Oxford scholars

How do you get into Oxford University? One way is to have very good grades, a better way is to be enthusiastic about your subject, so enthusiastic that you are teaching yourself it. A school friend of mine, Peter Kirby, was just such an enthusiast. In his case his passion was entomology. He had a comprehensive collection of moths (they all looked alike to me), and had made himself knowledgeable in the field. When he went for interview at Oxford, it was immediately obvious to the admissions tutor that he was a student who was capable of learning about arthropods simply because he already had taught himself. Peter was given an unconditional offer. All he had to do was get the 3 “A” levels which the university required of all students and he was in… no competition for grades at all. On the other hand I taught a student at Andover College who had an enormous need to achieve. He was incredibly hard working, but his work was worthy rather than enthusiastic. He was diligent with his mathematics, but he was working at it, he was working hard at it, it was not a passion. That spark of inventiveness, of insight, of exploration was missing. He was not Oxford maths material not least because he worked too hard at it. If he could have achieved the academic results he was achieving, but with less effort then he would have better fitted the profile of an Oxford mathematician. Why was he working so hard at maths, when there are others out there who do not need to do so? Because, he’d learned maths as a series of routines that he had to apply to solve the questions that were posed to him, and he approached the problems from this perspective. He didn’t approach them from the perspective of a fun adventure, in which he could apply his imagination. It is that sort of person that a premier university looks for when selecting its students. Puppet Maths intends to inculcate that adventurous approach to maths from the get go, so that all pupils no matter what their final level of achievement might be (GCSE, "A" level, matriculation) find that mathematics is a fun adventure, is easy, and isn't the toil that so many have experienced of maths in the classroom.