From Outdoor Instructor To Maths Teacher - By Isi Oakley

I’ve been an outdoor instructor for the last 20 years, encompassing a broad range of work from children’s residential trips to training adult leaders to run DofE expeditions. For the last decade, I worked for a local authority in Scotland, alongside teaching staff, to support them to take learning outside the classroom. I loved this role, as it often involved spending time with teachers, trying to figure out how to engage pupils by putting their learning into a different context.

My favourite thing to do this with was maths: Exploring symmetry and angles in nature, teaching navigation using bearings, making pirate treasure maps using scale drawing and coordinates, measurements of distance and estimating time, learning about vectors for rock climbing… Even activities I didn’t initially connect with maths turned out to have links: safe river crossings and fluid dynamics; sea swimming and tides, currents and waves; winter mountaineering and slope angle affecting the probability of an avalanche.

Finishing the maths degree I had started back when I left school to see where it would take me became an inevitability, although balancing this with full time work meant sometimes completing assignments in my tent whilst supervising DofE expeditions! 

The start of the school year on my SCITT has been hectic, with lots of new information to take in and systems to learn. I’ve been teaching from the get go, which is exactly what I wanted, having come from a background of working with young people in a very hands-on environment. The maths department at my school have been wonderfully supportive - answering all my daft questions, and allowing me to find my own voice when meeting as a department, even though teaching is all so new to me still. I’ve been treated like an adult with relevant experience, not as a complete novice – something that is very much appreciated as a career-changer in my 40s!

At the end of the first half term, I’m now feeling that I have enough headspace to *really* start to consider how best to teach the maths that my classes are learning, so I’m looking forward to next half term even more. 

Whilst this year will be spent learning how to teach maths in a classroom, it is my hope that in future years I can find a role that allows me to take learning outdoors again. I don’t know how that will happen as yet. Perhaps those young people who need to re-sit their GCSEs can be engaged in a different way, or perhaps there is scope for a secondary school equivalent of forest schools to deepen understanding of concepts, or perhaps those young people who struggle in a school environment would be well-served by an outdoor maths intervention, or maybe there is someone out there that is keen to adopt a whole-school approach that involves more outdoor learning and maths is a part of that… Whatever it ends up looking like, I’m keen to facilitate young people making the connections between what they are doing on paper, and what that looks like in the real world.

We live in a world in which we can ask AI to solve maths problems for us, and it is pretty good already at finding processes to complete them. What it isn’t so great at is putting things in context, making unusual links, and finding left-field answers to problems. Humans can do that if we train our minds to look for links and patterns everywhere, not just in the classroom.  

By Isi Oakley.

You can follow Isi on Instagram here.

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