The author drew the 2008 Easter conference to a close. During the final address, the author chose to focus on the domain of perimeter and area both because it is a topic accessible to teachers of all ages and because learners display considerable confusion between them. The core difficulty seems to lie in the necessity to attend either to the…

Over the years the technology behind displaying the image of the unit circle has changed, but the defining features remain constant. The key question for the author as a teacher is this: are the relationships embodied in the image simple, memorable and rich enough to be grasped by any KS3 student at his school? It needs to be simple enough to…

Polish students learn about Platonic solids in the final year of secondary grammar school, but in such a way that few perceive the beauty of this branch of mathematics. An average student associates polyhedra with calculating lengths and angles in a cube, cuboid or pyramid. But for the author, 3-D geometry is the branch of mathematics that shows…

In this article, framed as a conversation, the authors discuss the learning resulting from a variety of geometry tasks they have conducted with their students. None of them are convinced that all the geometry tasks within the numeracy strategy prescribed in English schools are necessarily good for children or aimed at the right age range. Using…

In this article, the authors describe a free interactive circular geoboard environment that can lead learners to pose mathematical questions. They list three major ways in which one can imagine the environment and problems being used by teachers. Among other things, they discuss how the environment could support teaching and learning, and how the…

Alf Coles and Barry Orr reflect on what it looked like when Alf taught a year 7 lesson. In this article, Alf was asked by Barry (student) if he would take a lesson with the Y7 class that he had taken over from another teacher in the department in order to see what someone else might do with his lesson plans. Alf describes what some moments with…