Educators From England

"When I drew this picture it enabled me to understand the piece better, but moreover, it helped me understand why I didn't understand the piece, because the voices got wound... between each other in a way that was difficult to follow until I drew this diagram... [I]t enabled me to follow the lines of music as I was playing... which... enables me to play it better. ...This is the point of understanding the s inside things."

"We will never be able to encompass everything by rationality alone... [T]his is a necessary and beautiful aspect of human existence."

"What if the pieces of string aren't really... string, but they're s? ...[M]aybe ...early diagnosis of Alzheimer's may come from looking at... the tangledness of brain cells that mutate... So an abstract way of telling whether it's tangled is... useful."

"[T]hat's why we move into the abstract world of ideas, where things behave the way that we want them to... [T]hat can be a scary move... because... in the real world you get to touch things... throw things... Whereas in the abstract world... if the logic doesn't do the thing that you want... There's nothing you can do about it. That's just how it works... [T]he upside... is that if you align yourself with the way logic is supposed to work, then everything behaves the way you want it to, because everything behaves perfectly logically... [I]t is the only place where everything behaves perfectly logically."

"Maths... as it's taught in school is often... boring, pointless, painful, beside the point, and doesn't show people the things that... are the most beautiful about abstract math, and what the point of it is..."

"[W]e can try and apply logic to other areas of life... [I]t's very frustrating if we try... with the expectation that that works. ...[I]t doesn't mean we shouldn't try ...[I]t's always good to try and understand everything else according to logic, but... this is the fate of many mathematicians who... get... frustrated with the actual world, because nothing behaves the way we want... Whereas in the beautiful mathematical world everything does behave..."

"[I]n order to study anything logically, we have to ignore all the pesky details that prevent it from behaving logically, and... move into the idealized world... rather than the real world of things... [T]his... is what... abstraction... is..."

"All our dreams can come true as long as we have the right dreams... [A]s long as we think logically, this is the world where everything behaves correctly, and... where any toy we want, we can play with, as soon as we've dreamed it up."

"The trouble with this is that nothing behaves logically."

"Mathematics... helps... construct and understand arguments... too difficult for ordinary intuition. ...It is a way of eliminating ambiguity... It cuts corners, answering many questions... by showing... they're all... the same question... by abstraction: throwing out things that cause ambiguity, and ignoring [irrelevant] details... until all you have to do is apply unambiguous logical thought..."

"In the abstract world, as soon as you've thought of... something, you can play with it. It's there... the idea and the thing are the same... so you create things just by thinking of them... I wish I could do that for my dinner, but I can't."

"Now, if you imagine drawing a circle in the air with a , the surface you make is a over a circle. The idea is that for each point in the circle, you now have an entire vector, that is, a line given by the lightsaber at that instant."

"[Q:] What is the best thing about your job? [A:] Chatting. And the fact that I can write about whatever I like. [Q:] And the worst? [A:] Chatting. (I'm always behind with my work) And the fact that I can write about whatever I like - which is terrible when the cupboard is bare of ideas."

"As I write, I'm interrupted by a dull thud. My partner has discovered medieval ceiling beams in the bathroom above a more recent suspended ceiling. Oops, another section of plaster must have come crashing down — but the sound is muffled as the walls are so thick. Indeed, my sister's housewarming gift of a school playground bell to summon people to dinner has been almost entirely useless — in this house you can't hear a thing."

"In my current school the teachers seem happy and have no plans to quit. Many have taught there for 20 or 30 years and educated the parents of the current students. Indeed, teacher turnover is so low that I very nearly didn't get a job. When I started looking last spring, there were 120 vacancies for business studies and economics teachers in London; in the whole of the North East there were only three. In the highest-achieving London academies a quarter of the staff quit every year — not just because they can't afford flats but because they are wrung out by the scale of the work. This is the trade-off: this sort of system gets the best possible GCSE results, but the teachers, and sometimes the students, get burnt out achieving it."

"I've invented some new words... ingressive to replace masculine and congressive to replace feminine... Ingressive is a character trait... a behaviour... about going forward... not being waylaid about what people say... being competitive and winning. Congressive is about bringing things together and... shedding light and understanding... helping people... and maybe we are presenting mathematics at school in a very ingressive way, because it's often about being right... getting the right answer."

