Scots TikToker and former teacher: Why maths teaching doesn't add up

You’re obviously hugely passionate about maths and the importance of engaging people in what it can do, but did you always know that you wanted to teach people about it?

I always wanted to do maths. I knew that. But I was one of those people who started my maths degrees saying: Oh, I'm never going to use this for teaching - I'm just here for the math.

And then as I got closer to the end of my degree, I was like, right… what do I actually do with this?

And it was only at that point that I reflected back on my life. So I was a Young Leader in Guides and used to do like a lot of helping out there. And also, when I was in sixth year of high school, in order to get my EMA I had a certain amount of hours that I needed to be timetabled. And the three Advanced Highers I was studying didn't do that. So I had this extra space that I needed to fill up in my timetable. Otherwise, I wouldn't get my EMA.

But my music teacher at the time was really wonderful, and she said: Okay, well, one of your Advanced Highers is music. So why don't you help out in the first and second year music classes, and I'll timetable you into them. And you can help me teach. I said yes I did that to make up extra space on my timetable.

So then when I got to the end of my degree, I thought maybe, actually, maybe I do like teaching? I love working with young people. Maybe I could give teaching a go. And then as soon as I started my PGDE I was like: I have found my calling. These are my people. This is awesome. You know, it was pretty much one of the first times that I felt purposeful, like I fit in, like I found what I was meant to do.

Community Mathematician and TikToker Ayliean Macdonald (Image: Lydia Smith)

Having unexpectedly ended up becoming a teacher, and then falling in love with the job, you decided to move on last year and became a community mathematician. How did that move come about and what does it involve?

Math City is the UK's first and only maths discovery centre. It's in Leeds and it's all about, you know, hands on maths.

Basically it starts with a guy called Michael Norton who runs a kind of a benevolent fund. He's really amazingly eccentric old guy. His brother Simon was a very good mathematician, so when he died Michael wanted to use some of the money to get people interested in maths and just to share the joy and love of maths.

Math City, which is in Leeds, is the UK’s first and only maths discovery centre, and Michael does a lot of funding for it. He's an amazing person to speak to - he does all of these weird and wonderful projects, like he's got cycling projects, he's really into the environment. He's just all for being an eccentric, philanthropic old guy. And he wanted to put up some money to get people interested in maths through this new role.

People had to kind of pitch for this role and so I pitched that I think that we should have art and maths, I think we should do music and maths. I'm really into community building and taking up space, and there's a lot of cool things that you can do with like chalk on the pavements making fractals. So I was like, get maths off the pages and onto the streets.

One of the stipulations that he put in was that he wanted the community mathematician to have a 'costume', as he puts it. And I was like, that's an odd word choice. Where are we landing with this, on a scale of hoody to mascot?

So he was like: 'I was imagining something like a pointy hat, wizard situation.'

And, okay, oddly enough, you’ve come to the right person.

So I put together a community mathematician outfit where I have a Klein Bottle hat and all sorts. I wanted it to be, you know, really interactive. So I have a cape, a massive six foot cape that when you lay it on the ground it’s a chessboard. So you can do makeshift chessboard maths anytime you need it - you just whip that out.

And yeah, he was just like: Okay - go around, do art, do the fun things. Get people interested.

Read more: Why reform of the Scottish exam system is vital

Maths is a subject that can provoke real anxiety in people, especially those who firmly believe that they’re just not good at maths. What do you think creates those sorts of feelings?

I'll use my mum as an example. She's from an older generation and she was put in what was called a remedial math class at the time. She struggled and she is someone who stands there and says they just can’t do maths.

And yet she's a wonderful textile artist.

There's a poncho that she made me, and I know this is a bit of a tangent, but this poncho has a right angle at one side and it has a right angle at the other side, and they’re joined by a straight line. And you might think because the lines are perpendicular they meet at this one point and never again, but that's on a flat sheet of paper. I actually have a tattoo of this shape, but I'm not a flat sheet of paper, and crochet isn't done on a flat sheet of paper, and that means you can have a shape which has two right angles and two perpendicular lines and they can meet up twice - and this is really high level maths - and the shape is called a digon. It would be impossible to draw this shape on a flat sheet of paper.

So my mum has managed to crochet this shape which is in elliptic space, so we're moving out of the Euclidian plane, and for people who work with textiles the amount of maths that they do is surreal - but yet she will sit there and say: ‘No I was never good at maths, I can't do maths.’

You were just never given the language to describe the maths that you do, and what you think of as maths is a very narrow view, and so of course you think you're bad at maths - but you're not.

So what would make the teaching of maths, or the experience of maths, better in Scotland? What would make things better for young people?

Very simply: more teachers, more funding, smaller classes. I think those are the things that we need to go for those.

As a young teacher, for the longest time, I said I was going to ignore - in a hopeful way - all of the politics that's involved in teaching. Why let politics tarnish this wonderful experience of teaching and learning maths?  I love maths so much, I want to give that passion to young people, and here I am in a classroom with 30 (to 33) young people - let me just communicate this passion, and I'm going to turn a blind eye to the politics of it.

And then as I matured as a teacher and got older, I started to realise just how much of an effect the system and management and things like that have on your ability to teach. And one of the things that I think makes a massive impact is the class size in maths.

Some people love ‘on the page’ maths and there is a certain degree to which maths is really analogous to like music or sport that there's a skill to it that you have to practice.

But if you had smaller class sizes you could also do more practical, hands on things.

So in Math City, they have this one exhibition which people seem to really love. Imagine a cylinder of water, like a glass of water, except it's massive. And you kind of like spin it round, and as you start spinning it the water spins out towards the edges. That's a parabola, which is one of the things that people struggle most with in National 5 maths. It's in the 'relationships' unit of maths, and what we're trying to build up is the relationship between graphs - so that's the picture version of maths - and equations, but there is a third aspect of that relationship which we could build in: where does this actually come from? How can you represent it in the real world?

Ayliean Macdonald believes if you had smaller class sizes you could also do more practical, hands on things. Photo Lydia Smith. (Image: Lydia Smith)

So we could do practical things with smaller classes. And obviously, for that, you need to have more teachers, because in the UK, we have a very, very high ratio of prep time to contact time. If you had more teachers then you could have smaller classes and there would hopefully be less contact time and more prep time. And with more funding - which I don't think is a controversial thing to say - you could either have like these hands-on practical things or you could go to places like Math City.

It’s obvious that you find your new role hugely exciting, but having been so profoundly affected by the experience of becoming a teacher, I wonder if – like me – you still feel some sadness at being out of the classroom?

The fact that I'm not a teacher anymore is in some ways heartbreaking, and I know that there is a kind of saltiness about people who prescribe things to teachers who are no longer on the ground actually teaching and so I was worried about it. But then when I left people said 'once a teacher always a teacher', like you still have that with you, and actually there's a really cool.

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I don't know if you can speak any Gaelic at all but when you when you say what your occupation is in Gaelic you wouldn't say "I am a teacher", you say “s e tidsear a th’ annam” which is more like, 'there is a teacher within me.' And so I do kind of feel like whatever I'm doing, I am going to always be trying to teach, because I just loved teaching so much.