Roger

About

• Roger has been with Save My Exams since February of 2020, creating content for the majority of the mathematics courses on the site. Before that he had been a Mathematics teacher for 3 years, teaching students from both the UK and abroad in GCSE and A Level Maths and Further Maths.

• Although he began his university studies as an Astronomy concentrator back in the 1980s, Roger’s academic career took a 20+ year detour through ancient and medieval languages, leading eventually to a PhD in those subjects.

• Roger always retained an interest in maths and the mathematical sciences, and his passion for teaching those subjects was ignited by two things: homeschooling his own daughter through her GCSEs (and through A Level in Maths), and working as a private maths tutor for a number of students in his local area.

• After hearing a news report about the shortage of teachers in maths and the sciences, Roger returned to university as a ‘mature student’ to earn a degree in Mathematical and Theoretical Physics. Following this he spent two years conducting postgraduate research into the mathematical theory that underlies quantum computing, before going on to complete a Welsh-medium PGCE course and enter the teaching profession.

• Roger is especially fond of pure maths — the purer and more abstract the better! But at the same time, he is also eternally fascinated by the ways that ‘pure’ maths cross over and drive research and discovery in the physical sciences. And he has an abiding interest in Statistics that is his applied maths ‘guilty secret’.

• When he’s not creating mathematics resources for Save My Exams, Roger can generally be found reading books about chess, or playing Elizabethan and Jacobean English lute-songs by candlelight. He is also a keen walker, and retains his interest in languages and literatures from all times and places. Most of all, however, he likes to spend time with his wife doting on their beloved house rabbits.

Education

• Roger has an MMath degree (first class) from Aberystwyth University, and also completed his PGCE in Secondary Education at Aberystwyth.

• Roger also has a B.A. from Vanderbilt University in Classical Studies, an M.A. from the University of Edinburgh in Celtic, and both an A.M. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in Celtic Languages and Literatures.

Expertise

• Roger has taught Maths at KS3, along with GCSE Maths and A Level Maths and Further Maths (as well as teaching maths tutorials for university undergraduate students while he was a postgraduate researcher)

• From his PGCE training, Roger is also a qualified Physics teacher

• His particular expertise is in the overlap between Maths and Physics — this overlap was at the core of his MMath degree in Mathematical & Theoretical Physics

Top revision quote for students

“I always tell my students that the key to maths exam success is like the answer to the old joke about ‘How do I get to Carnegie Hall?’ — practice, practice, practice. It’s almost impossible to work through too many exam and exam-style questions. Though also be sure to build up your ‘big picture’, to make sure you can answer those challenging questions that require drawing in ideas from multiple topics across the maths syllabus.”