Thirty years of turning “I can’t” into “I can.”

My career began in South Africa, where for three decades I taught two subjects most people think belong on opposite ends of the school: Mathematics and Dramatic Arts. In the maths room, children learned to reason with precision. In the drama studio, they learned to stand up, speak clearly, and be seen. I watched, year after year, what each room gave the other.

I also know the whisper of “I can’t” from the inside. I was once made to feel not good enough myself — and I remember exactly what it does to a young person’s idea of who they are. It is why I have never once believed a child who told me they were “just not a maths person.” They aren’t bad at maths. They’re afraid of it. Those are very different problems, and only one of them is hard to fix.

So I stopped teaching maths as a set of rules. A topic became a situation, a character, a journey — something a child could picture and step inside. The fear couldn’t survive the play. Marks rose, and kept rising: national-exam classes with 100% pass rates in Grade 12 Mathematics, awarded twice, and six consecutive years of 100% in Dramatic Arts. Grown adults still write to tell me they became teachers because of what happened in that classroom.

Today I teach from Sohar, Oman — live online classes for children in Grades 5 to 10 across the Gulf. The rooms have changed. The work hasn’t: one frightened child at a time, handed a story big enough to be brave in.