ATM People • Dick Tahta
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It is with great sadness that I learnt today of the death of Dick Tahta. Dick has been a writer of great significance in maths education since before I started teaching. Bill Brookes, Dick Tahta and David Wheeler were early members of ATM.
They met regularly to observe lessons together and discuss what they saw.
Here is a relevant quote from one of his publications:
“If in our enthusiasm for providing active experience for young children we do no more than provide the springs and balances, the sand and water, with requests for recording of what happens in certain selected situations, then we run the danger of abdicating from mathematics altogether. We certainly encourage the same abdications if we think in terms of children ‘discovering’ relations in certain external situations. Some of the most important mathematics relations stem from the earliest mental and emotional activity of the infant. We make sense of our environment by imposing these relations upon it. In developing our understanding and control of these relations in this way we further provide the possibility of a control of the environment. In order to develop the fullest resources of the human mind, it may be more important to think of creating mathematics rather than discovering it. In the creation of likes and unlikes we detect ‘the mind at work creating works of the mind’. And this is mathematics.”
From: Tahta, D. and Brookes, W. (1966) The Genesis of Mathematical Activity, in W. Brookes (Ed.) The Development of Mathematical Activity in Children: the place of the problem in this development, ATM, Nelson
Another of his books, ‘Starting Points for Teachers’ (written jointly with Colin Banwell and Kenneth Saunders) is an inspiring text for teachers wanting to move towards working investigationally with children.
Sue Johnston-Wilder
I was late opening the March MT and the news of Dick’s death came as a shock. I met him when I was a student on the PGCE course at Exeter.
Fresh from a maths degree, my head full of maths as a swirl of symbols, he taught me to play with elastic bands.He has been an enormous influence on my life but I don’t find it easy to identify why or how. I remember the elastic bands, the films of the Madison project. It was the 60s and for one session he just didn’t turn up. We didn’t know about experiments in group dynamics and so just stewed, for what I remember as a very long time, trying to make sense of the situation. So why did I leave thinking mathematics was exciting and involving and that interesting things could happen with mathematics and groups of children? Perhaps it was his listening as much as his talking that was powerful.
Since then Dick has always been around through ATM, his name popping up in a long list of work emails in response to an ATM discussion thread. I’ll miss that.
Chris Hopkins
The Magic Sceptre (Remembering Dick Tahta)
I remember even now, after so many years ago,
A math magician, able to conjure up and show
How to make mind pictures, how to see being
As a seamless web of thought, action, feeling;
Geometry, he once said, is indeed a magic form;
He speculated that it might be an innate norm,
Which conveys but cannot state its own power,
In groups of people, relationships of groups
To one another. Here are topological loops,
Nearness, kin, well-knit, cohesive, and bound:
Collectives understood in imagery and sound;
In touching the abstract, he sought to bring
A proximity space for greater understanding,
A situation for exploration, improvisation.
This work has its own clarity and justification,
Unfolding a lost tradition, geometry in sight,
As with magic sceptre creating lines of light.
Tony Bellows
I remember [Dick Tahta] when I was doing the PCGE at St Luke‘s Exeter.
An inspiring teacher, who not only looked at mathematics (and was also appreciative of Lakatos’ Proofs and Refutations), but also taught us to look at the interpersonal dynamics of the classroom . To see what it was like to follow a recipe - as with a mathematical technique or algorithm, on one occasion, he invited us all round to his house to make bread, with various cook books, telling us that if we wanted to give students instructions on how to do something, we should learn from this how easy it is to assume the other person knows something, and take it for granted, and thereby leave it out of the technique; it also was to show us how without a larger understanding, it is easy to make mistakes, and hard to fix them.
I still have a copy of his ‘Images of Infinity’, and am pleased that my son has now found pleasure in the diverting and entertaining way Dick explored the concept of infinity, using a multitude of different images and stories.
Tony Bellows
Dick was not a person whose head was always occupied with mathematics. His heritage inspired a recently published book called Ararat Associations.
