Nest box watching earlier today
#birds

My goodness the wooden interiors on old tube carriages made them look so warm and inviting.

Reminded of this!

The underappreciated iridescence of crow feathers. #birds

And for #etymology fans wondering what the orchid plant has to do with the Ancient Greek word for testicle… the tubers of the plant look like this.

[Picture from Swiss Orchid Foundation at the Herbarium Jany Renz, orchid.unibas.ch ]

A cornucopia of Peruvian orchids at Kew Gardens. Well worth a visit if you’re nearby!

www.kew.org/kew-gardens/...

And before then, the country has its Semiquincentennial and the men's football World Cup. Also the next moon landing mission. Imagine the 2027 reboot of this photo. Booo indeed.

I previously blogged about why I like getting students to compare how tricky they might find two similar-looking Qs (bossmaths.com/which-is-eas...)

Here's a new pair that I hope might generate an "aha" moment for students.

I like mentioning #etymology links between key words from across the curriculum e.g. "vector" and "convection".

Here's a topical one for today👇

(I personally don't present slides like this in class; I tend to prefer them as corridor display material.)

I’m sure students in general are much better at column methods than they were, say, 15 years ago. I wonder if their relative confidence with these procedures makes them less likely/willing to turn to “number line thinking”?

Ages ago I used this (non-calc) Q with my KS3 & KS4 groups. None saw the answer immediately; they all tried finding Alice’s and Bob’s numbers en route to answering the Q.

Used it again with selective school-bound primary Ss. Surprised none saw the answer straight away either #edusky #Mathstoday

Solve a quadratic inequality to find the integer values of n for which the expression is negative. I got 31, 32, 33. Then just added those three terms.

Delighted to see that a new Series of Uncharted with Hannah Fry is on the way 🙂

Here are a couple of questions I came up with to prompt quadratic formula-lovers to try thinking outside their comfort zone. These could be answered using the formula (following a suitable first step in each case) but can, with an appreciation of factors, be answered almost instantly by inspection.