Duration: 5 minutes 22 seconds

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Eddie Woo

The thing I love most about STEM is that it flips upside down the learning paradigm for students, especially in something like mathematics. We often have students answering questions that have been posed to them by the teacher or the textbook. However, STEM reverses that and actually has students themselves generating questions that mean something to them because they've got a problem that they want to solve.

And so they themselves are the ones coming to me saying, Sir, we're trying to solve this problem. How do we do it? And I'll say, I know exactly a tool for it, and then I can introduce the maths. One of the things that's most profound and powerful about mathematics is the universality and the timelessness of the things that we know and we can prove in maths.

For example, Pythagoras Theorem is all about the relationships between the sides of a right angle triangle. Now, Pythagoras theorem was true thousands of years ago and it will be true thousands of years from now, long after any human beings are around to know about it. And that's because it's about something deep and timeless and it's not dependent on culture or our context.

It's something which we can say to anyone around the world and they can say, Yeah, I agree with that. And I think in our world today, those kinds of things are in short supply. So it's a wonderful, unifying theme to be able to experience and see mathematical truths together and to actually agree upon them. In terms of making mathematics meaningful and connecting it to the lives of our students.

I think one of the most important things to recognize is that mathematics looks on the surface like it's about symbols and algebra and things like that, formulas that maybe a student might say, When am I ever going to use this in everyday life? But actually, mathematics is really about helping students think in a deductive and a formal and a logical way.

And it doesn't matter what problem you're encountering. Actually, all those things that we look at in algebra and geometry and trigonometry, they're just examples that give students kind of a practical context to say, how can you create something that really proves to me in a watertight way, in a convincing way? I'm persuaded that this has to be true.

A lot of the ideas that we encounter, a lot the skills that I want to teach students in mathematics, they take a lot of effort and work and they overload your working memory, they’re hard work. I don't shy away from that. One of the things that's really important there obviously, therefore, is student motivation. A student's going to care enough about wanting to solve this problem that they'll put in the time and the effort to develop those skills.

And I think when we give students a situation where there's a genuine problem they have to solve patch, it's local to their community. It's something they encounter every single day. And we can say, you know what? There's maths, there’s scientific knowledge. There is technology solutions that can help us do something about this problem that means something to you, that matters to you.

And often that's the key. Having it connects them in a personal way that I really love because maths can be so abstract. Sometimes it can feel like solving a bunch of problems that I don't care about, so why would I bother and put the effort in? So giving them a reason to care I think is really essential. There's these core skills that run across all of the different parts of maths that are meaningful to you, whoever you are and what have you interested in doing in life.

Now we must call these working mathematically. They are the skills, they're the qualities that we employ every time we solve a math problem. The things like communicating, understanding, problem solving, reasoning and fluency, these are things that matter every single day. Whether you're going to go into something super mathematical in your career, like, say, engineering or finance. But they're also there.

If you're an artist, if you're trying to write a compelling legal argument, there are points where those mathematical principles and skills are meaningful to you, whatever sphere of life that you're in. So I think focusing on those working mathematically outcomes are really the best way to help a wide variety of students connect to mathematics. As educators and people who work with young people, we really have a responsibility and the privilege of helping our students see all the wonderful contexts and practical applications for mathematics.

And it's really important that we show our students this so that they recognize that they're not just doing maths because we tell them because it's homework, because they have a test. But actually it helps us solve problems that really matter and it enriches our understanding of the world. I'll give you an example. Calculus isn't just about following a bunch of rules and formulas to get some answers out of manipulating symbols.

It's actually about the mathematics of change, whether that's temperature that fluctuates or population that goes up and down, or the position of the moon in the sky. All these things can be understood and articulated using calculus. So if we can show our students a context that means something to them, whether it's about trying to fight a global pandemic or trying to work out what's the way to minimize the amount of plastic waste that we have.

Mathematics provides us the tools for solving problems in all of those contexts. So we really need to labour to show our students those different kinds of things and to be thinking hard as we look out into the everyday world. Where does mathematics connect in ways that perhaps we wouldn't expect and that our students need to encounter in the school context?

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