These are amazing.

My seventh year of teaching and I got to teach moments for the first time this week! I've taught A Level every year but somehow never taught this bit of the spec.

Some fun deriving the mean and variance of the geometric distribution with 12FM today. Next week we will try and derive the Poisson distribution!

I like to say "We haven't seen enough evidence to convince us that H0 is false (yet)".

Not particularly tricky, but

A long discussion with Year 13 today about why we can't say a calculated 95% confidence interval has a 95% probability of containing the mean. Gosh I wish we just taught Bayesian statistics instead!

Big change from Oxford University!

For 2027 entry onwards they will use the TMUA (October sitting) for maths and not the MAT.

I am off to update SUMS magazine for current Year 12 students 😂

@meimaths.bsky.social

www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/u...

matrixcalc.org is very handy for quick matrix calculations!

Mistake is on the first line, I think. Once you've done column operations to replace the first column, you can't then use the original version of the first column in another operation to replace the third column.

A fair point! But the mechanical repetitiveness of performing the tests seems a bit pointless. Some of the exam questions are better and do a lot of that work for them.

I marked some homework on chi squared tests today. It really frustrates me that students have to do these sorts of tests by hand when of course in reality they are all done by computer.

At my previous school we used them for everything, across KS4 and KS5. Main drawback was lack of autonomy for teachers, but we made them collaboratively and updated them every year so there was some sense of ownership. Lots of benefits.

I did this course when I was in sixth form. I thought it was quite good (I didn't pay anything when I did it, I don't know what the situation is now).

www.coursera.org/learn/game-t...

Could you add me, please?

They almost feel ambiguous for the sake of it.

Of course students should know they should use the unbiased estimate for population variance when conducting hypothesis tests or constructing confidence intervals; although even there it seems a moot point as the test is inexact and we should be doing a t test anyway!

I think it introduced needless ambiguity. It's entirely reasonable to expect students to calculate both the sample and population variance and understand the difference between the two; but examiners should make it clear which is being asked for.

I talk about the idea of a "fictitious force", for example being on a roundabout in a playground and feeling a "force" pushing you outwards. But when we do problems it's always just finding the resultant force towards the centre of the circle.

Marking Year 10 trigonometry homework - one of them has accidentally had his calculator in gradians! First time for everything...

There's been some good ones this year. If I had to choose it would be Everyone in my Family has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson. I loved his second book too and looking forward to the third next year.

Chester?

Whenever I get asked if we're doing something fun, my response is always "Aren't all of my lessons fun?"

Unexpected email from Jonny Griffiths telling me there's a new 2026 update of his RISPS book, that's great investigations for impressionable A Level students. Download it now from www.risps.co.uk with links to Geogebra and Excel files
@jonny-griffiths.bsky.social

Solutions for 2001 STEP III now on my website! That's now 1994-2001 done. Once I've done 2002 and 2003 it should become easier as 2004 is when official solutions become available.

swintonmaths.co.uk/indexphp/ste...

Glad they enjoyed them!

On a walk today I got to see the rather impressive Colne Valley Viaduct which will carry HS2 trains in the future.

Year 10 homework this week included the classic question "how many piano tuners are there London?". Answers ranged from 6 to 4000!