“The Rudé právo newspaper made a huge advertisement for my book. One of those scribblers in there tore it apart as ideologically defective. Back then whenever Rudé právo said about something that it was ideologically defective, it started selling great for obvious reasons. Then people approached me: ‘My God, who are you insulting by your work? You only talk about math, nothing else.’ So I had to explain that it wasn’t directed against any of the Party officials; that I just try to make people think. Back then I didn’t fully realize that this was the biggest sabotage.”
“At elementary school… I was bad in math, but bad in a peculiar way. My dad used to give me various problem-solving tasks which I enjoyed; therefore he claimed I had a talent for math. But my grades didn’t reflect that because it all took me a long time. In the sixth grade, we had the principal Mr. Lepieš – or better comrade Lepieš – teach us math. He wasn’t happy with my results but still gave me B’s since I was the son of his colleague, a math teacher in a small town. One day he told us that we would start learning a strange, difficult thing – fractions, and he gave us some exercise. He taught us a rule, the so called cross-rule, on how to add up two fractions. We got homework until Monday to think over how much 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/6 is. He gave us this difficult task. As soon as he finished writing it on the board I replied that the result was one. He thought that I remembered it from somewhere. But then it turned out that I was capable of doing the same with other exercises. I also remember that one of my friends who used to be very good in math, suddenly ceased to understand it when fractions came up. He had a hard time with them. I didn’t get it – such a good mathematician, not seeing what is one quarter and one third, for me it was straightforward. Than comrade principal Lepieš told me: ‘See, Hejný, when you study, then you know it.’ I found that really funny at that time because I never started studying any of it.”
“I started teaching those fifth-graders and soon fell for it. I wanted to teach for just a year but then my colleagues who taught the other classes joined me. We would create our own exercise sheets together, go to trips with the kids, and organize young mathematicians’ summer camps. It created such a connection between us that it became clear that I wouldn’t return to math. I found the work with children fascinating. I would prepare my class and see before my eyes already how Evička will understand it and how Tomáš will… I began to prepare tailor-made tasks for them and it started working. I found great joy in the teaching. Later, I didn’t even think of abandoning it. Math seemed too flat in comparison with the great richness of thought hidden in this pedagogical and didactic work.”
Finding sense in what gives other people joy is the way to live a happy life
Prof. RNDr., CSc. Milan Hejný
photo: dobová - archiv pamětníka, současná Post Bellum
photo: dobová - archiv pamětníka, současná Post Bellum
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Milan Hejný was born on 23 May 1936 inTurčianský Svätý Martin, Slovakia. His mother Naděžda, née Pietrová, was a Slovak actress while his father Vít Hejný, a mathematician and a teacher grew up in Litovel, Czech Republic, but later answered the call of president Masaryk to help build a schooling system in Slovakia. At the time of the Slovak National Uprising his parents participated in the resistance. Milan’s mother worked as an announcer with the resistance radio in Banská Bystrica, his father, a former officer of the Czechoslovak army, collaborated with the partisans. The family went into hiding following the Nazi authorities’ in absentia death penalty judgment for his father. The whole family eventually survived the war including Milan’s uncle Ivan Pietor who had fled to the Soviet Union and took part in the drafting of the Košice Governmental Program. After the end of the war his uncle become a minister in the newly-established government and his father found a job at the Ministry of Education in Prague. For this reason the Hejný family resettled to Bohemia, only to return to Martin, Slovakia after the communist putsch of February 1948. In 1954 Milan Hejný graduated from high school and left to Prague to study Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University. There he met his future wife Eva Brzoňová, a stomatology student. The newly-weds resolved the lack of apartments by moving back to Slovakia where the University of Transport had been transferred. Milan Hejný later left the academic career and became fully dedicated to practical teaching. He began developing a math teaching method, building on his fathers’ pre-war elaboration. At present, this method is called teaching focused on chart development and it differs from the traditional formula memorizing by activating a child’s own competences in understanding mathematical rules. In the 1980s Milan Hejný made an effort to implement his method into new grammar school geometry textbooks but was rejected. After 1989 Milan Hejný worked at the Ministry of Education and lectured at foreign universities (among others in Canada and the US). Since 2005 he and his team had worked on mathematics textbooks for elementary schools which had then been published in 2007-2011. The popularity and practical influence of the so-called Hejný’s method has been rising in the past years and there are an increasing number of Czech schools which have adopted this teaching method.
