For many, maths is to be endured. Few people have done more to challenge that mindset than Eddie Woo, who built a career making the subject accessible, even - if you can suspend your disbelief - enjoyable. 

By his own admission, the Sydney suburban high school teacher turned maths-fluencer was more late-bloomer than child prodigy. Initially preferring the humanities subjects, what he lacked in natural numerical nerve he made up for with dogged curiosity. 

“I’ve always been a bit of a plodder, and I’ve always asked lots of questions,” Woo recalls of his early years.

“I’d run out of time in exams because I was always trying to take time to understand something. That was my goal.”

That curiosity - and a problem and solution way of thinking - proved useful when Woo was faced with the question torturing teenagers in high school: what am I to do with this one wild and precious life?

Luckily, his calling was revealed early. Woo was searching for a fulfilling career; Australia was¹ searching for maths teachers. An elegant solution to the economic principle of supply and demand.

The genesis of his later social media stardom was equally pragmatic.

In 2012, when one of his students was stricken with cancer and forced to miss school for treatment, Woo began recording and uploading his lessons online, allowing the student to learn from hospital or home. And so, WooTube was born: a free, digital classroom now helping more than two million students understand maths around the world. 

His contagiously jaunty approach to bringing maths to the masses is because daily life is, as Woo puts it, “awash with numbers, patterns and algorithms that are deciding what our lives are doing from day to day”.

One may not need calculus, but confidence with numbers is a life skill, be it when understanding compound interest, debt and budgeting, or comparing mortgages.

The teacher's own experience of the slow way his love for the subject blossomed explains his resistance to the sheepish, "I'm bad at maths" confession wielded by many. “Words have power,” Woo warns. The well-intended phrase can harden into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Before opting out, his advice is to try to stay with the problem.

“One of the most important things I develop in the maths classroom, is not the formulas, it’s not the facts and the procedures to get an answer,” he says. “It’s actually the willingness to sit in.”

So familiar are his students with this desirable difficulty of wrangling mental muscles against a problem, they've coined the state of learning sitting with a "sweaty brain".  

If there was ever a case for sweating the brain, the moment seems ripe as recent NAPLAN results reveal one-third of Australian students are failing to meet literacy and numeracy benchmarks and growing access and use of AI further tempts cognitive offloading.

To that end, "the ability to have our own knowledge and expertise to be able to critically understand and challenge something is even more important in a world where the technology is becoming more powerful.”

For Woo, the stakes extend beyond test scores. In a world increasingly shaped by algorithms and AI, understanding how to question, assess and reason matters as much as ever.

Westpac is backing that work, committing $3 million investment over three years with Australian Schools Plus to support school improvement programs in 100 schools.

Westpac Foundation will also award $4 million annually to organisations in grants, partnerships and initiatives that strengthen literacy, numeracy, wellbeing and school engagement. 

¹ Australia has grappled with a shortage of qualified maths teachers for decades. Around 40 per cent of secondary maths teachers are teaching out-of-field, meaning they lack specialist tertiary qualifications in mathematics, according to the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership. Research cited by the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute suggests that up to 75 per cent of students are likely to be taught by an out-of-field maths teacher at some point during Years 7 to 10.