It's so cliché, but the thank you cards (and actual verbal thanks) from year 11 means so much. This year has been one of the hardest of my career so hearing I actually made a difference to my students makes it all feel worth it.

So excited to be going to this tonight! Great way to celebrate the end of GCSE maths this year.

This week's genius idea: put my water in a re-usable insulated mug because the drinking experience from those is much more sippable.

There's a lot of issues with these new calculators but that ratio mode is too good.

Signing yr 11 leaver's shirts yesterday and, inspired by Matt Parker, I drew sine waves for it. Except the one student who requested a tan graph.

No matter how many times excel for the web tells me it's autosaving, I will still press ctrl s every time I do anything.

Spent yesterday at a Trust maths network day and just kept having random epiphanies about where we can use ratio. This was not at all what any of the sessions were on, just my brain this week.

Really interesting lesson today showing my year 10s (loads were on a trip) how to use the ratio function on the calculator and all the topics it goes with. It was nice to be able to revise a lot of topics through this lens without them getting muddled up.

I feel like MS is trolling me. I'm copying a bunch of resources for the travelling salesman topic and it keeps telling me it can't because "path too long".

Really interesting dept convo about what do we expect our year 7 set 1s to know before they get to us. Got us digging in to the primary curriculum and had some lovely debate.

Exploding dots is such a game changer for division. I saw so many people mention it and just didn't look into it and then I did it today and it was just smooth with my yr 7. They just got it and all the little issues went away.

I have one comment pro the new ECT framework that is unambiguously better: my ECT got a certificate to show she'd finished. I'm super proud of her! She's come so far and I'm really glad we hired her.

Another year, another sports day. I am so proud of 4 year ago me who declared maths runs board games. Lovely quiet children opt in to quietly sit and play games while I do a tonne of odd jobs before the end of the year.

Curious: which job did you find harder to balance:

Let me pop into work on our INSET day to get the last couple of refinements to year 10 assessments done. Exam wizard: NO, how dare you!

2 days into actual holiday and I've dug up and re-seeded half my lawn. Plus (fingers crossed) started to process to get a second cat.

Less than a week until we pick up our new kitten.

New kitten!

A blog post about planning a unit at a time Vs lesson at a time. Locke On Education: Lesson Planning lockeoneducation.blogspot.com/2024/08/lesson…

EdD or PhD? How do you know which is right for you? (Back here because butterfly land doesn't have polls!)