Impulse (advance) travel purchases

I've decided to try and commit myself to my jaunt to Switzerland in October half-term (especially considering I've just found out it's two days longer than I thought it was) by booking plane tickets from Bristol to Geneva. As yet, without return. I'm still hoping that I'll be able to organise cheap-ish TGV/Eurostar tickets for that. This may serve to show I have no clue what I'm doing...

Searching for fun and games in Bristol

I'm now starting to think about what other random stuff I can do in Bristol to meet people. Top of the list is joining a book group (which will probably be interpreted as a rather head-long rush into middle-aged-ness...) or trying to start up a killer pub quiz team. The second one is obviously very appealing, although the chances of it being a killer team is reduced as for me to be on it, it would involve me being on it. I'm sure we can overcome this...

YouTube Download

Seeing that most schools put a block on YouTube, this extension for FireFox is just fantastic. Download clip, show in classroom. Brilliant. I can definitely see this being quite helpful for organising tutor time.

I'm sure that there are several points in this post that show that my transformation into a teacher is probably close to complete...

Still not in Belfast, right first letter though...

Just a quick update on how things are going, I've now been in Bristol for just over a week and I'm starting to feel a little settled, which is good. Particular highlights so far is that I've settled into a good church, and I've been made to feel very welcome there, and I'm starting to feel like I know what I'm doing at work. It's still a bit of an odd time at the moment, I'm working but I'm sort of not - I don't start actual teaching until September, so these few weeks will involve planning for next term and having a rather large amount of information downloaded upon me.

I'm just recovering (I hope...) from a bit of a rough weekend, I've had a bit of a fever and sore joints over the end of last week, and that manifested itself in a rather impressive headache yesterday morning that completely threw off any plans I might have had. It still wasn't completely sorted today, which led to me leading a rather zombie-like existence today. The purchase of some ibuprofen seems to have got it under control, so hopefully will be in better shape in the morning. Just as well, I've got quite a bit of admin to get through in the next few days.

So things are going well, and it's good to have this period of time to settle in, although I'm looking forward to getting my teeth into the teaching come September. Saying that, the thought of 120+ children's mathematics education lying in my hands for a year is more than a little daunting...

"Sir, why do we use letters?"

There is something unusual about the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything:

Think of a number, any number. Add seven to that number, and multiply your answer by three. Subtract nine from that number, and double your answer. Add 228 to you answer and then divide that number by six. Finally, subtract the number you started with. What number are you left with?

Magic. At least enough to give me a good trial for witchcraft given the correct temporal context. But it only stays magic in the world of arithmetic, which is enough to baffle both my class (and possibly a reasonable number of adults) with a "how did he do that?" variety of wonder.

If we satisfy ourselves with just picking a number and trying to work through my problem over and over again, we will be left bewildered by why we get the same answer every time, no matter what number we pick originally. This is why we need to use letters, or algebra - the only way we will ever see what is going on is if we somehow do this problem for every number in existence simultaneously. This particular problem is nice because there is an initial shock when it first works, and somewhat impenetrable without generalising, but falls apart with a small amount of algebra:

Think of a number - x
Add seven - x + 7
Multiply by three - 3(x + 7) = 3x + 21
Subtract nine - 3x + 12
Double answer - 2(3x + 12) = 6x + 24
Add 228 - 6x + 252
Divide by six - x + 42
Subtract your original number - 42

I will concede that one disadvantage is that this feels like "unweaving the rainbow", there's a certain amount of fun in the "magic" that's a shame to lose, but it's a nice demonstration of why we do need to use letters rather than numbers some of the time.

Editted as there was a, ahem, 'deliberate' mistake. Once it was spotted, it would have of course been misleading to keep it there...