PSL Fireside

Esther Diera: math that has to live outside the textbook

Conversation published 22 June 2025 · Published September 21, 2026

Esther Diera teaches mathematics and chemistry in Kakamega County. She also writes CBC-aligned questions for Grades 6 to 9 as a Kurasa MWALIMU WA Math panelist. The useful part of her fireside is not the title. It is that she was not always “a maths person.”

Field note from a Kurasa regional lead, rewritten for this site in September 2026. Named adults and schools are those already published on mykurasa.com. Confirm they still wish to be named. This is not a 60 Decibels finding and not the 29 August 2026 homepage scale.

Portrait of an adult Kenyan woman teacher in an empty classroom with a chalkboard of working.

I struggled with math in Form 1 and 2 until my teacher, Mr Martin, changed how I saw it. Now I help students see that math is alive and everywhere.
Esther Diera — PSL Fireside, June 2025

The classroom, not the stage

She names the myth learners bring: where will I ever use this. Maps use matrices. Bridges use curves. Tax is arithmetic. GeoGebra, PhET, Desmos — tools that can run offline — are how she makes that sentence true in a rural school, not a slogan on a banner.

Scratch Day

At Masinde Muliro University of Science and Technology she ran a Scratch Day with 283 junior-school learners from Facebook Academy, St Joseph’s Academy, Pendo School and Shikhello JSS. They built a live maths quiz. That number and those school names are from the June 2025 write-up. They are not a national enrolment figure.

What she tells girls

Algebra feels abstract in Form 1. Vectors arrive later. Calculus looks impossible. Her method is unfashionable: revisit the basics, use a real object, add a game when it earns its place. To learners — especially girls — she says she once thought maths was not for her. Practice still has to happen.