© ATM 2008 ● No reproduction except for legitimate academic purposes ● copyright@atm.org.
uk for permissions
CONFERENCE FRAGMENTS AND
COHERENCE
Anne Watson’s opening address to the joint Easter
conference, 2008
One of the things that happens as people grow
older is that they look at what is happening around
them with bewilderment. The things they see as
important get overtaken by things they see as
distractions. The commercials that interrupt good
films on television get longer; it is now possible to
make a cup of tea using a teapot in the breaks.
Roast lamb has to nestle on crushed potatoes,
topped with curled parsnip rusks and rosemary
spears like hat decorations. In petrol stations the
shelves of chocolate groan with unnecessary
variants of the Mars bar.
When I look at the documents that surround
mathematics teaching in schools I feel similarly
confused. I do not disagree with most of the tens
of thousands of utterances that support good
teaching, but their proliferation obscures the
mathematical heart. Highly qualified young teachers,
good with maths and good with people, enter the
profession with a wheelbarrow of words to ‘obey’
and the fear that they will be spotted omitting
some essential ingredient of a good lesson such as a
hydration break, or an objective review, or a magic
moment, or a kinæsthetic engagement opportunity.
Experienced teachers constantly have to adjust what
they do to make it look as if they are enacting the
latest set of guidelines. Is chanting ‘in’ or ‘out’ this
year? Which letter of the alphabet of learning are
we up to: Assessment for learning, Building
learning, Climate for learning, Distributed learning,
Every child learning ... when are we going to get to
Mathematics learning? I must have missed it
because we are now on to P for Personalised
learning.
For my talk at the conference I tried to avoid
sounding like an ancient monument in the manner
of the first two paragraphs for two reasons: firstly, I
am only 59, and secondly, it is unhelpful. Teachers
work within the current documentary environment,
whatever it is, and sense has to be made of the
urgings to teach better and teach differently. As a
8 MATHEMATICS TEACHING INCORPORATING MICROMATH 210 / SEPTEMBER 2008
country we do not do as well as we could with
mathematics learning; too many students switch off
early and we are dependent on other countries for
the mathematical, technological and scientific skills
necessary to maintain our economy. School children
in Delhi learn the logic required to programme
computers at an age when our students are praised
for decorating their web pages. School children in
Singapore can juggle situations involving multiple
proportional relationships at an age when many of
our students still think multiplication is about
easier ways of counting squares in rectangular
arrays.
Unfortunately, the initiatives introduced by
schools to raise expectations and adapt the learning
ethos in a general way (such as those listed above)
can sap the energy necessary to really zoom in on
what will help students learn mathematics better,
and learn harder mathematics. In the countries that
do well in international tests more students learn
harder maths because more students are taught
harder maths, and maths lessons are strongly
constructed around the coherent development of
mathematical ideas, rather than around general
beliefs about good lessons and social norms. So the
main thing to think about when planning lessons is
not: ‘where do I write the learning objectives and
how often should I refer to them?’ but ‘what is at
the heart of this bit of maths and how will students
connect with it?’
Teacher training is similarly hemmed-in by
documents, and the standards new teachers have to
attain are generic. Mainly these refer to ways of
behaving (teachers and students), what to think
about, who to include in planning and teaching,
and vague aims about good classroom life. It would
be possible to become qualified and never have to
think through a single aspect of school mathematics
from scratch. It would be possible to achieve and
demonstrate every guideline, every list item, every
criterion of every whole-school initiative and still
 © ATM 2008 ● No reproduction except for legitimate academic purposes ● copyright@atm.org.uk for permissions
not really work hard on how to help your students
understand mathematics better than their existing
expectations, and better than the school’s grade
predictions.
How, I wonder, can teachers contact the inner
coherence of mathematics while working in a context
