Where were you on the 24th August?

Where were you on the 24th August 2017?

It was a Thursday nearly three weeks ago and if you were a university student, my guess would be you were probably working (to try and repay some of that never ending student debt), on a beach sunning it up somewhere or sitting in front of Netflix! If you worked for The OR Society, you were in the office, listening to me squeal in delight and pack boxes with brown masking tape. If you were a school teacher, it was the day you were dreading / excited for / apprehensive about!! It was …. GCSE results day.

For students up and down the country, they were opening up envelopes which told them how they had done. For this year, Maths and English were re-graded and went from 9 – 1 rather than A* to G as previously. It was now a grade ‘9’ that was desirable, rather than the previous ‘A*’. 

So what about the boxes with brown masking tape? This year, as part of our outreach work promoting what we do, we were giving away free maths goody bags. (Wait, free maths goody bags? Am I reading that right?). Yes, yes you are!

We popped a little message on twitter to let people know we were celebrating their students achievements (and of course a picture) and we were inundated with messages, re-tweets and replies telling us how their students had got on. Teachers from up and down the country messaged us - we had York and Manchester email us, along with Torquay and Kent, to let us know their students had excelled at maths. We wanted to reward these students – and what better way than a free maths goody bag (It’s also our way of tempting them into a career in O.R.)! It came with a wonderful white and red tote type bag (which of course had ‘The OR Society’ and our logo on the front), a pen, pencil, ruler, DVD and of course some leaflets about what we do and what Operational Research (O.R.) is all about. And …. For a random selection of them, we gave them puzzles too!! Think Rubik's Cube, pyramids and other wooden maths puzzles to keep the brain in shape. 

The packs were sent to teachers to distribute to the students and I therefore had the pleasure of reading all the tweets (and seeing how people had done) and subsequently packing the bags up!

So, it seems if you want to get your name and message out there, free maths goody bags is a great way to go about it!! If you were a teacher who messaged us, please do let us know if the goody bags arrived! :)

              

Interested? Bored? Hopefully not the latter ….

Tweet us @ORinSchools or @TheORSociety or drop us an email: schools@theorsociety.com

Disclaimer to those who think it’s unfair: Now, just so we’re clear – I think EVERYONE did a great job. Those who got a grade 8 did awesome and those that got a grade 1 did awesome. However, we’re a charity and unfortunately our budget doesn’t stretch to a free maths goody bag to every single student (If you think it should, feel free to donate to us – drop me an email and I’ll ensure every student next year gets a maths goody bag!).