Quoting from Maths General, which is positioned in Lower School and Sixth Pure:
I have written webpages in places where one or more of these conditions apply:
• I have a different approach to what you find in a text book,
• where I never found enough exercises meeting the needs of my students,
• where the exercises available didn’t extend the subject sufficiently for my classes ,
• where I found the textbook content only in university texts, which made them rather difficult to read and hard to share with a class.
The readability of the English varies, depending upon who I was writing for at the time. If you want more or different, you might try writing to ask. If you modify my stuff, I’d like to know; if you disagree, I want to hear how and why and what you think is (more) correct. I have occasionally left what I think are answers nearby.
Frequently I have written theory in the dense language used in university texts. That is because, despite what I wrote in the earlier paragraph:
• I am trying to educate readers into coping with that sort of language
• I assume this content has been or will be taught in class.
For similar reasons I often look for different approaches to a topic. I believe understanding comes from several different approaches and I am sure that those student who benefited from my teaching were the ones who were prepared to find the same maths occurring in a different field.
Papers offered here were mostly written at Plymouth in the style of MEI S1 papers at a time when the format was well understood; Q1 was data handling, the other three has one on probability, one on combinatorics and one on hypothesis testing. Type I and II errors were off-syllabus. Coursework was required for most of this period, which meant students had to find and choose topics to explore in data handling. To keep people from plagiarising I required that no two students study the same thing and many found interesting material in the work of their parents. S2 coursework studied two variables and frequently proved far more interesting for all concerned; indeed the S1 students often trespassed into this before declaring their project ‘finished’. A persistent difficulty was finding enough applicability / usefulness of the content of S1 to produce anything meaningful. Coursework (for Stats) stopped in, I suppose, the late 90s. Can anyone make that more exact for me?
DJS 20151210