fragmented by always-new objectives, criteria, and
initiatives? How, more importantly, can learners
experience the inner coherence of mathematics
while working in a context fragmented by testing,
modular curricular, short-term learning objectives,
and lessons that jump from one topic to another
because of coverage pressures, textbook design,
staffing problems, and so on?
In the conference talk, I raised these questions
in two mathematical contexts: trigonometry and
multiplication.
Trigonometry
For all my life in education, dealing adequately with
simple trigonometrical problems has been a hurdle
which makes a difference round about the D/C
borderline, and its earlier equivalents. Thus those
who are expected, or hoped, to get ‘pass’ grades
are taught to do trig questions and others might
not be. Three events have contributed to my
thinking about the place of trig in the curriculum:
1 Three students I was teaching had compared
their maths lessons to those of friends in
another school, and they came to me to
complain that I wasn’t teaching them trig so
how were they going to get good grades in
maths. I gave them a piece of rope, some goat
problems, and a mathematical dictionary so
they could learn some trig – they did.
2 A teacher whose students generally achieved on
average two GCSE grades above their statisti-
cally predicted grades told me that her head of
department told her not to bother to teach
them trig – so she did, because ‘you cannot get
a B without it’.
3 I was observing a student teacher using Autograph
to engage an A-level group in exploring the
transformational relationships between sine and
cosine-related functions. I asked one student
what was puzzling him; he said: ‘We did trig in
year 10 for GCSE – don’t remember any of it
now.’ After some probing he said: ‘It’s
SOHCAHTOA isn’t it?’ This did not seem to
me to be an enormously helpful memory for
dealing with the functions so I tried another
tack: ‘How could you change the sine curve to
get the cosine curve?’ His response was quite
argumentative; clearly I was being foolish: ‘Is
MATHEMATICS TEACHING INCORPORATING MICROMATH 210 / SEPTEMBER 2008
that transformations?’ then, to his friend:
‘Billy, when did we do transformations?’ and
back to me: ‘I don’t think we have to do that
for this module.’
I then went to the internet to see what help a
new teacher would get if stuck for lesson ideas and
found a range of rather half-baked contributions,
none of which will be reproduced here for fear of
being sued. A search on ‘trigonometry’ will give
you plenty to think about. There were diagrams
and formulæ; clever and ‘easy’ ways to remember
what to do with right-angled triangles; pictures of
tall buildings and trees whose heights were, appar-
ently, unknown; diagrams of people pulling sleds at
various angles; jokes about how incomprehensible
trig is; gadgets for resolving triangles with ‘simple’
plastic sliding parts. The triangles were all almost
isosceles and orientated with the right angle as a
bottom right vertex. Some had used colour to
connect sides and aspects of the formulæ. There
were diagrams purporting to be about ‘spherical
trig’ without any spheres, and ‘contextual trig’
without any contexts. The most honest image was
just a page of worked through questions of a
tedious kind. The most intriguing was a circle
containing a triangle, its right angle at the centre
and its other vertices on the circumference – no
words, no labels.
None of the pages I found came anywhere close
to informing anyone about the tricky things you
have to understand in order to cope with the
beginnings of trig.
• angle as measure of turn
• angle as a variable in triangles
• similarity
• recognising right-angled triangles in various
orientations
• conventions about labelling triangles
• names of sides: O and A and H as labels
• lengths: O, A, H as variables related in the
Pythagorean way
• ratio
• three ways to express the relationship: a ⫽ bc
• enough about functions to grasp what sin, cos,
tan mean
• what ‘inverse function’ means, and why we have
to specify the interval
• that tan-1 is arctan, not 1/(tan), and what it
means.
There is probably more. Most of these ideas are
hard to understand and need rather more work
than the few hours recommended in the KS3
framework. No wonder many teachers merely offer
SOHCAHTOA and keep their fingers crossed that
no-one will mind not really understanding what
9
 © ATM 2008 ● No reproduction except for legitimate academic purposes ● copyright@atm.org.uk for permissions

