Happy New Year Maths Blog

Happy New Year! While not quite the start to 2021 we all hoped for, we’ve had a great start to fully-online maths lessons at LECB.
It has been a delight to be back in the (virtual) classroom and lovely to catch up with learners and feel their enthusiasm literally oozing out of our laptops. I’ve missed a few students who haven’t yet managed to join the sessions due to technical issues, but fingers crossed we can get that sorted out soon.
It’s not easy for those learning themselves while also juggling other responsibilities such as home schooling but I’m really proud of how everyone has managed to focus and learn this week.

In my Functional Skills Entry 3 class this week we’ve been looking at graphs and charts. This is such a useful topic to understand, especially at the moment! There are always charts in the news showing Covid rates or vaccination doses data, like these from  https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations  (accurate as of 8 January).  It’s interesting to look at graphs like these and ask questions such as:
​
What do you notice?
 
What do you wonder?

Or this chart from https://flowingdata.com/2015/02/19/impact-of-vaccines-throughout-history/ showing the impact of vaccines throughout history. Definitely gives the idea of a positive swing in 2021.

In Core Maths – a new course this year for learners who have a GCSE and an interest in real-life maths such as financial maths and statistics – we have a big focus on critical analysis. We all know data is often manipulated to suit a particular purpose, so it is incredibly useful to have the analytical skills to know where to start sifting the fact from the fiction.
 
I’ll leave you with this scatter graph from https://www.ft.com/content/6b597385-ba51-413a-96bd-cb75d3446718
 
And again ask these questions:
 
What do you notice?
 
What do you wonder?