More than a maths teacher » 5. Random Musings

Merry Christ-maths!

loislindemann — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 15:04:02 +0000

Whatever form your festivities may take, I hope you have a Merry Christmas!

I don’t know why I associate puzzles with Christmas. Maybe it’s childhood memories of tiny plastic tangrams from the insides of crackers, maybe it’s because I’ve been lucky enough to receive lots of puzzle books as gifts over the years. Anyway, here’s one of my favourites, hope you like it.

On the move

loislindemann — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 13:42:30 +0000

If you are reading this – then welcome to my blog’s new home!

I enjoyed using Wordpress.com – and I fully intend to continue to do so – but I always intended to use self-hosted Wordpress for this blog. It just opens up so many more options. Since my old web host couldn’t seem to provide the necessary support for me to run an up to date release of Wordpress, that presented a bit of a challenge. So I’ve moved: firstly to a new web hosting provider, then to a self-hosted blog.

Unfortunately I couldn’t automatically redirect any readers from my old place at Wordpress.com. So if you’ve followed the trail of breadcrumbs and made it here – thanks for making the effort!

Retweet? No thanks.

loislindemann — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 11:42:55 +0000

Twitter means different things to different people, I have no problem with that. This is not going to be one of those ‘You Just Don’t Get It Do You? 10 Ways You’re Tweeting It Wrong’ type of posts.

For me, Twitter is about conversation. Retweets are part of that – and something that I’m a big fan of, so it was good to see them finally appear at Twitter.com. However, I don’t use the web-based version of Twitter much, so I didn’t play around with the new retweet function until last week. Sadly, I soon learned that whilst Twitter’s version of retweeting may fit their business model, it doesn’t work for me.

In an offline conversation, if I repeat something interesting that I’ve been told, I don’t necessarily do it verbatim, I’m able to add my own comments if I want to. If I retweet via a Twitter client (such as Tweetdeck) I can do that online too, but I quickly discovered that Twitter’s own retweet function is exactly that – a verbatim retweet. There’s no opportunity to add anything. That’s not facilitating a conversation, so personally I’m not interested.

I just hope that as Twitter develops their new retweet function, they don’t end up affecting the ability of the rest of us to RT in whatever fashion we choose.

Goodbye Mr Titen

loislindemann — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 21:16:24 +0000

Once upon a time, in a land known as South Yorkshire, there was a maths teacher who was surfing around the t’Internet. This was back in the days when most web pages were still made from Sellotape, old records and sticky-backed plastic, which might explain why I was so amazed to find Mr Titen’s More Than Math page.

A webpage, made by a math(s) teacher, full of puzzles and homework hints. I was impressed. I wanted one. Now let’s be honest here, GeoCities web pages were all a bit eye-watering to look at and I have to say that Mr Titen’s was no exception. Frankly I wasn’t keen on the dancing teddy bears, but it still left me feeling inspired.

The result: Ms Lindemann’s Mathemagic Page was born. It looked not dissimilar to my current site, which was supposed to be an elegant lilac, reflecting the hastily polled opinions of some of my students. Sadly, a miscalculation with a rather ancient monitor resulted in a vista of pink, a colour scheme which remains to this day. (Yes, it is long overdue for an overhaul and redesign, but that’s another story entirely.) The earliest versions of my own site owed a lot to Mr Titen’s More Than Math Page; we may have had different ideas about how our sites should look, but I loved all his puzzles and optical illusions – ideas which still provide the basis for some of my own site’s most popular sections today.

My fledgling site lurked quietly inside my school’s website for a while (alas, its earliest incarnations have been lost, but perhaps that’s for the best). Of course, I really wanted to find my own little home on the web, but that caused me a bit of a problem: every permutation of mathemagic-dot-anything had already been snapped up. I agonised for ages, but I just couldn’t come up with anything else that wasn’t already taken, so I ended up adopting More Than Maths. It’s not plagiarism you know, it’s an homage – honestly!

I still popped back to visit Mr Titen from time to time, although his site has been very quiet for quite a few years now. So it feels a bit sad to know that this is it, GeoCities is no more. Mr Titen’s More Than Math Page has been consigned to history (and the Internet Archive).

Goodbye Mr Titen. Goodbye.

All’s well that ends well

loislindemann — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 22:00:38 +0000

This morning I picked up my colleague J, who was dropping her car off for servicing and needed a lift into work. She was distinctly stressed by the time I met up with her, not about the car, but because she had realised that she had managed to leave her laptop at home. There just wasn’t enough time to fetch it, which for someone with a day of planning ahead of her was a bit unfortunate to say the least. Did I make a few helpful suggestions? Of course I did. Did I also take the mickey? Well, maybe just a little bit.

We duly arrived at school, at which point J peered at the mountain of stuff in the back of the car and said “Hey, I can help you carry that, because I’ve got *no* laptop!” Indeed. Offer accepted with grateful thanks. As we got all my stuff out of the car, J spotted an omission: “Where’s your laptop?”

Oh.

It seems that the forget virus is in town.

I didn’t even have my trusty eeePC with me.

Outlook: a disorganised day ahead.

But amazingly, it was OK. No one had asked to use the netbooks that are stored in my room, so J and I used one each for the day. It meant I was using the students’ heavily filtered version of the web, plus staff areas of the network were off limits (although the latter problem was solved by using a desktop machine in the room where I teach ICT). However the wonders of Dropbox, Gmail, Google Calendar and Remember the Milk meant that my potentially chaotic day ran perfectly smoothly: key tasks remembered, key files accessed. No major problems at all. It did mean a day with no Twitter client, but Monday’s a pretty full day, so I don’t dip into the Twitterverse much anyway.

Perhaps the best part of the day was at the end, because with no laptop do the work I’d planned for after school, I simply caught up with some paperwork and then came home much earlier than usual. Very nice.