Australian of the Year: talented teacher making maths popular again
Eddie Woo has inspired generations of students to study mathematics.
Over the past several decades, Australian students have been abandoning mathematics.
Despite its growing importance in an increasingly tech-filled world, high schools are struggling to attract kids to the subject.
Enter Sydney high school teacher Eddie Woo.
In 2012, he started posting videos of his teaching at Cherrybrook Technology High School online for a student who had missed class because of cancer. They were longer videos, filmed with his smartphone and posted on YouTube (username: WooTube). Last year, the father of three passed 150,000 subscribers, and his videos have been seen more than 10 million times. Most are simply shots of him standing in front of a whiteboard at the northwest Sydney school.
Mr Woo has undoubtedly inspired thousands of children to pursue maths for longer. It’s an uphill battle, but one he says is worth having. Thirty years ago, 95 per cent of students studied maths for their HSC. That figure is now 77.6 per cent. In 1995, 14.2 per cent of Year 12 students studied the highest level of maths. It has slowly, but surely, decreased to one in 10 students in 2014, according to Australian Council for Education Research figures.
“If students are spending huge hours in this whole other world, then one of the things I think has been valuable about it is it inhabits their world,” he said in one interview. “It is in the seven to eight-minute chunks of time that is almost their native medium. I think that’s one of the many reasons they’ve found it useful.”
Outside the classroom, Mr Woo is equally passionate. He is a volunteer facilitator with the University of Sydney’s Widening Participation and Outreach program, and has motivated more than 1400 students from disadvantaged backgrounds. His list of accolades is growing. His Facebook page has 8500 followers, and he is a regular commentator on mathematics in education discussions.
He has, for half a decade, diligently and meticulously covered areas of the HSC syllabus in snippets that are palatable for the millennial student. It is for all of these reasons Mr Woo has been nominated as a contender for this newspaper’s Australian of the Year.
Readers are encouraged to make a nomination for Australian of the Year by filling in the form here.
The winner will be announced in The Weekend Australian tomorrow.
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