Week 3: Your favourite lesson when you were at school – what is it like to teach it now?

When I was at school I adored Maths. When I was at primary school we learned maths by working our way through various text maths. The teacher would mark our work and periodically go through something. I can't honestly remember any teacher in primary school teaching me any maths. I'm sure I learned it all through the text books. It was great because you could work through the challenges at your own pace. Being a book ahead of the other children raised your self-esteem quite nicely! I wish I could remember which books we used...

My love for maths continued into high school and I relished every challenge. I loved my high school maths teacher and looked forward to every lesson. We were often set problem solving investigations for homework and I used to love exploring these with my mum. I took my GCSE a year early and scored a B. I took it again the following year and raised it to an A. Until GCSE, maths was without a doubt my favourite subject.

I then opted to do maths at A-level and it was at that point that it ceased being my favourite. Until GCSE I could always see a purpose and an application for everything I was being taught. A-level maths was just too abstract. I couldn't see the point. It was divided into two modules, pure maths and statistics (each module ending in an exam). I hated pure maths with its calculus, integration and differentation. I didn't find it at all easy. I loved statistics however. I could see how useful statistics could be (I am still a nerd for statistics now). I did so well in statistics that it brought my overall mark for maths up and I scored a D in the A-level.

For some reason, and I still can't quite figure out why, despite maths being my lowest A-level result, I chose to study it in University. It was probably a good choice in the end though, as it restored my love of the subject somewhat as things started to make sense.

Now, as a Maths teacher, I teach Maths every day. Children's 'textbooks' are often used but pupils are never left to just work their way through. I think the newer way is a much better way to teach. But I do wonder whether more able children would, as I did, love the chance to just work their way through a textbook. In primary school we were taught to 'do' things in maths. Now I like to think that I teach children to understand what they are doing.

I love teaching maths, just like I loved learning it!