If data obtained by the Financial Times is any indication, Gordon Gekko will be swapping his gold cufflinks and red braces for a mortarboard and fat text book (read: interactive whiteboard and Maths teaching software).
From the FT:
Inquiries by maths experts about teacher training places have soared as the credit crunch tightens, official data obtained by the Financial Times show.
[Skeletor - formerly of Lehman Brothers, now teaching Year 6 maths in Didsbury]
Michael Watkins, TDA’s head of recruitment, told the Financial Times “bigger numbers are turning to teaching than ever before”.
Those men and women, formerly the toast of the city and dubbed ‘Masters of the Universe’, have lately been brought low by the financial crisis and recession. In times of difficulty, skilled workers often turn to the stable sectors including, of course, teaching.
This was predicted by many last year, and I have secretly been hoping that some of the brains behind credit asset-swaps and fiendishly clever derivatives will turn their skills towards an industry that rewards the soul (if not enlarge the wallet…).
Mr Watkins even calculated that the quality of applicants may have improved. He pointed out that many of those who were planning to move from a financial services career into teaching were bringing more than just strong academic achievement.
He surmised that in subjects such as maths and economics, individuals who had first-hand experience in the application of a theory carried a significant advantage when it came to teaching it.
But the FT piece ended with a caveat:
…cynics might suggest that the credit crunch shows a knowledge of advanced maths can be more dangerous than no knowledge of maths at all.
Does this mean we’ll have another generation of financial wizards leaving school in years to come? Who knows, but if nothing else the presence of thousands more highly-motivated intelligent men and women who know how maths is used in the ‘real’ world must surely be a good thing.
It can’t be too much to hope that these former masters of the universe will still need fun maths classroom tools and tutoring software to remind them that before you can package up sub-prime mortgages, you need to learn how to partition two-digit numbers…