ABSTRACT
In the first two years of my teaching career in the UK, I experienced classes that would rarely listen to what I had to say. I felt I managed to ‘turn off’ students from mathematics who may have begun the year relatively keen and enthusiastic. Students seemed engaged primarily in an exploration of my boundaries rather than anything mathematical. The failings were of my own making. In my third year of teaching, I moved school and began a research collaboration with Laurinda Brown that was pivotal to my finding a way of being in the classroom that allowed something more interesting to take place. The ideas in this book have been developed almost entirely through that collaboration (see Brown and Coles 2008).
