Miranda Morrison

James Heale, Cosmo Landesman and Miranda Morrison

18 min listen

This week: James Heale asks whether the cabinet secretary Simon Case can carry on (01:00), Cosmo Landesman tells the story of when a man – and his axe – came to visit his home in London (05:03), and Miranda Morrison warns against the damaging obsession with STEM in secondary schools (11:10).  Produced and presented by

Why maths to 18 is a bad idea (by a maths teacher)

Whenever I tell people I used to be a maths teacher the most common response is: ‘I absolutely hated maths at school.’ It is an age-old tale, to loathe maths lessons (or indeed your maths teacher). So, what better way to make children loathe maths even more than to make it compulsory until the age

Keiron Pim, Miranda Morrison and Cosmo Landesman

24 min listen

This week on Spectator Out Loud: Keiron Pim discusses what young Ukrainians can learn from the works of Joseph Roth (01:00), Miranda Morrison reflects on her decision to quit her job as a teacher (11:26), and Cosmo Landesman asks whether successful writers can be friends with less successful ones (19:39). Produced and presented by Oscar

Why I’ve quit teaching

For the past four years I have worked at an academy in Hackney. I was deputy head of maths for three of those years, and head of maths for the final term, managing 16 staff. After nearly a decade teaching in the state sector, I’d finally worked my way up to a well paid and

I’m being terrorised by a Bengal cat

Over the past year and a half, I have been victimised by my neighbour’s cat. Bollinger the Bengal weighs just seven pounds and has a silly dangly bell around his neck, but he manages to terrorise both me and my two cats. He fights my male cat, George, so viciously that I fear he might

How to win the Maths Challenge

Simon Singh, founder of the Good Thinking Society and author of The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets, believes that parents should ferociously ‘lobby their children’s schools’ if they still don’t run the annual Maths Challenge. For those not familiar with it, the Maths Challenge is a phenomenally well-organised competition run by the United Kingdom Mathematics