"[T]here are many fields where we use ingressive means to filter people, despite the fact that congressive characteristics would be more useful... and that's the thing that I would like to change."

"A lot of programs for good mathematicians at a young age are... competitions and... problem solving... and Olympiads, and that is very ingressive..."

"London is where powerful people are, on the whole. The best-paid jobs are here, the best-paid egos. London is the capital of power and egos — therefore it's the capital of office affairs as well."

"I make it my business to help everybody understand these things a bit more, because... they're very misunderstood..."

"I believe very strongly in helping other people understand things. There's no point knowing things if you don't help other people know..."

"Math, unfortunately is presented in this very ingressive way, despite the fact that when you get to the research level, it's very congressive."

"I don't believe that one should have anything without sharing it, and that includes knowledge, money, food, love..."

"People in professional jobs work for three reasons: money, status and the interest of the work itself. The main reason those in their fifties become sluggish is not that their minds are going, nor that the work itself has become too monotonous. It is that neither money nor status move them as they used to and the interest of the job is not enough to keep them going on its own."

"The point is to help us. It's not there to cause people pain. The point of abstraction is to clear out the fluff in order... to see more clearly what's actually going on."

"If you're only presented with... things you don't care about... then you won't care about having those things made easier, and so if all the problems... given are dumb... problems that don't... have anything to do with real life, then everyone.., especially young people... will immediately see that we're just talking a load of rubbish..."

"So instead, I like to show people, rather by analogy, why abstraction is useful... [A]bstraction is a process of analogy because... it's going to ignore certain parts of this... and... [that] situation, and... miraculously the two situations become the same, and then I can study them both at the same time, which saves me time, which is good because I'm... lazy."

"[J]acking in journalism to become a teacher so late in life wasn’t brave – it was desperate. Though I didn’t admit it at the time, I was entirely burnt out – I had been at the same place for an interminably unimaginative 32 years – and was showing the classic symptoms. I was cynical about the value of what I did and of journalism as a whole – what was all this crazy chasing of ephemera really for? I also felt the columns I was writing were rubbish. The very thought of writing another one was making me feel so sick I had to find a way out and do something else entirely."

"[A]bstract theory often comes from wanting to be lazy, or... conserving brain power, conserving energy, because if you do the same thing over and over again, wouldn't you rather not... and just do it once... [T]hat's what abstract theory is there for... [T]hat applies to all sorts of aspects of life, not just sciences and programming"

"I wrote this book because I love maths, and I love food... [S]adly most people love food more than they love maths..."

"The work I do is totally abstract... [T]he idea is that it will help other people understand things that they can then do in the world..."

"With jobs, as with parties, it is best to leave when you are still having a good time."

"Math... is... misunderstood, and most people think it's all about numbers, and it's not... [M]ost people think it's about getting things right and wrong, and it's not. ...[I]t's more like cooking ...[Y]ou decide you're just going to fiddle around in the kitchen with some ingredients and make something, and the only thing that matters is if you like it or not. ...In the end all that matters is ...you make your own rules, and then you follow them and see what happens. ...[M]aybe you cause a contradiction ...then your whole world implodes, and that's ok. You move on to the next world."

"I'm going to declare that mathematics is the study of how things work... how logical things work... [I]t's the logical study of how logical things work. ...I don't think it's impossible to define. I think I just did it."

"I'm not interested in being right... I'm not interested in winning... but I hate losing, and I don't like being wrong. ...But if it's a situation when nobody is going to lose because we're all trying to understand something together, then there's no risk of losing, and... we can all gain from it."

"If you hate the idea of being... told you're wrong, then you get put off math at a very early age because it's the one subject where you start being told you're wrong a lot, and... if you don't like that... you'll move off into some subject where... you can create things..."

"I'm not interested in playing sport... because I hate the idea of losing, and I'm not interested in winning, so there's no upside and there's only potential downside..."

"[T]he biggest thing, which readers may find hard to swallow given my entire career has been based on ridiculing others, is that, for my next act, I want to be useful. Yes, I know sticking pins in pompous chief executives is useful in a meta kind of way but that's not the kind of useful I have in mind."

"I'd like to talk about abstract mathematics and my experience of making it... palatable to people who may have had very bad experiences of it..."

"Our blindness to ageism is particularly puzzling as it is a prejudice not against people who are different from us (other races, genders etc) but against our future selves."

