My father, David Higginbotham, who has died aged 85, was an inspirational teacher known for using humour to help young children understand maths.
Determined to breathe life into the subject he had found so dull as a boy, he drew cartoons on the blackboard to make the concepts more fun. A man with a wheelbarrow moved decimal points around. An empty bird cage kicked off a lesson about the polygon. A chap selling cans showed how to deal with fractions by cancelling, and the lowest common multiple, or LCM, was explained by his spotty, buck-toothed “secret girlfriend”, Elsie M.
