ABSTRACT
Judith is a newly-qualified mathematics teacher in an 11-16 secondary school. She is working with a class of Year 9 pupils, who have various rectangular arrays of points on ‘dotty’ paper, and have to connect them by drawing line segments between pairs of points. What is the least number of segments necessary so that they form a continuous line connecting all of the points? The brief episode that follows will be used in this chapter to raise and illustrate a number of issues about language in the mathematics classroom. As you read it, you might make a note of some of the issues that it raises for you.
