I became concerned about the students I would be teaching. If they had avoided mathematics since it stopped being compulsory, only to find themselves at university and being made to study it as part of their course, I could imagine it would be difficult to find motivation.
Mathematics is quite a polarising subject. If they have chosen not to do mathematics at A-Level they are likely do not like it.
I enquired about the courses the students would be taking. Some would be from foresic science degrees, some from business and some from astronomy and computing. This is potentially a real problem, since these are a wide variety of courses. Although there is plenty of mathematics that reaches across these subjects the differences is application mean that the maths must be taught in an abstract way. Business students do not want to learn about radioactive decay, equally forensic science students are not likely to be interested in compound interest; yet these use the same mathematical techniques.
Still, some links to the home curriculum must be useful. Surely students who are not keen on maths, who are being forced to take time out of the degree they chose to read to be taught some, will only be interested if they can see the application in their own subject. This is a great contrast to when I studied mathematics, a lot of which was studied for its own sake, because it was interesting. If these students had this opinion, they would surely not be sitting in this class.
