Dear Elle,
Could you please give me some advice on becoming a Maths teacher? After doing a maths degree I am seriously thinking about going into teaching, but I don't know whether I am just being arrogant by thinking I could make a difference. I want to teach people about proof and geometry like I would have liked to learn about at school, but never did. You mentioned that your dad was a Maths teacher, that's all.
yours
Tom K
Dear Tom,
You are right, my daddy is a maths teacher. He is a very good maths teacher - he teaches numbers to the boys and girls and he goes to the school on his big motorbike that I am not allowed to drive because I am too small. When I get a bit bigger I will drive my daddy's motorbike and wear the funny black boots that he wears. My Uncle Russell has lots of motorbikes as well, but sometimes he drives them a bit faster than is allowed, and his dog George the dog tells him off. George the dog told me this.
I don't really know what a roggant is, or why you would be like a roggant if you became a maths teacher. Is a roggant a sort of ant? I don't like ants, they are too small and they always run away when I try to give them a drink of blackcurrant squash. I don't think you should become an ant, even if a roggant is better than a normal sort of ant.
I have not learnt about proof and geometry yet but I think that when I learn about it I will be very good at it, because I am clever. I am much more clever than that horrid man called Gaston in Disney's Beauty and the Beast. He doesn't like books or clever people, and he has silly hair. He thinks he is good because he eats lots of eggs, he eats 5 dozen eggs every morning to help him get large, and that is a lot of eggs. But I think maybe he is telling fibs, because nobody eats that many eggs.
I think that being a maths teacher is a very good thing to be, and my daddy is not at all like a roggant or any sort of ant - my daddy is quite big and he likes curry and ants are so very small and I don't think they like curry but maybe they do. I once met a man called Andrew who was a maths teacher at the same school as my daddy and he was tall and thin with a very silly pair of trousers that were much too small for his legs, so I think maybe it doesn't matter what you look like if you are a maths teacher.
I have to go now and feed some more jelly to George the dog.
love
Elle xxx