they are doing. Yet many of our secondary mathe-

matics teachers are excellent mathematicians
themselves and could see how each of these aspects
contributes to the overall symphony. If they do not,
it is because they are blinded by the guidelines
which pretend that planning to teach is not about
serious analytical engagement with mathematical
concepts, because that is all done for you in
textbooks or the framework. Instead all teachers
have to do is select an objective, think about
individual students’ needs, engage other adults
(who may know nothing about trig), provide a
range of types of task, ensure proper resourcing, set
homework, take emotional and social issues into
account ... and don’t forget the plenary. And if you
are being observed make sure that your students
don’t look as if they are stuck, or struggling, or
confused, or frustrated, or upset by having to
restructure their intuitive ideas.
• shifting from the binary operator to having
more elements involved: distributivity and
associativity
• one dimensional; two-dimensional; n-dimen-
sional forms of multiplication.
Again, teachers are well able to distinguish
between these, but do they have time to think
through and work hard on students’ understanding
so that these shifts to new meanings of multiplica-
tion take place satisfactorily? I have not seen a
secondary textbook yet that takes these shifts
seriously, and am fed up with seeing multiplication
represented only as arrays for repeated counting.
To understand multiplication fully, one needs to
recognise it when it looks like this:

Multiplication
Maybe I was being too ambitious, expecting to find
real advice about teaching trig on the web – it
might be easier to find supportive resources for
teaching multiplication.
and when it looks like this:
This was fun. The ingenuity of people producing
arrays of objects to be counted in different ways
was astounding. They were not so inventive about
the numbers chosen – most of the examples I
found were for four groups of three things, and
then three groups of four things, whatever ‘things’
were chosen. Then there were hundreds of pages
showing multiplication tables with every kind of
embellishments and colourways and musical
accompaniments. Then methods: grid, trad,
Gelosian, long, short, sneaky and tricky, with or
without dancing parrots if you got the right answer.
There was, however, a huge gap between these,
and like this: x2 ⫽ 24; x3 ⫽ 24; ex ⫽ 24
which were all about multiplying integers using
and like this:
half-known facts or repeated addition, and higher
kinds of multiplication, such as signed binary,
matrix, inner and outer products, modular, complex
number multiplication, and so on, of which there
were lovely examples, particularly from the
Wolfram website.1 Most of the kinds of multiplica-
tion that trouble upper primary and secondary
students were not represented:
• scaling, stretching, substituting n units for 1
unit
• comparing two acts of multiplication
• expressing the inverse of multiplication as a
fraction
• shifting from multiplying discrete numbers to
continuous numbers
and this: xy ⫽ 24, or this y ⫽ 24/x, and this x ⫽ 24/y

10 MATHEMATICS TEACHING INCORPORATING MICROMATH 210 / SEPTEMBER 2008

 © ATM 2008 ● No reproduction except for legitimate academic purposes ● copyright@atm.org.uk for permissions

and this:
What two numbers multiply to give 24?
What three numbers multiply to give 24?
What number squared gives 24?
and also like this:
My contribution to the endless
lists of things to remember
when teaching mathematics
I have tried to work out how a busy teacher can get
help when thinking about how to teach so that
students learn hard ideas really well. One way
would be to concentrate on the maths first, rather
than last, among the myriad of requirements. What
lessons really need to be about are the shifts of
understanding necessary to understand how mathe-
matics hangs together. These shifts take time and
effort for teachers and learners, and need careful
thought and mental preparation (not ‘mental
starters’, but hard planning and shared commit-
ment). Learners need to shift between:
• additive, multiplicative and • patterns, relationships and
exponential thinking properties
• discrete and continuous quanti- • results and reflection on results
ties and reflection on procedures
• intuitive and mathematical ideas • operations and inverses
• ad hoc and abstract methods • operations and functions
• rules, facts and tools • conjectures and proof
• procedures and meanings • inductive and deductive
• perceptual and conceptual reasoning
‘seeings’ • examples and generalisations
This list, of course, only adds to teachers’
burdens, but fortunately it can be simplified.
Mathematics teachers need to think about: doing
and undoing: developing the mathematical reper-
toire; relating properties; distinctions between
discrete and continuous mathematics; mathematical
reasoning; and the interplay between exemplifica-
tion and generalisation. Indeed, I would go so far
as to say that a lesson without these is not a mathe-
matics lesson. If teachers could be freed from other
requirements which have little to do with mathe-
matics then maybe there would be more time to
think hard and plan hard for students to learn
about these essential ideas.
In the conference talk there were more jokes,
some maths for people to do, and more pictures Note
and I even sang a little bit – but this article is what 1 See http://mathworld.
I meant to say. wolfram.com/
Anne Watson works at the University of Oxford.

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