The Whizz

Who would have thought legendary baseball player Jackie Robinson would inspire a talented young woman to pursue a career in maths?

Prominent mathematician Moon Duchin, profiled yesterday in the Scientific American in a ‘where-are-they-now’ feature, reveals what inspired her to study maths.

“I wanted to be a mathematician since I was 7,” she says. She was fascinated at the time by a book on Jackie Robinson breaking the color line in baseball, and so “I wanted to blaze a trail as a woman in math—once I decided I probably couldn’t be a baseball player,”

 [Top Mathematician Moon Duchin, inspired to excel in maths by Jackie Robinson]

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Want to learn your number bonds* and get some exercise?

Try Maths-Twister! In this video, a teacher demonstrates a useful classroom game to help students practise their number facts and mental arithmetic by playing a variation on the classic game ‘Twister’.

Read on for our take on the ‘Maths-Twister’ recipe, or watch the video on the BBC’s new ‘Backpage’ website where - as they put it - ”parents of primary school kids share their top video tips about helping with homework.”

Many of the homework hints give physical ways of learning subjects, which can be handy if you’re desperate to enjoy the sunshine. We recommend our home students use Maths-Whizz for between 60 and 90 minutes a week, which gives lots of time for exploring maths in the real world - give it a try!

(* number pairs that total a given amount)

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Math-Whizz has made an appearance in the US on local TV in Seattle, Washington state. King5’s Jane McCarthy looked at the successful integration of Math-Whizz into the Everett School District curriculum. Click here to watch the clip and read the accompanying story.

The segment, shown Friday 13th on King5’s morning show, focussed on the usefulness of the service for staving off ’summer learning loss’ (discussed on our blog here):

“Since using the program, Everett teachers have seen some students gain a year of math knowledge in just three months.

“And with summer approaching, they don’t want all that knowledge to slip away. Studies show that summer break isn’t always good for the brain because students can lose months of knowledge.”

Mary-Anne Stine, Everett School District’s Curriculum Director, pointed out that “[students] lose up to two or three months and struggling students even more,” over the summer break.

It seems a number of parents and teachers had the same concerns in mind when they visited our US site and subscribed to Math-Whizz following King5’s report - we’ve had a phenomenal response and hope it will continue!

If you are a teacher or a parent in the US interested in Math-Whizz online tutoring, email Ben Keogh at ben.keogh@whizzeducation.com.

It’s not as if mathematicians needed proof that theirs was the purest science, but this cartoon merely serves to reinforce the fact, though sociologists and psychologists may find themselves disagreeing…

Maths is vital for young people. Without maths students lose out educationally and, later, professionally.

If we didn’t believe this fervently, we wouldn’t have embarked on producing Maths-Whizz in the first place. As it turns out, lots of parents and teachers (and even students!) agree with us. It now seems the UK independent think-tank Reform is equally enthusiastic about learning maths, but they have come at it from a different angle.

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The testing system in England is in danger of damaging children’s education, according to a recent report from the Children, Schools and Families parliamentary select committee.

As the BBC reports, 25 million papers are taken in an annual orgy of testing that, the committee argues, risks placing too much emphasis on too few types of test and on teaching to the test.

More damningly, the report states:

…that the single-level tests’ “one-way ratchet” system will lead to an “artificial” improvement in results, in which pupils will be “certified to have achieved a level of knowledge and understanding which they do not in truth possess”.

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The parents’ evening is going out of fashion, according to an article in The Guardian, yesterday.

Polly Curtis reports:

Rather than an evening a term queueing for a five-minute chat with teachers, parents want more frequent access, or to monitor their children’s progress online, according to research commissioned by the Department for Children, Schools and Families.

The DCSF report, summarised here, suggests that parents’ working lives are getting in the way of engagement with their students’ education, especially homework.

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Whizz Education is on Facebook!

The social networking website that threatened to take over the world in 2007 now features a Whizz Education company site where you can become a fan, view Whizz videos, check out Whizz company pics and chat away about Maths-Whizz Tutoring and Maths-Whizz Teachers’ Resource with other fans until the cows come home.

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Eagle-eyed Whizz Blog readers - what other kind are there - will have noticed the snazzy Whizz Scientific Calculator lurking in the sidebar to the right of the main blog page.

The Whizz Scientific Calculator is as it appears in our Key Stage 3 animated exercises in our Teachers’ Resource and our online Tutoring service; it features power functions, logarithms, trigonometry buttons and fraction conversion and all that jazz. Do your homework, work out your tax, write rude number-words or calculate the budget deficit (though you may need a larger screen for the last one).

Visit the Whizz Calculator Widgetbox page to put the Whizz calculator in your blog, on your website or even in your Facebook page or Google homepage. Click the ‘Get Widget’  button, select where you want to put your own Whizz Calculator, and copy the code as appropriate.

You can also add the Whiz calculator to your iGoogle page instantly with this link.

Abstract concepts are better for teaching maths than real-world ones, according to a study reported on in a recent New York Times article. What does this mean for teaching maths and what does it mean for Maths-Whizz?

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