"Rooms with a View" from The Exeter Bulletin, Fall 2007

Philip Mallinson’s mathematics classroom is a study in geometric shapes and patterns

You may not be able to judge a book by its cover, but you can learn a lot about Exeter teachers from their classrooms. Their intellectual passions. Their personal heroes and hobbies. Their high standards of scholarship (and, occasionally, their high tolerance for clutter). Scan the titles on their bookshelves, examine the historical artifacts and the plastic wind-up toys on their Harkness tables and you’ll glimpse something about why they became teachers in the first place — and what it is they’re most excited to share with their students. In this article, you’ll find a few of the many teachers whose classrooms set the stage for discussion and discovery.

Mathematics instructor Philip Mallinson keeps a model classroom—literally. His high-ceilinged Academy Building classroom is filled with 3-D geometric models and puzzles, a collection amassed over the course of his 40-year teaching career. The models not only pique students’ curiosity, they also help them grasp hard-to-visualize problems. Mallinson dates his own interest in geometry—"the exact instant"—to a footnote he stumbled on during an otherwise "dry-as-dust" high-school course. "It had pictures showing how to fold flat figures into models, along with a reference to a book called Mathematical Models by Cundy and Rollett," he recalls. "I went to the school library, and amazingly they had it. I made every model in that book." Today, a copy of Cundy and Rollett sits on the bookshelf behind his desk.

Interested in learning more?

Read the complete article, which profiles the classrooms of Philip Mallinson, Ming Fontaine, Townley Chisholm, Donald Foster, Inna Sysevich and Peter Greer '58...

Read the full issue of The Exeter Bulletin, Fall 2007...

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