Things I assumed you knew

I’m writing this post at the request of a colleague. To explain what happened, I need to start by explaining what Solution Bank is. 

If you teach Edexcel A Level Maths or Further Maths and you make use of the Pearson textbooks, then your students are probably very familiar with Solution Bank. It’s a set of PDFs that have full worked solutions to every question in the textbooks. The textbooks do have short answers at the back, but Solution Bank is incredibly helpful for students to check where they went wrong or to point them in the right direction if they’re stuck on a question. As I set a fair amount of textbook homework at A level, I tell students about Solution Bank in their very first lesson of Year 12. It’s available directly from Pearson though it appears on various other websites too – a lot of students access it through Physics and Maths Tutor because that comes up first on Google.

Last week my colleague (who mainly teaches A level) found out about the existence of Solution Bank for the first time, through a student. He’s been teaching A level maths for two years and no one ever had ever mentioned it before! He has been making his own worked solutions to every textbook exercise, which took many hours of unnecessary workload. I feel terrible, but when he joined my school in September I never thought to tell him about the existence of Solution Bank, and they didn’t think to tell him at his last school either. He said that a blog post about Solution Bank would have helped him immensely when he first became a teacher, and might be useful to other A level teachers who don’t know about it. 

This led me to think about other things that we might assume all maths teachers know. So here goes – for many of you everything in this blog post will be obvious, but even if just one teacher benefits from this post then it’s worth writing.

Equation Editor
I can’t take any credit for this one, and if you’ve been reading my blog for a while then you’ll already know about it (I first mentioned it in Gems 70 in 2017). If something is written in normal font in Word or PowerPoint and you want it to be formatted mathematically, highlight the text and press alt + =.  It will turn it into an equation.  You can also use keyboard shortcuts to write powers, fractions etc without having to click on the equation editor tools. This makes it very quick to create equations for lessons, assessments and resources. For example, to type 4³ just press alt and = together to enter equation mode, then type 4^3 . I use this literally every day. Dr Frost has a helpful guide Equation Editor with Office for those of you who want to know more about this.

Excel Basics
I once worked with a newly qualified teacher who said, “It took me ages to input my test scores to the tracker last night because I had to go through the whole year group and find the names of all the students I teach”. This made no sense to me until I looked at the tracker and saw that someone had sorted the whole year group alphabetically, and this teacher didn’t know how to sort or filter by class. That’s when I realised that I should have spent some time explaining how to use the tracker when this teacher joined my team. It was wrong of me to assume she knew how to use Excel, in the same way we shouldn’t assume that new staff know how to use the photocopiers.

Everyone has their own ways of doing things in Excel but here are a few basics. 

If you’re new teacher who has never used Excel before and you are being asked to regularly input data to a tracker, then I suggest you ask a colleague to talk you through it, or watch some tutorials on YouTube.

Having worked as an analyst in banking before training to be a teacher, I’m good with Excel and am always happy to support colleagues across the school with formulae and formatting. I think all schools should offer Excel training, at various different levels of expertise, to upskill teachers and leaders.

Here are a few other teacher IT basics that I always assume everyone knows but sometimes they don’t:

• Press ctrl+f to search a document (e.g. if leadership send out a staffing timetable and you want to find your initials on it)
• If you have a screen or board that connects to a PC in your classroom, press the windows button and the letter p to change the projection settings (e.g. when someone uses your classroom and changes it to extended desktop when you prefer duplicate mode)
• The snipping tool is incredibly useful  – this is another thing I use every single day.

Answers

Most resources are provided with answers these days, but sometimes we want to use a set of questions that doesn’t come with answers. When I first started teaching I used to work them out on paper and then lose the piece of paper and have to do exactly the same thing the following year. Now we have better solutions to cut workload.

Instead of working answers out on paper, work out the answers by writing directly onto a Word/PowerPoint/PDF document and then saving this for subsequent years. Many people use a tablet for this. I do it on the screen in my classroom – I just write answers onto PowerPoint with the PowerPoint writing tool and save the ink annotations. You can also write directly onto PDFs and save what you’ve written (open the PDF in Edge to do this) – this is great for making model solutions for exams. If it says you don’t have permission to write on it (e.g. it’s a GCSE paper) then you can create an unprotected copy by printing it to PDF. 

I’m not a fan of AI at all but I have to admit it’s a time saver for working out answers. I spoke about this in my recent presentation about Don Steward‘s wonderful resources. For example if I use Don’s task cancel algebraic fractions in a lesson, I can put the screenshot into an AI tool and ask it to work out the answers for me.

We all know the AI isn’t great at doing maths, so we have to check any answers generated by AI. With this surds simplification task ChatGTP seemed to do a good job except on Question 19.

Exam Board Resources

Last year I attended some A level training on Edexcel’s large data set, and half the teachers in the room said they had never heard of Emporium. I almost fell off my seat in shock. How can you teach A level Edexcel (or any Edexcel for that matter) and not use Emporium? I use it all the time. The same goes for the other exam boards – they all have websites packed full of useful resources. Ask your Head of Maths how to get access. 

UKMT

I’ve always assumed that every school offers students the opportunity to do UKMT challenges, because every school I’ve worked in has run them. It is surprising to meet maths teachers who don’t know about the existence of these challenges. All the information is here. I know that many schools enter all their ‘top set’ students and run the challenges during the school day. We give every student the opportunity to enter (students sign up on an online form a couple of months in advance) and we run the challenges after school. I know some schools run lots of preparation for these challenges but we don’t have capacity to do that, so we point students towards independent preparation resources (past papers and mathsaurus courses). If you’re interested in other challenges and competitions, I have a slightly out-of-date post here that might be helpful.

Resources

I’m not writing a blog post about resources but recently a colleague told me she’d never heard of Corbett Maths 5-a-day – it reminded me that I should never assume that everyone knows these classics. For many years I have made good use of Corbett Maths 5-a-day for Year 11 retrieval and I assumed they were widely known. I also often meet teachers who aren’t familiar with Don Steward which always surprises me. And someone recently asked me where to find maths grade boundaries and I told them I always use MathsBot or gradeboundaries.co.uk for this – I thought everyone did!  

Here are a few old blog posts that you might useful for resource basics:

And finally – some more old blog posts that some of you might find helpful:

My full blog archive is here with over a decade’s worth of information for maths teachers.

If you found anything in this post helpful then please comment below so I know it was worth writing! 

And if you have any other basic tips that you want to share with teachers, please feel free to add them below too.  

Thanks for reading!