What three decades in classrooms have taught about learning, drawn from Ahmet Arduc's own statement of educational philosophy.
Where it began
Formally, his teaching began in 1995. Informally it began much earlier, as a primary-school pupil in Germany, when a teacher brought him into an older class to show the solution to a question the older pupils could not solve. He remembers that moment at the board as the start of his teaching journey.
Three lessons from the classroom
Lesson 1
Believe in young minds
Preparing a mathematics fair, he spent some time looking for a way to make two-sided discs for the game Reversi, then put the problem to his maths games club. Within minutes a student had the answer: glue a white backgammon piece to a black one. The lesson he took from it has three parts:
give students the opportunity to express their thoughts;
believe that young minds can achieve much more than we expect;
let them know that we believe in them.
“We learn from each other, and bring out the best in each other.”
Lesson 2
Check understanding at every step
After a geometry lesson that felt like a good one, a student came to say they had not understood anything. Since then he treats assessment as part of teaching itself: diagnostic assessment before a new unit, formative checks such as quizzes, classwork and exit tickets along the way, performance tasks such as projects and portfolios, and summative tests at the end.
Lesson 3
Curiosity deserves an answer
A Grade 10 student once asked about limits of functions, a Grade 11 topic, after hearing the term in a film. Instead of saying it was too early, he asked why she wondered about it and gave her a one-to-one lesson. Seeing a student learn something new, he writes, feels like watching a new leaf grow on the ivy he kept in his university dormitory: “That is why teaching is my passion.”
The teacher as doctor and tailor
A doctor does not treat a patient's language, religion, race or gender as a problem, and neither should a teacher. And like a tailor, a teacher never quite teaches the same lesson twice: each lesson is cut to the needs of the class, and differentiation goes further, to the needs of each student. When students feel valued, they are far more likely to engage with the subject.
Technology in the service of teaching
He has always looked for tools that let a teacher see learning more clearly, and built them when they did not exist. In 2011 he began using an online homework tracking system and an instant test evaluation system with optical answer forms, both of his own design; in 2017 he finished coding his first online question bank for his students. AhMath grew from the same impulse. In AhMath's own words: tools can suggest and organise; teachers, guardians and students make the decisions.
The personal and professional goal stays simple: to add value to each student's journey of education.
Questions the writing returns to
The journal ranges well beyond education. These are themes that recur across the essays. They are personal reflections and explorations, not research findings; articles that summarise research say so and cite their sources.
Authenticity and identity
Who we are when no one is watching, and how we tell our own story.
