Maths Made Easy and Fun

During our very busy November in Kathmandu we were visited by Anne Willmann and her husband Willi. Anne has recently retired as the principal of an IB School in Auckland, New Zealand and she and her husband are both Maths teachers. They were visiting Nepal to do some trekking and to visit their old favourite places as they lived in Kathmandu for 2 years a number of years ago. They generously volunteered their time to help with some teacher training at Riviera, our Model School.

We were very keen to accept this offer as many of the teacher training workshops we have conducted have focused on English and the Social Sciences. This has simply been the result of the expertise of the volunteers we have had in the past. Whilst the Maths teachers at Riviera have attended all these workshops they find it more difficult to apply the skills they learnt to the Maths classroom. This is compounded by the fact that many school students in Nepal struggle with Maths because unlike many other subjects, you can not do well by simple rote learning. Maths requires that you understand the concepts in order to be able to solve problems. As a result, Maths is an unpopular subject and one that teachers find very challenging to make fun. Let’s face it – this is not only an issue faced in Nepal! How many of you had fun in Maths classes when you were growing up?

Fortunately Anne and Willi were experts in this area, and their energy and enthusiasm immediately had the teachers at ease and eager to learn. As part of Riviera's Model School program, we invited 3 teachers from nearby government schools to benefit from the workshops as well.

Two workshops were conducted over two days and included an array of games, magic tricks and other activities all designed to make learning Maths easier and also fun. The teachers were having so much fun doing the activities I'm not sure they wanted to go back to teaching! It was also fantastic to see teachers from different schools working and learning together, sharing their ideas and experiences. One of the comments from the teachers was that they had so much fun that they didn't realise they were learning Maths! In one activity, the students would have done hundreds of calculations without being aware of how much they’d learned because they were racing to complete a competition against other teams. That’s exactly how learning should be – fun and relatively pain free!

At the end of the two workshops Anne and Willi donated copies of all of the exercises and activities they had worked through with the teachers meaning we will be able to share the concepts with other schools in our network. For this as well as for their time and effort, we want to say a huge 'thanks' to Anne and Willi. In the weeks since the workshops we have seen a great improvement in the moral of Riviera's Maths teachers and many of the students are now looking forward to going to Maths class - we can't ask for more than that!