# February, 2015

I usually rankle when someone posts to MathsJam something that isn’t really MathsJam related – there’s been a spate of people in the USA who seem to think it’s aimed at primary school children, posting the sort of pathetic “If 2=4…” puzzles that plague Facebook. (Note: if 2=4, anything follows.)

## Three simple tricks I wish my GCSE students would use

Don’t get me wrong: I love tutoring. As long as a student is putting in a genuine effort, I’m happy to forgive the odd “I don’t know” or “We haven’t been taught that.” And my students do put in the effort. I thank them for it. But there are some

## A student asks: How can I make M1 less confusing?

A student asks: Hi, I am currently doing Mechanics at college and I am finding it very confusing. What can I do to help get my head around the work? This is another slightly-hard-to-answer question; because I don’t know the student, or what s/he is struggling with, it’s really hard

## Wrong, But Useful: Episode 23

In the first full-length podcast of 2015… Dave decides he’s not talking to me, which would make for another short one, if he meant it The number of the podcast: 3003, because of Singmaster’s conjecture @sherriburroughs (Sherri Burroughs in real life) asks: how can maths lovers promote the love of

## A student asks: how do I revise in a hurry?

A question from a student: I am sitting my Higher Tier GCSE exam on Monday and I have tried every way to revise but it just doesn’t stay in my head! While I am reading the method, I just don’t seem to understand it – it feels like i am

## Taking Trigonometry Further

On a recent episode of everyone’s second-favourite maths podcast, Taking Maths Further, @stecks and @peterrowlett asked: You want to calculate the height of a tall building. You set up a device for measuring angles, on a 1m high tripod, which is 200m away from the building. The angle above horizontal,

## “A little biter of a question”

This problem came via the lovely @realityminus3 and caused me no end of problems – although I got there in the end. I thought it’d be useful to look at not just the answer, but the mistakes I made on the way. Maths is usually presented as ‘here’s what you

## The Mathematical Ninja shuttles some numbers

“So, the least common multiple of $52$ and $64$,” said the Mathematical Ninja, “is $13 \times 16 \times 4$, which is $832$.” “H-how did you do that?!” asked the student. The student was clearly new around here, so the Mathematical Ninja went easy on him. “Very simple,” he said. “I