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Students count on PM’ s Teacher of Year
MGSM’ s John Croucher has built a career out of making maths and statistics relevant and fun in the classroom. By Dallas Bastian
Becoming a teacher was the last thing professor John Croucher wanted to do growing up, thanks to a bad stammer that kept him from speaking in front of classes as a schoolboy. But after gaining confidence and receiving positive feedback from his first few lectures – full classes and good attendance – Croucher decided it was going to be his career. Now, 30 years later, he’ s the latest recipient of the Prime Minister’ s University Teacher of the Year award.
“ It’ s great vindication for all the work that everybody [ puts into ] their learning and teaching,” Croucher, professor of management at Macquarie University’ s Graduate School of Management( MGSM), said.“ It’ s a culmination of all that hard work that you’ re finally recognised for it all.”
Winning the premier university teaching award in Australia highlights that teaching subjects such as statistics and maths, which people often think may be boring and almost impossible to teach, can indeed be made engaging, he said.
“ You can make it interesting and you can have students really like a subject that they might otherwise not have enjoyed at all.”
Croucher said he has always been fascinated by numbers and mathematics was his favourite subject at school.
He was able to blend his love of sports into his work, conducting research in the area, and even presented a rugby league telecast with Ray Warren in the’ 80s and’ 90s, bringing statistics to the public at large.
He also wrote a popular column for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald called“ Number Crunch” for 12 years, published more than 120 papers and penned 24 books that have racked up more than $ 3 million in sales in Australia – many are internationally used textbooks.
Learning was instilled in Croucher from a young age through his parents, despite the fact both left school during the depression at the age of 12.
“ They understood the value of an education and they made sure
6 | campusreview. com. au