“Teaching is a performance profession. You need to be on your A-game every single day of the week and that’s difficult. My approach has always been that we need to treat teachers like elite athletes. They are given the best treatment. They are looked after and they’re cared for.” #UKMathsChat

Teachers in England offered lie-ins to make job more appealing

Other perks including nine-day fortnight and more planning time at home offered to attract recruits

Just lovely!

Feels more like ‘Today we have done (drum roll) focusing!!’

I’m also being sold Bloom communicated every lesson. Do any maths departments do this? Is it useful? In what way? #ukMathschat#iTeachMaths

They’re trying to sell me ‘meta skills’ for mathematics. They want courses with clearly defined meta skills communicated every lesson. It feels the latest fad to me. Has anyone found this to be useful at Secondary level? #ukMathschat#iTeachMaths

But you’re not really memorising more triangles my way, you’re just remembering the relationships required to build the triangles you need. I think that’s different.

Ah I see. I struggle with ‘memorise this’ in my own learning. I always have to build what I need. My ‘on the fly’ usually involves me having to re-build knowledge. I agree the ratio ‘special triangles’ are more efficient (if you can remember them!) … it’s just that I struggle working that way.

But you're thinking in ratios still ;-) For me, tan is a length. • tan 45°: Draw out tan 45° ...(base =1, angle 45°) ... realise that 45° ⇒ the vertical will be 1 too. • tan 60°: Draw out tan 60° ... (base =1, angle 60°) ... realise you can scale a sin 60° triangle. No ratios in sight :-)

The lineTrig ones are what you’d use on a unit circle to build, say, a basic sine table of 24 values; they’re your starting point. I don’t think of them as ‘special’ to be honest. And obviously the ratioTrig ones are just scaled versions of these to give nice numbers. That’s how I see it.

As for the ‘special’ triangles, well, they’re specific to trig-as-ratios … the ‘special’ triangles for trig-as-lengths are different!