Concordia

Concordia Winter 2018 9 Concordia Winter 2018 8 Michael Illing retired from teaching Maths this summer. He reflects on 40 years spent at Merchant Taylors’. Michael Illing I t seems a very long time ago that I, then a newly graduated mathematician, arrived here. For a year or two I was the youngest person on the staff. I expected to stay for maybe three or four years, but it has turned out to be rather longer than that. Now I have found myself the oldest one here, and it is time to call it a day. The school was smaller then. Fewer people, and less space. What we called the New Block consisted of the Music department much as it is now, two downstairs Biology labs, and four upstairs classrooms. All else was in the main building, as it had been since 1933. Classes were larger, so the rooms with their old- fashioned blackboards were more crowded. Nowadays no room has more than twenty-four seats, and it is very seldom that they are all full; but I used occasionally to have classes approaching thirty. If ways of presenting Mathematics to a class have evolved as technology has developed over the years, much of the content has stayed the same. Changes in the public exam structure have had their effect, mainly for the better. GCSEs have generally been an improvement over O-levels. For the able “When I started, handheld calculators were still a novelty.”