Maths Education Quotes

A review of maths teaching is a great thing, but it's a complex issue, and often the damage is done in the very early years of education.

When I finished my degree I became a physics and maths teacher. And worked in the international school in Brussels, because like many kids, after University I went home going 'ahhh I don't know what to do'. I happened to fall upon a job there because they were desperate for a physics teacher which is a common theme among many schools.

Maths is fundamentally a different process in education than it is in the real world. There is an insistence that we do maths by hand when most of it is done by computers. The idea that you have to do everything by hand before you can operate a computer is nonsense.

My subjects were maths and physics. I truly appreciate the value in sciences, but understand the difficulty finding and retaining teachers for these subjects, especially when most of my Imperial cohort ended up as management consultants or in finance.

In other countries you can do high-level maths or general maths, whereas we've just got all-or-nothing. We need to give people another option from 16-18. Not everyone is going to want to become a rocket scientist but that doesn't mean that maths isn't extremely useful.

When I was seven or eight, whenever I was getting too rowdy at night, my parents would give me a maths workbook to work on to quieten me down.

The first rap that I wrote was about my Maths teacher, and as expected, he didn't like it, but the students loved it!

I have been running maths clubs for children completely free. In my building in Bangalore, I conduct maths clubs for several months, and every child who attended the club was poor in mathematics and is now showing brilliant results.

Most of all, a good maths education encourages students to embrace difficult problems, not shy away from them. In my opinion, the problem is that most UK secondary schools don't stretch good mathematicians and therefore fail to turn them into excellent mathematicians.

Most people...are put off science because maths is the gateway and they can't handle it. What we should be teaching is operational maths because, in general, the maths we need to carry out science is pretty straightforward.

Schools receive 12% more per student for those doing media studies or psychology than they do for those doing maths. You could change that around, made a premium on doing maths.