The end of an era!

Sunday 22 November 2020

Farewell IB Maths Studies

Students in southern hemisphere schools have just finished their exams and so the final session for Maths Studies has finished and the course is officially closed. This feels like the end of an era to me and provokes a couple of reactions. The first is practical and the second is a bit more personal and sentimental. So for the benefit of everyone, I'll start with the first!


Practical

Since the new Mathematics: Applications and Interpretation course came in to being, we took the decision to build a parallel site to cater for that new course. Since then, subscribers have had access to both - details are here on the Changes to the sites! page. The idea is that users would have access to both until the Maths Studies course was phased out. That time has come and so from mid-december users will no longer have access to the old 'maths studies' site. We hope that doesn't cause any inconvenience and hope that people are reassured that everything that was there that is relevant to the new course has carried over. If you have been sticking to a corner of that site that you like and want to make sure it is included, then please do get in touch and let us know.

Sentimental

Well, I started teaching IB maths studies in 2004 and instantly fell for the course. It was my first experience of teaching mathematics to post 16 year old students who might not have continued with mathematics otherwsie and I have always thoroughly enjoyed it. I have seen it through a couple of syllabus changes and many years of workshpps for maths studies teachers from all over the world. Although there is so much to enjoy about the new course, there was something kind of 'club like' about maths studies students and teachers that will be gone in the new era and I will miss that. As a workshop leader and author it has also given me a wealth of professional oportunities for which I am also grateful. I know that the new course is a positive evolution and all of the things I liked will continue, but I would like to mark the change by saying a huge thank you to the teachers and students of this course that have passed through my classroom and workshops. It has been a real pleasure and the expression 'Maths Studies' will always have fond connotations for me for that reason.

Moving forward

The big change is of course that this course now operates at SL and HL and this is a big change that is taking me a bit of time to adjust to. I am very grateful to have Ollie on board to help with that as well as a number of external contributors. There is a view that 'Maths  is maths' and that we can shuffle topics around and change names, but essentially what we are doing is the same. I have some sympathy with that view, but I think a very deliberate focus on applications of mathematics is a significnat change of emphasis that is beginning to have an impact on my classroom practice for this class. That, for me, is a good measure of change. Probably the biggest change on the future horizon is the way we assess. In that there is a lot of potential and it might bring about some signficant changes to our classroom practice. The online exam where students have access to a greater range of technology that can do more will lead us to be asking different questions and so on. I find all that exciting and it convinces me theat moving on was the right thing to do, despite the fact that it brings some difficulties and it means that we are saying goodbye to Maths Studies!

Onwards and upwards. Good luck everyone with the new courses and farewell Maths Studies

Take care,

Jim