it's kind of funny to talk about why I love maths because I didn't love maths
when I was at school I really thought of it just as okay how good are you at
crunching numbers mathematics is literally all around us there are
patterns and relationships and connections which when you get to sense
them they're really beautiful and elegant and surprising I get to touch
the fabric of the universe when I understand what mathematics is
when I realized that through this incredible platform of YouTube my
teaching could help people all over the world that's really what set this stir
ball going
back in 2012 I was teaching a pretty ordinary maths class there was one boy
in this class he was diagnosed with a really serious illness and this boy is
gonna be away for at least several weeks and I didn't want to leave him with just
a textbook that's all I could give him I knew there was more I could do from this
point he loved mathematics I took my phone and I literally sat it
just on top of a table in the middle of my classroom and I realized that if I
just put these ears up on YouTube which was free easy to access then I could
send them to him and he could literally keep up with us just like his friends
were when I started putting my videos online
it all seems fine quality but as the video started to increase in number I
started to think about okay if I can make a better quality it's actually
helping people so I had to look up some tutorials on how to do basic editing
transitions how your diction is how you use tone of voice I learned a lot of
that ironically not that ironically from YouTube itself
hey sir you'll be really funny if you called your channel rutube we're never
hilarious and we had a great laugh even though it started with just him it kind
of just took on a life of its own spreading out to those students in the
class students from other classes and other schools they became interested I
still remember that was on my food just watching YouTube comments sort of come
up onto my video and it was the middle of the day and I was kind of like why
are people watching they don't realize this person who was commenting was from
a completely different country in a completely different time zone
and I was like whoa this is global now even at a party of five thousand people
I'm proud to declare I love mathematics Yale is Australia's most famous teacher
and these turned out to be the math teacher
we all wish that we had everyone was like sitting next to apart like oh my
gosh grab mr. woo like can you believe this the hands were actually shaking
with the excitement to see kids get so excited about a maths teacher education
should be free people shouldn't have to pay to learn and I love that YouTube is
about that's a marketization of knowledge and lady I teach about 800
hours over the school year but my YouTube videos have been watched for
over 90 million minutes that's more than I could teach in not just my lifetime
like several copies of my lifetime I mean it's amazing he's still a young man
and his impact has been so profound it's he could help a generation fall in
love with mathematics again and I think that is truly an extraordinary legacy
that I expect any to have for education here in Australia and increasingly
around the world I love that mass helps us understand and
wonder at the world around us in a deeper way that we could otherwise it's
really about taking what I love and just saying you know what if we put that on a
platform that can access the world there's no limit to what we can achieve
you