Letters and Numbers

Two contestants pit their linguistic and numerical skills against each other and the clock in this entertaining quiz show. Join host Richard Morecroft along with maths whiz Lily Serna and wordsmith David Astle. Norm Do vs Gavin Griffith Richard talks with Norm a little about how Norm helps train students for the mathematical olympiads. As Norm says, it basically involves feeding them maths problems and letting them go at it. I'll note from personal experience that there is a lot more done in the way of teaching and discussion about the problems, but fundamentally that is the approach: Get students working on challenging problems, see what they make of them, and then suggest ways in which they might find more helpful approaches to them. Tonight's challenger is Gavin Griffith, a primary school teacher. Seven years ago Gavin "stumbled upon" a sports camp in America, and since then has spent pretty much every American summer there (from about May through to September), dealing with around 260 kids playing a variety of sports. As Richard points out, this means that Gavin more-or-less gets a perpetual summer, or at the very least avoids winter. The camp involves a lot of team sports; Gavin says that he isn't that good at the sports but makes sure that they play safely and have a good time.