It is simple arithmetic that helped Arthur Clarke to arrive at a solution to the millennium mystery. Probably you all would like to learn mathematics from him, and not your teacher.
Researchers attached to a university in England thought of a unique study: suspecting that children invariably do not like their mathematics teachers, they prompted some 300 children of 12 and 13 years to draw how their teachers appeared to them. Except for a few, the portraits were not very complimentary to them!
Some of the prominent features were bald heads, beards, spectacles, wrinkles on their foreheads, as cowl on their faces, and a pair of fear-some horns!
Some of the remarks made by the children included: “mathematicians have no friends, except other mathematicians”;
“they areshort-tempered”;
“they have no sociallife”;
“they force children to do sums at gun-point” etc, etc.
The researchers are now trying to give a better image to maths teachers. The 300children were drawn from Britain, Sweden, Norway, Fin-land, Germany, Romania, India and the USA
