Month: June 2016

I received the instructions this week from the community project school where I will be volunteering as a teacher.  I have learnt that the Khmer culture requires modesty, and in addition teachers are highly respected in Cambodia, and must dress in an appropriately dignified way – and in particular must not display shoulders, knees or cleavage.  I suppose it’s the same sort of rules that the Queen adheres to in the UK, but unlike the Queen I have to contend with a tropical climate – so natural fabrics only.

Having taken advice and plumped for linen, I have scoured ebay and have come up with a couple of possibilities.  First is the Bohemian Arty look, with Tie-dye linen smock and cropped trousers:

Secondly is the Nehru look, with linen trousers and long  flowing top:

I shall continue to work on this – perhaps Lawrence of Arabia next?

But I don’t think I can go for bright colours like the Queen, as they apparently attract mosquitoes, so I will have to look dignified in a muted sort of way … the Farrow and Ball approach to dignity.

The last time I did any maths was a GCSE in 1991- and I mean real maths, not splitting a bill, checking my change or counting children on school trips.  But even these things are done using my own idiosyncratic method and I don’t show my working.  So I probably wouldn’t get any marks for them in an exam, even if I arrived at the right answer and realised that 37 – 1  meant that I had left a child in the service station 20 miles back.

So I thought I’d better put in some practice before I have to start teaching maths in Cambodia next month, and I got out the list of topics.

Topic number one: complementary numbers.  So I googled it and learnt that ‘a complementary number, in number theory, is the number obtained by subtracting a number from its base. For example, the complement of 7 in numbers to base 10 is 3.’

So I googled base number.  Apparently it is ‘a number which is going to be raised to a power.’

So I googled power.  This tells you how many times to use a number in a multiplication.

I think I get this last one, it’s like squared or cubed, but the other two are definitely still fuzzy … I can’t help thinking of numbers raised to a power as being despotic – probably plotting a violent coup and fighting me every step of the way as I struggle to subtract them from their bases.  If it comes to a showdown between me and the numbers, I’ll put my money on the numbers winning – although I will be able to use my idiosycratic methods to check my winnings and make sure I haven’t been short-changed.

I have decided to abandon complementary numbers and start with number patterns instead, as they sound far less threatening.  I will post a progress report next week.