Caroline has shamed me into writing some blog! I know I haven’t managed to do anything regularly but I will try to improve! Anyway, I have lots to say now.

I’ve been really busy this week, it has made a nice change. On Friday and Saturday I ran training for second cycle mathematics teachers and the school supervisors. I was great to be training again. I am doing an Ethiopian version of the four day course, two days now, a gap task and follow up in schools, followed by another two days. I tried but failed miserably to get much involvement from the mathematics department here (the idea is that they plan and deliver the training with me and continue after I leave) and ended up doing all but one session myself. I did manage to get two of the department to come to a couple of sessions tho so I count that as an achievement. The first day was about learning styles, reflective teaching, the nature of maths and…. Yes, you guessed it, geometry! Saturday was more geometry and looking at planning. The feedback was really positive but I do wonder just how much people understood. I learnt a lot and would do some things differently if I do it again. I started with a starter on gradients of lines – I attempted to get them to imagine their bodies as the y axis, with the x axis running across their chest and then use their arms to show me the line y = x. Very reluctant! I asked them to show me a steeper line and one with a smaller gradient. They didn’t really like it at all!! I will persevere tho – probably it wasn’t a good thing to start with! I tried to do some of the stuff on loci from the Maths Study modules from the Key Stage 3 strategy but they found the whole concept of loci quite difficult. There is one where you have two points about 8 cm apart and you move a coin so that it is always the same distance from the two points – simple, you might think, you trace out the perpendicular bisector of the line joining A and B. Well, no. We grappled with this for some time. I got two people out to be A and B and then asked them all to stand so that they were the same distance from A and from B. After much persuading a couple of people got up and positioned themselves correctly, then some more and just as I thought we had cracked it more joined in and placed themselves in two more lines parallel to the bisector….hmm….. OK, so fortunately I had some rope so we measured the distance from these oddly placed people to A and B and showed that they weren’t the same. I think they got it eventually.

They want us to train using TALULAR at college. All very well I thought, but what the hell is it? No-one could tell us. Then one day I noticed a big sign just inside the college gate but obscured behind another.

	Teaching And Learning Using Locally Available Resources