Triumphs and Tribulations in Teaching

Extract

Good morning and thank you for coming to listen to my Presidential Address. You have been listening to Meat Loaf’s Bat out of Hell and for those of you who are used to seeing me in various costumes I apologise for not appearing as Batman on a Batbike, but I know my limits (like .

The illustration on the front cover of the Gazette is a bit of a turkey. It comes from an old mathematics exercise book by Henry Smith who started it in 1843 and appears just before he does some examples on the single rule of three direct in vulgar fractions. I wonder how long it took him to do it, but there has surely been some implicit mathematics done in managing to get the wording arranged fairly equally around a circle! The rest of the exercise book is very neatly presented and illustrated, though without any indication that the work has been marked in a summative or formative way. Hence it would not meet today’s standards.