Numbers

Two police cars, one fire engine, two ambulances. Many emergency workers talking quietly on the pavement.

They probably thought I was a ghoul standing taking photographs in the smell of smoke as I returned home from work. They won’t have known that I’d rather celebrate the amazing service they provide than 4 years 1 month and 8 days of photographs.
Fire and rescue service attend 1,500 fires in Great Britain every 2 days and 14.5 hours.
Ambulance services are called out to 1,500 emergencies in England every hour and 33 minutes.


In other numbers, I spent this morning with 13 parents and 2 observers exploring how we can support primary children learning maths. We made maths games out of dice, playing cards, wooden bricks, cardboard boxes, a recipe, coins, smarties, knives and forks, bubble-wrap, candles, apples, and one candle that looked like an apple. We wondered how many paces, cars, door numbers and pieces of cat shit we can count between home and the shops. We made a shared graph plotting ‘hate to love maths’ on a scale of 1-5 against ‘horrible to fantastic first maths teacher’ on a scale of 1-5. We found a correlation and they were convinced it was causal. I had to explain that we didn’t have the evidence for that. Then I read them some research results that showed they were right.
 
Best of all, we had fun.

Unlike the poor souls involved in whatever was happening here this evening.