The Scotsman - S2 Wednesday - As easy as 1,2,3

There’s this wee boy, seven years old, and he’s all excited, clapping his hands above his head, leaping off his seat to give a standing ovation. The rest of the class is having a great time too, warmly applauding.

So what makes children who must have seen everything Disney and Spielberg could throw at them, so joyfully appreciative? Hold on to your mortar boards: it’s arithmetic - courtesy of mathsman Tom Renwick, a sort of latter-day travelling minstrel.

One of the boy’s pals had just done really well. He came out to the front to be the teacher and, demonstrating with his fingers, correctly recited the family of four sums, 4+3=7, 3+4=7, 7-3=4 and 7-4=3.

When, after fun with sequences and even adding 99 and 10, the class beat Mr Renwick at the number guessing game, the cheering brought the house down. Hooray! It all goes to prove that there’s no show like a live show.

Class teacher Jennifer Goodall enjoyed that game. It was a real cliff-hanger, a good one for her to use. The children had to think hard and, by a process of elimination, the tenth guess was correct. The first wee lad was beside himself with joy and the girl who cracked the puzzle was congratulated by all.

With a 5 per cent decline in the number of pupils taking Higher maths this year and a corresponding drop in the number of passes, mathsmen like Renwick are desperately needed in schools to make the subject popular again.

When he arrives at the school, the children become excited. For here is an intriguing stranger, someone whose repertoire they do not know.

The mathsman cometh, but are such colourful characters to everyday classroom practice what Nigella Lawson is to cooking? Do they make something necessary look interesting and glamorous, when the everyday practice of it can be drudgery?

Not so, says Renwick, who sees his role as one of helping children, teachers and parents to harness pupils’ natural enthusiasm for maths. He supports local authorities, schools and parents on any aspect of the 5 to14 maths curriculum, from nursery to S2. Today’s lesson at Niddrie Mill primary, Edinburgh, is one form of in-service which he does in the classroom with the pupils and their teacher.

Renwick’s aim is to maintain the enjoyment of the subject and to say "Well done" to all concerned. Yes, he goes in and makes counting fun. It’s easy, he concedes, for a new voice to catch the attention of children. He’s up there at the front, encouraging them to find the answer, daring them to think differently and challenging them to beat him at guessing. He reinforces learning by using the same phrases in different situations. The children become attuned to this and respond. Some think his name really is ‘Mr Coont’.

When Lynda Boyle-Ronaldson took over as head of the school earlier this year, she decided, in consultation with parents and staff, that maths was a key area to target. "We wanted to make maths more exciting," she says, "to raise each child’s self-confidence and turn Niddrie Mill ‘on to’ maths."

And so Renwick was invited along to help the school achieve its goal.

Miss Goodall’s enthusiastic P3 class was his third stop in a morning which started with Diane Bell’s P7 pupils. There, he set out his stall in the form of a grid of 120 numbered cubes. At first, no numbers were showing. Starting at 14, Renwick kept adding 10 and, as the class predicted, the numbers appeared. He repeated the pattern using the number 11, and then the nine times table.

At each stage of every lesson, number is related to real life. How much are six ice-creams at 90p each? Once you know the nine times table then you know lots of others.

During their session, the P6 children in Lorraine Budge’s class had to explain how they do the sum 76-19, a mental calculation at level D of the curriculum for 5 to 14-year-olds which ranges from A to F level. Do you take away 20 and add one, or make the 19 up to 20 as if counting out change, or what? The name of the game is interactive mental agility and everyone can join in.

A key recommendation of the guidelines for the curriculum and from Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Education is that teachers adopt more such oral and mental maths methods and that children spend less time on individual work.

At first it seems as if interactive mental agility bears more than a passing resemblance to the time-honoured traditional chalk and talk, whole-class teaching. The difference is that, in the former, all the children usually answer at once. There’s no switching off once your turn is over.

One strategy is to get all the children to hold up whiteboards on which they have written the answer. That way everybody tries and fast workers have the satisfaction of being among the first. Also, the teacher can gauge who is getting it right and who needs a bit of help. Nothing is written down on paper, so it doesn’t matter if it is wrong. Children just wipe out the answer and try again.

As a former maths teacher and adviser who now works freelance, Renwick practises the verbally interactive teaching he preaches. "I tap into their natural enthusiasm for number," he says, "and underline the importance of them saying and hearing their maths, as well as reading and writing it."

Another mathsman, New Zealander Ken Ring, takes a more eccentric approach to the subject. Ring, who spells his profession "Mathman!", puts on a clown show for infant classes, employing the basic language of maths.

A former teacher and president of the New Zealand Society of Magicians, he believes that children learn not so much by being taught as by imitation. He deplores exams and is appalled that infants here are subjected to national testing.

He brings in simple concepts such as taking things away and then throws in a word like tessellation (fitting shapes together exactly). "But you won’t be able to say that," he says, challenging the younger classes and encouraging them to repeat the word.

When he makes something disappear, he calls it subtraction. The small children can say the big words and see what they mean too.

On his recent visit to Scotland, Ring performed at Fettes and Loretto schools.

"Maths can be hard, but so is getting up in the morning and you can do that," he tells the older pupils.

He explains that he was not born able to do tricks and that there are secrets which he had to learn. "Maths is like that. Ask your teacher to share the secrets and anybody can do it. But first you must learn the special words, things like negative numbers and what one is."

Mathsman Peter Patilla, author of Interactive Mental Maths and the forthcoming Maths Dictionary, puts forward the philosophy that you don’t need to be good at a thing to enjoy it.

The former teacher, head teacher and lecturer, whose Higgledy Piggledy Street and Linking Elephants works are beloved of nursery and infant schools, says: "Look at golf and the duffers who love it. Same thing goes for maths. Also, repetition needn’t be boring. Think of kissing."

Back to Nigella again. Patilla believes in a balanced diet of maths: you need the roughage of the four rules. The published schemes he sees as frozen packaged food to microwave: "But hopefully the teachers will throw in the vital ingredient - their own croutons or a swirl of cream."

With increasing numbers of secondary pupils dropping maths to take more fashionable, less demanding subjects such as beauty care and retail travel, the dash of spice added by mathsmen and women is likely to be welcomed by many education professionals and employers who believe maths matters.

Tom Renwick can be contacted via the website www.mathsontrack.com

New Zealand Mathman, Ken Ring, visits Scotland every year and can be contacted via his website www.mathman.co.nz

• Peter Patilla’s new book, Maths Dictionary, will be published by OUP in January 2003.