Eddie Woo: Australia’s favourite teacher pays it forward
HE overcame bullying to become one of the successful teachers in Australia and now Eddie Woo says educating the next generation — not money — is what gets him up in the morning.
Stellar
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AS a young boy, Eddie Woo would do his very best to get out of going to school. Bullied because of his Malaysian-Chinese heritage, Woo would dread the classroom so much that he would simply stay in bed until his mother gave up on trying to get him out of it.
That scared, bright boy would grow up to become one of the most renowned teachers in Australia, and the champion of our school system. He has more than 300,000 subscribers on his mathematics-focused “WooTube” channel, and millions of hits on his videos. He became one of only 10 finalists for the 2018 Global Teacher Prize, an annual award of US$1 million presented to a teacher who has made an outstanding contribution to the profession. While he didn’t win, Woo, 32, considers being a role model to young Australians as a prize in itself.
“I was in regional Victoria the other week and I met all these really young people who said, ‘You’re an inspiration to me.’ It brings tears to your eyes to know you have the opportunity to change the lives of young people and children everywhere,” Woo tells Stellar.
“One of the hardest things about being a teacher is that you don’t just give 9am to 3pm. You don’t just give a nice, well-defined professional service. Teachers give a part of themselves to their students. They give their character, and their curiosity and their respect for others. In some way, it’s the hope of every teacher that we get to pass on good attributes and great citizenship with all the people we interact with. It is a great privilege.”
The Cherrybrook Technology High School head maths teacher, in Sydney’s north-west, speaks at an uncommonly fast rate, something he blames on his students. “I talk to teenagers and I only get their attention span in five-minute pieces, so if I don’t talk fast I can’t get anything done,” he says with a laugh.
It is not only teens that Woo engages with. His WooTube channel, which started in 2012 when he began posting videos online for a student sick with cancer, aims to get maths out there to the whole world — and remove the discipline’s negative reputation.
“If I want to help people regain their confidence in mathematics, I have to act a little bit like a doctor,” Woo explains. “I have to diagnose the patient: ‘Tell me at what point did you start feeling you didn’t understand maths and it wasn’t clicking for you. OK, right, now I’m with you. Let me go to that point and let me rebuild your understanding from there. Sort of like building the foundation of a house.’”
Like many migrants, Woo’s parents came to Australia in search of opportunity and a better life. Woo was born in Sydney’s Camperdown, and in so many ways, his life was quintessentially Australian. Yet to his bullies, he was different.
In his Australia Day address this year at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Woo told the crowd, “When I was a kid, it didn’t seem to matter that I had spent my entire childhood in North Rocks supporting the Parramatta Eels. It didn’t seem to matter that I grew up listening to Crowded House, or that my favourite food was the potato scallop I religiously purchased for 20 cents at the tuck shop on my walk home from school each day. No, what seemed to matter was that I didn’t look Australian — or that at least I didn’t fit what my peers thought an Australian was supposed to look like.”
Despite all the challenges, Woo persevered at school, gravitating towards the humanities and excelling in English and history. Maths wasn’t even part of the equation back then. “I didn’t mind maths but it certainly was not my strong point,” he says. “So for me, it was quite a shock in turn to become a mathematics teacher. I discovered it was an amazing, wonderful and beautiful subject when you get to know it.”
While his late mother was not a fan of his new-found love — she wanted her son to be a lawyer — there is little doubt she would be exceptionally proud of the tremendous success Woo has garnered. In addition to WooTube and the Global Teacher Prize honour, Woo was named as this year’s Australia’s Local Hero, and has been given a new role as a master teacher with the NSW Department of Education. Now he’s making his foray into TV, hosting a new ABC ME series titled Teenage Boss, which follows teens who are given control of their family’s monthly budget. Woo, who acts as a mentor to the teens, is adamant that he would not have done as good a job as many of these youngsters if he was let loose on the family budget at their age.
“I would not have even known where to start. I didn’t have any sense of the value of money and how long it took to earn any of these things so I don’t think I would have been a very good Teenage Boss at all.”
His own children with wife Michelle are not yet in their teenage years and are too young to know what they would like to do in life, but Woo is keen for them to know that they can pursue whatever they want, whether it involves maths or not. “I think they do like maths — they find it hard but that’s because maths is hard. That’s totally OK to admit that,” Woo tells Stellar.
“I don’t want them to become maths teachers if they are not going to be great maths teachers who enjoy being maths teachers. What I want them to do is to take what they’ve been given — the great opportunity they get from an Australian education — and to be able to use that in a way that helps others.”
After all, that is what he would like to be known for: helping people. For him, being a teacher offers the opportunity to show young people just how capable they are of things they once thought were too hard or even impossible. A big, fat bank account would be a colossal failure compared to being an educator, in Woo’s mind.
“In life, I can say thank you to my parents and say thank you to my teachers, but I’ll never be able to pay them back the debt I’ve earned,” Woo says. “I’m a really big believer that even though I can’t pay it back, I can pay it forward to the next generation. I can give them a gift that’s very precious, and if they can pass it on to their next generation, that’s what drives me. That’s what makes me get up in the morning, roll out of bed, and be excited and patient about what I do — because there’s a great moral purpose behind it.”
Teenage Boss premieres 6.25pm, Sunday June 24, on ABC ME and ABC iview.
Originally published as Eddie Woo: Australia’s favourite teacher pays it forward
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