No.127
in 1957 revealed a mathematics
gap between Britain and the Soviet
Union. Bryan Thwaites (C, 41-42;
Co Ro, 51-59) called a meeting and
his group decided to rebuild school
mathematics. Since the fundamental
concept in the axiomatic development
of mathematics is the empty set,
four-year-olds on SMP would start
with the empty set too, rather than
the ‘sums’ on which their benighted
parents had cut their teeth. On that
stark rock the group built an elegant,
practical and meaningful syllabus that
culminated in vector spaces and orbit
mechanics. (Incidentally, Sir Bryan
recently celebrated his 95 th birthday
with a flying lesson and buzzed his
girlfriend’s back garden.)
Readers may know of the Pacific
cargo cults that attach superstitious
meaning to western technology:
in one such, islanders carve
headphones out of balsa wood and
sit in improvised control towers
summoning passing planes; in
another, the Yaohnanen worship
Prince Philip as a divine being. Before
the SMP, mathematics teachers
were priests in a cargo cult, going
through the motions; no wonder
the Soviets had beaten us to orbit.
The SMP reformation had rationale
and purpose: derivatives were ‘local
scale factors’; what the cargo cult
called ‘integration’ was ‘finding
anti-derivatives’; actual integration
was studied; vectors unified abstract
algebra and mechanics; resisted
motion was modelled with differential
equations, which might be solved
step-by-step; and all the pure maths
was fair game in the applied maths
questions. There was an S paper for
the very strongest, which of course
included a dozen Wykehamists every
year; and the thing became even more
splendid at Further Maths. What a
rag-bag of dodge and fallacy my own
education was, compared to SMP;
how fortunate were generations of
Wykehamists to have teachers who
pioneered it; and how lucky I was
to stumble into this haven of rigour,
simplicity and purpose! Sadly, the
The Trusty Servant
SMP, a city at unity in itself, could
not survive the millennial fashion
for modularisation, and judging
by the text book, its successor the
Pre-U is degenerating into a cargo
cult. It happens all the time: there’s
a cuneiform tablet in the British
Museum (BM 13901) that suggests
Hammurabi’s scribes were running a
quadratic equations cargo cult in the
suburbs of Babylon.
7 points the way; but what an
extraordinary thing to have noticed,
and then care about!
John Smith’s determination to get his
department to teach best methods was
somewhat undermined by physical
eccentricity on a grand scale. He was
fond of wild scissoring movements
with his very long legs and was
indulging this while sitting on a
in a classroom over what
1.b radiator
Che Guevara
is still called the Headmaster’s Back
Compared to the tragedy of the SMP,
Passage when he toppled out of the
in which readers may find a parable
for Britain’s trajectory from Concorde open sash. Only the fact that D1 is
John Smith’s determination to get his departm
on the ground floor saved his life. Of
to Ryanair, the Winchester Algebra
by it physical
course, when
came to eccentricity
eccentricity on a gra
Wars were a Balkan sideshow, fierce, undermined
Funky was the square-root of Durran,
entertaining and instructive. It was
movements
with his very long legs and was i
whose pièces de résistance were animal
John Smith’s battle hymn that the
over without
what is limits.
still Henry
called the Headm
impressions
simplest things could be taught well classroom
Thompson (Co Ro, 64-00 & 05) was
or badly, that I was teaching them
open sash. Only the fact that D1 is on the gro
reduced to tears by the Tiger – ‘Stop
all badly and what was I going to do
to eccentricity
Funky
of D
it John. Please,
please was
stop the
it!’ – square-root
and
about it?
in
the
Warden’s
Garden
at
Eton
impressions without limits. Henry Thompson
QUESTION 2.
Match a College mother once said, ‘O
Multiply out (x − 2)(2x + 5) .
the John,
Tiger I’ve
– ‘Stop
please stop i
heard it so John.
much Please,
about your
(x − 2)(2x + 5) = 2x 2 − 4x + 5x − 10 = 2x 2
ape – please do it for me.’ Durran
a College mother once said, ‘O John, I’ve hea
+ x − 10.
politely declined but was pressed
me.’
Durran
politely
declined
but was pressed
hard.
Suddenly
the ape
appeared,
In every classroom in the world
scratching
his
armpits.
He
peeled
off
his armpits. He peeled off his interlocutor’s
p
beyond SO23 this working would
his interlocutor’s patent yellow heels
receive a tick. Not at Winchester in chucked them in Logie and brachiated away.
like a pair of bananas, chucked them
1986, where Funky’s syllabus was
in Logie and brachiated away.
explicit: boys must write
QUESTION 3.
2x 2 + x − 10 without intermediate working. Question 3. In the diagram below, find x.
In the diagram below, find x.
I mustn’t discourage my 32 readers
with a paragraph explaining why
Funky was right and the rest of
48°
10
the world wrong, though Question
Che Guevara
2
response
Your response to Your
this question
will to this quest
depend on whether
you are
pro- the
or anti-Funki
Funky.
Like
anti-Funky. Like the anti-Funkies, I
primary,
so the
sine of an a
had been taught that
the ratio
of sides
was primary, so the
of an of angle
the sine
length
the hypotenus
was the length of the opposite divided
and hypotenuse;
the whole thing was to
by the length of the
similar
ratios even
defined
cosine
and
TOA.
Should
that the
tribal
incantation
fail
tangent and the whole thing was to
slogans,
of which Silly Old Harry Caught A H
be remembered with a mnemonic:
SOH CAH
TOA. Should
even that would
printable.
In Question
3, anti-Funkies
x tribal incantation fail to stick, there
" were
= cos48° ;
x = obscene
10cos48°
= 6.69 .' That
more-or-less
slogans,
10 of which Silly Old Harry Caught A
grave. John Smith’s line was that cos48°
is w
the adjacent, so that without invoking a ratio
wondering what the sides of such triangles ar
glitch, and had I not come to Winchester I w