IAIN WILSON, TEACHER OF MATHEMATICS AND THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE, MARLBOROUGH COLLEGE, MALAYSIA
Ask someone to list ‘creative’ subjects and they are likely to respond with music, art, drama... but maths is not generally included. And yet creativity is a vital tool in the armoury of a mathematical researcher: if mathematicians never thought in new ways, then new theorems would never be discovered (or invented – but that is a different matter). As Gruntowicz (2020) notes, many questions posed in our day-to-day mathematics classrooms are solved in routine ways, and in many classrooms around the world, these problems are being posed and solved in an unimaginative, drill fashion, which does not communicate to the students the true excitement that maths can offer – I daresay that many reading this will be familiar with that. Repetitive teaching and uninteresting drill questions, often employed as the most efficient way in which to get students to a good grade in an examination sys
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