“When he first saw Atom Egoyan’s film, Ararat, Dick Tahta was intrigued by the many associations it summoned up for him. The film is crammed with brief conversations and scenes that linked with memories of his childhood in a small Armenian community in Manchester in the nineteen-thirties and with the various aspects of Armenian culture that are - as in any immigrant community - carefully nourished by Armenians all over the world. Above all, the film delicately raises the issue of what later generations have made of the terrible experiences of their ancestors in the last years of the Ottoman Empire.
“As well as giving a penetrating insight into Egoyan’s film, Tahta offers some fascinating interpretations of Armenian history, religion, language and literature. His digressions into youthful memories, family history and his own travels through Eastern Anatolia, give this book a warm and personal feel.
“Dick Tahta was born in Manchester, of parents who had survived the events of 1915. They were keen for their children to have an English education but made sure that they spoke Armenian at home. As a second-generation immigrant, he was interested (like some of the characters in the film) in the nature of identity and its definition by criteria other than ethnicity. He raised four children with his late wife Hilary; he was a mathematics teacher and then a university lecturer.”
Marten Gallagher • Web Editor - sourced from Amazon blurb for ‘Ararat Associations’
There are some people to whom you can only say “Thank you” - Dick was one of those.
The first time I heard of Dick was in 1976 when an unusually enlightened teacher education department in St Martin’s College told us that the only obligatory set-book for our PGCE Maths Course was ‘Starting Points’ written by Dick, Colin Banwell and Ken Saunders. They were right, of course.
The first time I actually met Dick he was very angry! He and George Knights were telling a group of teachers that they had not spent the money that ATM, for the first time in it’s history, had unconditionally given them to form a group that would provide Children’s Workshops. It was my first ATM conference in Lancaster about 25 years ago. He gave us a very short time to consolidate the group and go out and provide week-ends where kids would come with their teacher and do maths. He wore a big woolly sweater!
I thank him for the time I spent with him, Geoff Faux and Eric Love when I had my head opened during a course in Cumbria. He showed me how to work with posters, words and questions and taught me how to count in Armenian using Gattegno’s ‘Silent Way’ method. He wore a big woolly sweater!
I thank him for the support he gave me when I coordinated the ATM conference in Northampton in 1988. He, together with John Mason, Geoff Faux and Trevor Fletcher, gave me the confidence to plan a conference about people doing mathematics (and some crazy music!). He wore a big woolly sweater.
But maybe the most important thing of all is that during several week-ends in Bristol when we met with Gattegno and I, as a new entrant to mathematics teaching, was overwhelmed by this small and incredibly powerful man who shook up my thinking like no-one else has ever done, Dick talked to me and listened to me. I thank him for that.
There is nothing in mathematics teaching that was not foreseen and understood by Dick. I am very proud that I had the opportunity to spend some time very close to this wonderful man.
David Cain
Postcards from Dick
Pictures and words,
Words and pictures
Complementing each other
Oh Dick, before the net your wonderful postcards
Used to drop on the mat
Each a response to something
That you made special
By noticing, by sharing your noticing
When you died I reached for your folder
There they were, staring at me now
Reminding me of plans
Some mad,
Of caution advised
Of, we’ll go for it then
Of comfort offered
Of doubts shared
But came the net
You used the net
Who else responded;
With such alacrity,
With humour.
By teasing,
(your words, not mine)
And insight.
But most of all
When you listened,
You gave attention
Your attention helped me focus
On what I was saying.
Can you ever know how good that was?
Thank you Dick, from my heart.
But it’s the postcards I will miss
Postcards that used an image
That said things words can only hint at.
Geoff Faux
Dick told me to write something for MT - something about my teaching. I did. He sent it back and said that he had hoped I would write about what I do, and wondered if I had written instead about what I thought I ought to do. I had.
It is important to tell each other what we really do.
When I was ill once he sent me a book. I believed that Dick would have thought carefully about what he sent, so I thought: 'why this book? why me? why now?' I couldn’t answer these questions so asked him: 'Dick, why this book? why me? why now?' He said: ‘It was spare’. Well, I have heard Conrad’s Lord Jim called many things, but never ‘spare’.
It is important not to get stuck in self-made kingdoms in dense and strange places. Educative relationships with children are open and simple. Spare.
Anne Watson
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