Staff Spotlight – Lance Coad
Lance is our Head of Mathematics
What do you love about your job?
I am bonded to teaching by nature. In my role as a teacher, I am duty-bound to model learning, to engage in creative and reflective thought, to share a zest for discovery and the exploration of ideas. This is what I feel drawn to do, and this is why I am a teacher.
What made you want to study Teaching?
See above – it’s pretty much the same answer: my initial studies took me into the foundations of being, described in mathematical language, and my subsequent career is a working through of the “being” that is engagement in life. To cultivate a career that still retains some respect for reflective thinking is essential to me: I think I would suffer if I had to wrestle with mundane trivialities every day. More than this: I really do value education at a foundational level, so a belief in the worth of what we try to achieve helps to provide a depth of motivation even when times are difficult and inessential distractions obtrude.
What is one thing you would go back and tell your 14 year-old self?
“Do not listen to advice that comes from the future, it will only imperil you in a paradoxical self-immolating path.” That said, I think I would have been richer if I had been less invested in the cultural divides of the day: the us-and-them mindset that pervaded sport, school and much of day-to-day being. Learning to embrace varieties of life and living has meant breaking free from certain modes. The trick of, course, is learning what to let go and what to retain, and such learning might require time and experience. Perhaps patience is the key: “Be patient, Grasshopper, be patient.”
What is one thing you would love to do, if you could you do anything?
I realise that this question is not intended to be taken literally (“if you could do anything”!) and so I will not venture thoughts of the inherent contradictions that lie within the construction. Nor will I rebel in horror at the idea that any one person should have such power! Instead, let me simply suggest that I would like to have time and space to perhaps work through an expression of my being that might perhaps interest me and be encouraging to some others.
If you could invite anyone to dinner, who would be seated at your table?
I guess you mean that the invitee is the one to be seated, not that the invitee is to meet someone already seated? In any event, I have a general reluctance to meet heroes: I have seldom met anyone who measured up to the image that had preceded them. On the other hand, I regularly meet folk who are more interesting and finer than they would avow. Let me dine with humble people, let me feed kindly folk from far away, and I will learn to embrace more than my erstwhile experience would allow.
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner – A Lament!
Bach’s demeanour left me puzzled and Newton was a nutter,
Gödel couldn’t touch the food for fear of poisoned butter,
Einstein laughed but smoked a pipe and fiddled all the night,
Heidegger sat too close-at-hand and assured me he was right.
Montaigne, meanwhile, presumed not to know on matters all discussed,
Yet spoke at length and digressed immense, as only Montaigne must.
Also come was Archimedes, and with all of these I’m spent;
Guests they came and pests they stayed, the better once they went.
