Don Steward's rough notes

This is a collection of Don Steward’s paper notes on tasks for teaching mathematics. The tasks are mainly aimed at learners aged 11-16 and the notes include early versions of tasks on his blog, some of the paper-based median resources, and notes, workings, and ideas in development. 

Don has inspired countless teachers and learners in his fruitful career as a mathematics educator and resource designer. His teaching materials were often crafted with hidden depths, but one of his greatest talents was making these tasks feel approachable. To both pupils and teachers, they appeared like any regular exercise. While students could engage with them as simple exercises, they would often find themselves noticing and discussing interesting patterns and ideas along the way. Over time, and with a bit of exploration, teachers could uncover these deeper aspects, leading to richer discussions and greater insights from their students.

Mathematics teachers, however, like it when they get to see people’s working. So, when Don’s paper notes were passed on to us, we thought others might enjoy seeing how his ideas evolved and what influenced his thinking. It took a number of people quite a while to do the scanning at over 22000 pages and while we considered sorting it into categories, we found that Don had already done much of this work himself. As a result, we chose to present his notes as they were—keeping documents together in the same way he had organised them in labeled physical folders.

Don would have described himself as a ‘collector’ of resources, but he was also an innovator – constantly tinkering, adapting, extending and polishing tasks – adding his own sparkle to make the tasks shine.  He never considered any of the tasks to be ‘his’, but wanted his work to remain freely available to help teachers and learners. He hoped people who use his resources might donate to charities supporting education in Africa, so please consider doing so if you are able: https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/jessesteward

We hope you will find something of interest in Don Steward’s notes and the rest of the materials on his blog, and that the huge contribution he has made will live on to inspire future teachers and mathematicians.

Don wanted his work to support the teaching of mathematics so please feel free to use it in your teaching. This material (and other material on Don’s blog) may be reproduced, and modified, for non-commercial purposes, under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 detailed at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ – all other rights reserved by Don’s family. If you recognise any third-party materials that you hold the copyright of then please email: Dme@lboro.ac.uk

This work was made possible thanks to generous support from Loughborough University’s Centre for Mathematical Cognition funded by Research England.