Does anyone love their subject more than Chris Smith? This is a teacher who started a maths newsletter for a dozen colleagues in 2006 and has produced one every term-time week since then - and now has thousands of subscribers from around 100 countries.
Smith was Scotland’s Teacher of the Year and one member of “Britain’s brainiest family” this year, having won the BBC show The Family Brain Games with his wife - also a teacher - and two daughters. Now, he is one of Tes Scotland’s 10 people of the year.
A master of maths
Passion for maths has earned those accolades, and Smith is on a mission to show every pupil who says they can’t do maths - and that it’s boring anyway - just how they can.
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Smith’s madcap maths stunts have become legendary at Grange Academy in Kilmarnock, East Ayrshire, where he has spent his entire career. He always attempts something special for Pi Day on 14 March (3/14 in North American calendars, obviously) and this year 432 pupils troop outside through howling winds, each having been issued with coloured, numbered and laminated A3 placards. Smith bellowed instructions with a megaphone and sent a drone skittering up to capture what exactly they were doing: from above, the pupils had, in precise order, shown the value of pi to 314 decimal places.
Smith is a relentless optimist who, in a recent podcast with Tes Scotland, did not gloss over the heavy and sometimes excessive demands placed on teachers, but said that he always saw light at the end of every tunnel, in the form of his pupils.
Earlier in the year, when we asked teachers around the country for their top tip for the 2019-20 school year, he had a beautifully succinct piece of advice for teachers “scunnered” in their job: look at the “brilliant young people” in your school and “let their enthusiasm, creativity and joy revitalise you”.
