Mathematical Careers
What makes a mathematician? Qiu Chengtong, the first Chinese-American mathematician to be awarded the Fields Medal, known as the Nobel Prize in mathematics, once commented, “The true essence of maths is not about solving questions, especially not the ones set by others, but to discover research paths, raise worthy questions and blaze a trail of their own.” The inspiration for his remarks on fundamental maths education should put more focus on cultivating pupils’ interest in learning maths and building their maths thinking.
Since its establishment, the Wellington maths department has launched the Maths Week programme, which, over the years, has led our pupils to realise that maths is everywhere, including problem-solving, π and the maths time unit. Pupils were inspired by the curiosity of creative games and competitions that deepened their understanding of abstract concepts, so they were equipped with the necessary skills to solve practical issues. One of Wellington’s approaches to building the maths thinking of the pupils allows them to grow into outstanding talents to embrace the ever-changing world.
Let us look back at our maths week and learn how our inspirational maths team has led Wellington pupils to understand more about Mathematical Careers.
Primary School
This year’s Maths Week was a resounding success enjoyed by pupils, parents and staff.
The children had a lot of fun learning and testing their mathematical knowledge in various practical situations. Here are some testimonials to this effect:
“I was excited about the ‘bungee egg drop’ because we had to work out how long to make the bungee cord, and we didn’t know if it would work.” (Eason, year 5)
“I enjoyed going outside during maths lessons, doing sport and measuring our speed, jumping and throwing length.” (Bella, year 5)
“My favourite thing about Maths Week was measuring the ingredients for our pancakes. We weighed everything carefully and made some delicious snacks.” (Angela, year 4)
Seventy-seven parents also put their maths skills to the test during our parent workshop, and we are proud to say our parents rated the workshop a 4.87 out of 5. It was also an honour for me to hear the extent to which our parents believe in the Wellington approach towards teaching maths; 71% of parents strongly agreed that ‘the Wellington approach to teaching maths benefited their child(ren)’, and the remaining 29% agreed with the statement.
Maths Week 2022 was a fantastic week for everyone involved. There were fun, challenging mathematical activities. But, most importantly, as it was the focus of this year, our children found out through their experiences how important maths is in many different careers. So this week will help inspire our children during their maths learning and future career choices.
Senior School
Maths week at WCIH is a fantastic opportunity for the Maths Department to share their love for the subject and try to inspire the pupils to see how brilliant it can be. It also provides a platform for teachers to show off their maths knowledge and cement with our pupils how essential maths is in our daily lives.
This year our theme for maths week is Mathematical Careers. Most of us know that maths is used in our daily lives, but when asked to think of examples, we often cannot think of anything beyond counting money or reading road signs. This week’s goal was to show our pupils careers with a more profound use of maths than expected.
It is essential in a themed week like this that the pupils can see the link to the curriculum. This makes it feel beneficial and inspires them even more. Throughout the week, our pupils worked on measuring, weighing, perimeter, area, circumference, profit, averages and even tensile strength. These topics appear in the curriculum from year 7 to year 11 and are topics many of our pupils are already very familiar with, just not in the context we gave them.
On Monday, our pupils were learning about maths in fashion design by using pieces of fabric to create a skirt. This involved making the skirt fit specific dimensions of a model, using lots of circle calculations, and then calculating how much profit they wanted to make if they were to sell the skirt.
On Tuesday, we listened to a talk from Dr Di Kang in the theatre. Dr Kang told us how she uses maths daily in her job as a professor of economics. Pupils were learning how important data collection and analysis can be and when we sometimes make links between data that don’t truly exist.
On Wednesday, the pupils learned about maths as a chef by making pancakes. The pupils followed a recipe that required them to scale down the ingredients from 12 to 5 pancakes, then measure and weigh ingredients to make the pancakes with no wasted ingredients at the end.
On Thursday, our pupils were given a choice of learning about maths in artistry or maths in sports careers. In artistry, the pupils were learning how to make regular geometrical shapes with paper, emphasising the most commonly used shapes in design. In sports, the pupils measured and averaged their running times and throwing and jumping distances to decide overall winners in each category.
On Friday, the pupils were working on maths in engineering. The pupils were tasked with creating a bungee that could support an egg, getting it to bounce back up as close to the floor as possible without touching it. In this task, the pupils had to consider the elastic bands’ tensile strength to ensure it was not too short or too long for the 4.5m drop from the balcony.
Our pupils thought highly of this year’s maths week,
“I didn’t realise there was so much maths in designing clothing.”
“That was very interesting. The spurious correlations are crazy.”
“My pancakes were too runny. I think my flour measurements were a little bit wrong. I learned to double check my measurements as my cup to grams ratio was incorrect.”
Maths is the universal language of all sciences. We hope that Wellington pupils’ interest and passion for learning maths are inspired by the engaging maths week and that their maths logic is established to grow into outstanding pupils with critical thinking abilities.
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