About Me
After teaching mathematics in a New South Wales high school for ten years, I
retrained as an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher.
Since then I have been teaching the language of mathematics to students who have
recently arrived in Australia and whose first language is not English.
Over the years I have given numerous workshops to other teachers about the
language of mathematics.
At present there is no text book that is suitable for my students, so I am in
the process of writing resources for them. I have published a couple
of books, one of which is a workbook that targets first phase learners who need
to progress from word level to sentence level. If you are interested in
this mathematics workbook for your ESL students, please contact me at
murraymb@optusnet.com.au to find
out more or to simply have a chat about issues in this area.
I am presently writing a
text book that will specifically target first phase ESL students. This
textbook will take students from word and sentence level to paragraph level and
beyond.
About this website
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to write mathematics lessons for students in
Australia who, for some reason or another, cannot access a local high school.
During that time, my colleagues and I spent a lot of time surfing the net for
interactive and exciting websites that distance education students could access
to aid and stimulate their learning of mathematics. The
Maths Links page
contains what I consider the most interesting websites for mathematics in the
world. Most of the websites that are included are interactive.
The I.E.C. maths page is for my ESL students at Marsden Intensive English
Centre, which is part of Marsden high school, in West Ryde, a suburb of Sydney.
These I.E.C. maths links include glossaries and simple drill and practice
websites, as some of my students are refugees who have
had little or no schooling prior to their arrival in Australia.
The Wingeom page is a selection of interactive geometry activities that I
have made using a Windows-based free program called Wingeom. This program
was created by R. Parris at Phillips Exeter Academy in England. (Three cheers
for Mr Parris, whose program is very powerful and who will not sell it, no
matter how many offers he gets.)