"Czerski... frames the ocean as a , the blue machine, driven by the difference in solar heating between the equator and North and South poles, with complications from tidal forces, wind, differences in salinity—which, like temperature, affects density—and shape of continental land masses and undersea crust. They generate complex effects... in a great, layered mass of water that is in constant motion. ...It all adds up to a persuasive case that Earth-dwellers need to understand the ocean and work with it..."

"Helen Czerski has the coolest job in science—she's a bubble scientist. Or... full title... a physicist and oceanographer at University College London. When she's not doing that... a science presenter for the BBC. ...[S]he also plays badminton competitively."

"Keeping everything in balance is one of the functions of the blue machine, but the... gradual raising of world temperatures poses a significant threat... It is only at the very end of her book that Czerski directly addresses the environmental changes... Her concern up to that point has been to set out clearly and calmly the design of the ocean engine. But... her... closing chapter on ‘the future’... is clear... the blue machine is... resilient, but will suffer permanent damage from rising temperatures. ...sea levels; currents... diverted; the fishy inhabitants... disperse and... disappear; tropical storms.. increase in frequency and power; sub-surface areas... de-oxygenated—all... alongside... the ocean as... dumping ground for plastic and... detritus. The oceans absorb carbon... breathe out carbon dioxide... determine global temperatures, but there are limits to their capacity..."

"[T]he ocean world is not good at talking about itself... [A] lot of ocean scientists... assume that people should care about the ocean, because they should... [A]ctually it's much more interesting than that. There are much more interesting things to say, but you've.. got to frame it right... [I]t's the framing that we miss in these conversations. ...You ...need a skeleton to hang pieces of information on, and for most people ...you say the ocean, they've got literally nothing... It really is a void. They're just like, "I don't know what to think about that. I don't know where to even start thinking about it, so I... forget everything I hear about it. ...I ...know it's all going wrong somehow ..." ...[T]he opportunity that NOC has is to earn a place in people's perception of what their world is like, by providing some of that context. ...[T]he most powerful thing that NOC has is... the collective."

"Scientists always think that the most important thing about what they do is the individual things that they're learning. That's not true. The most important thing... actually the gift that you have as a scientist that you've been given through the training, is a perspective on the world. ...[W]hat NOC has is an amazing opportunity to share a perspective, and not to dumb it down or to sugarcoat it, but just to say, "This is what it is." and to say that really well... [T]hat's... where you really can change people's idea of what it means to live on planet Earth, if you do that well..."

"[I]t's not just about pretty fish. We all like pretty fish, but... it's much more interesting than that, and we are shortchanging people if we don't really show what the ocean is. We all take it for granted as ocean scientists... So it's that opportunity that NOC has to do something really important. That's why I'm on board."

"But you have to try... [T]hat's the lesson of ocean science... It was never going to be easy. If you go back to Challenger, we're now 150 years on from the Challenger expedition... something like 400 stations around the globe... That's like going around the and checking what color the paint is... on 400 dots along the ceiling... and the Sistine Chapel doesn't change every season... and people did try, and there are fundamental principles behind it all, and so it's worth it to try."

"Any alien visitor to Earth... would look at the ocean first. Any alien visitor who wants to know the dynamics of planet Earth would look at the ocean before they looked at the land. And yet, we don't see it. ...We don't see this engine that completely defines our planet, and that has to change. ...Now is a good time for that to change."

"And so this time NASA... the Artemis missions are... very much gearing up to go back to the moon. Different setup, different politics... but fundamentally, this time... for the first time in 50 years, we're going to be far enough away to look back at the Earth and to see... this blue planet. And this time we have to see that blue for what it is. ...[T]he timing of the book... from the point of view... of the arc of human history, this time... we have to understand the blue itself, is the point."

"I've collaborated with many people from NOC over the years... I visited Steph Henson and the group she works with that study ... [W]hat was great... was seeing the variety of practical ways of doing things, and this... contrasts with what looks very crude... these... big yellow plastic funnels, and then the technology that's coming down the line. This... holographic camera and other things that will let them watch marine snow as it's falling, rather then waiting for it to be scooped up and put on the sample plate. ...The huge benefit... of being at NOC is that you've got all these people, it's such an interdisciplinary place. You've got all these people right next to each other that can learn from each other... I definitely miss that, not being in Southampton any more."