Blog

At the moment I am in the midst of marking Research Presentations from around the world. It is amazing what the range of presentation styles is like, and so exciting to see students that research...

I’ll start with a question – to how many significant figures is the number 500? What does “significant” mean? Consider the number 315 – which digit can you change which would have the least effect on...

The ‘tag line’ in my sent emails reads “There is nothing more economically damaging that a set of beliefs lacking any underpinning in data, empiricism or common sense – any opinion asserted without evidence can...

Have you stated your Internal Assessment(IA) yet? If you are a ‘May session’ school, this anytime from May of IB1 until December of IB2 seems a likely time that your school will carry this out...

Plato’s political views are usually associated with ‘The Republic’ and its detailed analysis of the perfect political and social community. The possibly apocryphal dialogue on ‘The Laws’ sheds further light on the necessity to establish...

At the heart of every computer, however complex, are binary numbers – that is, numbers formed only of 0’s and 1’s. This is because it is easy to represent just two digits electronically: a switch...

Here is an idea I got from a colleague of mine recently for a novel way of getting your students to plan a lab investigation. It is a model that could be rolled back and...

The next two blogs will focus on the nature of two aspects of personal knowledge, namely, knowledge of oneself and knowledge of others. What the psychologist Howard Gardner described as Intrapersonal and Interpersonal knowledge. Of...

First, I’d like to explore the “Is it fake nature” part of my post’s title: “The 1958 Disney documentary into lemmings that won the academy award. Footage of lemmings jumping off cliffs was later found...

It’s the time of year to carefully plan your listening for the exam!   The often forgotten criterion from the listening paper rubric is Criteria D: Context.  Let’s discuss expanding the context of each of...

For Kant, there is no absolute evil, but a ‘radical’ evil which is literally at the root of human freedom as there is a natural, human inclination to act according to our desires and passions...

I grew up in what might be termed an ‘old fashioned household’ – another way of saying that much of what I call my personal tastes are in fact hand-me-downs from my parents. One example...