ABSTRACT
As a classroom teacher of mathematics in English secondary comprehensive schools in the 1970s and early 1980s, I struggled with ways of helping my students to learn mathematics. I enjoyed doing mathematics myself, and I wanted students to have the pleasure that I had in being successful with mathematical problems. I experienced the introduction and implementation of syllabuses involving the ‘new’ mathematics. This gave me a lot of pleasure as I enjoyed working with sets and functions, with Boolean algebra, with matrices, with transformation geometry. Some of my students enjoyed this too, but the vast majority were, I came to realize, as mystified with the ‘new’ maths as with any of the more traditional topics on the syllabus.
