RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32387, 28 August 1970, Page 19

RANDOM REMINDER

BREAK-UP

The universities, as well as the schools, are enjoying their well-earned rests at present, and that applies also to the Technical Institute, which produces some wonderful results in the course of its varied activities. But of all the pupils and staff at the various educational establishments it is unlikely that anyone welcomed the vacation more than one of the young men who are charged with the task of lecturing the accountant’s mathematics classes at the Institute. He has not had an easy task. He is about half the age of his pupils who average something over 40 and who include several senior members of the profession, including two present councillors of the

Society of Accountants. They had to cover, together, some features of the new maths and went on to differential calculus. It required these mature pupils to think at unaccustomed speed and with an unaccustomed degree of concentration. It had been a trying time, all round. The pupils floundered about with problems handled at school by third to lower sixth students and they bad considerable doubts about accepting the proposition that 0 divided by 0 was not necessarily 0 but could be anything. Some members of the class are still suspicious that this is a trick, a genuine case of being blinded by science. There has been homework, and regularly, each week, fathers have lost face with

teenage daughters through their inability to grasp what the girls regard as the simplest of mathematical problems. One day, the tutor, going through some examples in a test book, was fired by enthusiast to such an extent that when explaining the solution of one example he developed his theme beyond the bounds of necessity; when he referred back to his text book he discovered he had also answered the following example. This did nothing to bolster the confidence of his bewildered, balding boys. But if it did nothing else, it has persuaded some mature men of business to still their criticisms of the length of teachers’ vacations. It was clear to all parties that they all needed the rest.