Mathematics at School

Mathematics played important part in my time at Oundsdale. There were several different aspects this, some good some bad.

Maths Olympiad

Each year the school ran a maths Olympiad. This comprised a series of rounds where the entrants had to solve puzzles related to mathematics. Most questions set as a narrative or a diagram and first you had to work out what the question was. Once that was sorted out you then applied the mathematics to get the answer.

I won this competition or was runner-up on several occasions in my time at the school. I was pleased to receive prizes at speech day. One year this was the radio amateurs handbook which I was very pleased to get.

Adding machines

They were somewhat old-fashioned the time, but we had lessons on how to use a mechanical adding machine. To have a whole class of students cranking away at their machines to do the sums made for quite a noisy classroom.

The computer

It must be very rare at the time, but we had a computer accessible from the school. In a small office there was a teletype which would read and write paper tape. Those of us with access would go in and write our programs, then save them on a tape. About once a week a large furniture van would arrive from the South Staffs Polytechnic (I think that's the right name) and we would handed our tapes. The tapes were fed through a reader in the van and we were given the results tape. We would then take this to our teletype, and run it to see what we had achieved.

As you may guess, it was quite difficult to debug a program when you only had one interaction week. But we learn the principles of computing, and felt the joy and disappointment of programming.

Midlands mathematical experiment

The schools enrolled in the Midlands mathematical experiment. This gave an alternative syllabus for maths. Some of the concepts in the normal curriculum, such as calculus, not included. Concepts normally reserved for universities, such as statistics and topology, where included. The experiment was aiming to provide a more directly relevant curriculum for maths, as was the ethos of the school with all its practical aspects.

We enjoyed and thrived on this new curriculum. Things went very well to O-level. However after one year in six form we were told that no A-levels available for MME. This meant an abrupt change of course in our mathematics lessons, attempting to cram in those things we had missed before exam season came.

Unfortunately this did not succeed. The whole maths set failed maths, and there was a desperate rush to go through clearing and find university places for all of us. With passes in physics and statistics I was able to go to Portsmouth Polytechnic, but was nowhere near the office for Cambridge that I'd been given.