Biscuit's Box

Welcome to another 'challenge your reality' rant. The Reality   Teach to test mentally has become so intrinsically intertwined with adherence to National Curriculum that teachers of Mathematics have become institutionalised from the outset of their teaching careers. The Reasoning   It is not their fault, my wife is included in this number and has been teaching secondary Mathematics for 25 years if we include her PGCE placements. However, for myself as a person diagnosed with ADHD, maths has always been a beautiful and wonderfully complex world of discovery, a view that was shared by Pythagoras who built a complete religion around it. In comparison, my own secondary schooling, centred around the new National Curriculum Standards (yes, I'm that old), crippled that passion in me for years until I finally got the opportunity to teach myself. Yes, mathematics is the verifiable aspect of science, the rules and the regulations, but it is also art.  It is why STEM became STEAM in...

Greetings fellow reprobates and welcome to another musing, The titular question is not as simple as it first appears, I want you to consider the actual process you go through when you get angry. Let us first set the scene using a metaphor of high pressure pipes, switches and taps. The task is to fill a bowl with water.  There are two high pressure pipes, one with an on/off switch, the other with a tap, which do you choose? I'm going to make an assumption and paraphrase what you are thinking: "The tap obviously, completing the task with the pipe with a switch is just too difficult to comprehend!" Changing the scenario slightly, you take a new job filling bowls from the pipe all day, every day. Your supervisor has a tap pipe and every day for a week you watch how they fill the bowl then have a go yourself. You watch them turn on the tap, fill a bowl, turn off the tap, get another bowl and repeat the process.  When it is windy the work is a little harder and they have to hol...