Superstar Teacher Eddie Woo on "Teenage Boss" and Why Maths Is Like Music
Australia’s most famous mathematics teacher Eddie Woo is renowned for his high-energy maths lessons on his "WooTube" channel, which recently hit one million subscribers. In fact, Eddie was named among the top 10 teachers in the world in 2018, and he's also a recipient of Australia’s Local Hero Award.
So, if his dynamic videos have helped you out with your homework on more than one occasion, you may be surprised to know that maths didn’t always come naturally to him.
"I was a student myself who struggled to learn a lot of maths just from reading it out of a textbook," Eddie, who hosts ABC’s Teenage Boss, tells Student Edge.
"I always needed to ask someone questions."
However, Eddie explains that needing that extra support helped him develop a great deal of empathy for other students, which ultimately led him to start his own YouTube channel.
"I had this one student who was very sick, and they were missing a lot of school," he says.
"I just kind of pulled my phone out of my pocket because that was the only video camera I owned, and I wondered if [a video] would be useful for this one student. I never had a dream that it’d go any further than there."
Eddie points out that he is completely "bamboozled" by the popularity of his videos, but he has some idea as to why they have been so well-received.
"We all love learning, and if you think about what makes a good story compelling, what happens is that the main characters encounter a problem and we want to know how they’re going to solve that problem," he says.
"We’re kind of kept on the edge of our seats because we want to know the solution to the problem. I structure my lessons to be their own little narrative.
"So, I kind of think the success of these videos is because of the learning we all love to be connected to. I think every human being wants to understand the world that they live in, and mathematics is a wonderful tool to do that.”
Eddie believes the key to enjoying maths is to focus on the areas you have an interest in, rather than simply what you’re required to learn at school.
"My relationship to music is very similar to my relationship with mathematics," he says.
"When I picked up the guitar for the first time and taught it mostly to myself, I was like, this is what music is about. It’s not about learning scales or being taught some pieces that someone else thinks is important; you can just learn the music that you want.
"I think that most people never make that transition when it comes to maths, and the only maths they learn is the maths they were forced to learn.”
The star maths teacher fronts Teenage Boss on the ABC, which follows 15 teenagers from across the country as they take charge of their family budget. Eddie highlights that Season 2, set to debut on 31 August, sees the teens learn about the value of money.
"When I first give the kids the suitcase full of cash, it’s an immediate thrill. But then the reality sets in of just how much they have to do with that money and how far they need to make it stretch," he says.
"It really shows how it’s not just a mental thing, it’s an emotional challenge to manage our money effectively.”
Eddie believes it is important to "expect the unexpected" when creating a budget.
"If you’ve got a $2,000 budget for the month, you maybe want to set aside $100 or $200 and assign it to nothing, because something will come up," he says.
"That allows us to have flexibility and adapt to things even when we don’t know what they are ahead of time."
As Eddie tells us, you don’t have to be on Teenage Boss to start thinking about how to better manage your money.
"There’s nothing stopping you from starting off in a small way yourself," he says.
"I’d encourage everyone to start getting on the train to learn the lessons of mathematics in small ways. That really equips us to start thinking about the financial world around us."
New episodes of Teenage Boss air weekdays on ABC ME and ABC iview at 6.30pm from Monday 31 August.
Header Image: ABC
