish don’t know they’re in water. If you tried to explain it, they’d say, “Water? What’s water?” They’re so surrounded by it that it’s impossible to see. They can’t see it until they jump outside of it. Derek Sivers Sitting in a park in central London on a warm, sunny June 2018 day I knew…
“It is estimated that up to six months will be saved in teaching time by the introduction of decimal money” British Pathe news video clip – ‘Decimalisation (1970)’ On 15th February 1971 Britain changed forever and day to day life would never be the same again. The monetary system went from mixed-base (‘old money’) to…
Just over 3 years ago I attended my first ever maths conference #MathsConf10 in London. That event was to change the course of my teaching life forever. I plugged into a network of passionate maths teachers and went deep down the rabbit hole of CPD; from books, articles, journals, CPD videos, podcasts, twitter discussions, conferences,…
In the middle of my short holiday at the Peak District an article appeared on the famous US newspaper on the 6th of August 2020. The article was titled ‘Everybody Is a Live-Streamer in Covid-19 Era‘ and I featured on the opening paragraph for that story. The article was published in print of the Wall…
Over the last 2 years I have been mentoring Paul Morgan, an A Level Chemistry tutor on his move to tutoring Chemistry online. With Paul being based in Burnley and me in London, we are still yet to meet in person. We have been meeting on a video call every week which serves as part…