At Right Angles: Azim Premji University's Mathematics Magazine for School Teachers
At Right Angles is a triannual magazine for school mathematics, published by Azim Premji University in Bengaluru, Karnataka, for teachers, teacher educators and students connected with the subject. It describes itself as an in-depth, serious magazine on mathematics and mathematics education, and its purpose is practical: to help teachers make teaching and learning in the classroom more experiential and meaningful. Published in March, July and November each year, and available free in English, Hindi and Kannada, it has become a valued resource for India's mathematics teaching community, especially for those working with children roughly between six and fourteen years of age.
In a school system where mathematics is often the subject children fear most and drop earliest, a magazine written by teachers, for teachers, about the joy and logic of the subject fills a distinctive gap — between the textbook, which must be followed, and the staffroom conversation, which rarely gets written down.
Published by Azim Premji University with the Community Mathematics Centre
At Right Angles is published by Azim Premji University together with the Community Mathematics Centre at Rishi Valley. Its editors have been drawn from institutions including Rishi Valley School, the Azim Premji Foundation, the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, Lady Shri Ram College, the Association of Mathematics Teachers of India, Vidya Bhavan Society and the Centre for Learning — a coalition that signals the magazine's dual allegiance to classroom practice and to mathematical scholarship.
The magazine is part of the university's family of magazines for school education, alongside iWonder... for science and Pathshala on school education in general. Azim Premji University brings these titles out to provide good-quality learning resources to practising school teachers, teacher educators and educational functionaries, promoting dialogue among teachers, practitioners and educationists on current discourses and perspectives on education, classroom pedagogy, research and on-the-ground experience.
The Editorial Leadership
The magazine's best-known editorial figure is Dr Shailesh Shirali, Head of the Community Mathematics Centre at Rishi Valley School and Director of Sahyadri School, who has served as Chief Editor of At Right Angles. Shirali is the author of many mathematics books for students, an editor of the undergraduate science magazine Resonance, and closely involved with India's Mathematical Olympiad movement and with teacher education.
Sneha Titus has served as Associate Editor — a mathematics teacher of twenty years' experience who moved from full-time teaching to work on inculcating in students a love of the logic and relevance of mathematics, mentoring mathematics teachers from rural and city schools and building small teaching modules using technology, media resources, games, puzzles and stories. That combination of a research-minded chief editor and a practitioner associate editor captures the magazine's stated balance between being academic and practitioner oriented.
What Teachers Find Inside
Azim Premji University describes the content as designed to help teachers with more experiential and meaningful teaching-learning processes in mathematics. Articles are written by mathematics teachers, are related to the curriculum and syllabus, and are contextualised to local environments — an important detail in a country where a fractions lesson may be taught with pebbles, seeds or market prices depending on where the school is.
The magazine's regular sections give it a recognisable shape. 'The Joy of Mathematics' celebrates the subject's pleasures and surprises. 'ClassRoom' shares teaching experiences with illustrated pedagogical strategies. A 'Reviews' section evaluates resources for teachers. And each issue carries a PullOut section with activities for teaching difficult concepts in the classroom — material a teacher can lift directly into a lesson. Readers can access resources for the classroom or elsewhere, read about mathematical matters possibly not in the regular school curriculum, solve non-routine problems, share original observations and discoveries, and write about and discuss results in school-level mathematics.
A Platform Teachers Write For
At Right Angles is deliberately participatory. The university invites articles from mathematics teachers, educators, practitioners and students that support and enhance the learning experience of mathematics, particularly for students in the six-to-fourteen age group, and readers are invited to contribute their own writing, interact with one another and discuss school mathematics. Feedback is welcomed at the magazine's editorial address, and calls for articles are issued for forthcoming issues.
A recent call for articles shows the magazine's current agenda. It seeks material for the foundational, preparatory and middle school levels — Classes 1 to 8 — including guidance on selecting content and online resources, pedagogical strategies for foundational numeracy and computational thinking, differentiated teaching practices, reviews of teaching-learning material and ways to use local context and local materials, help for students to bridge gaps in conceptual understanding, work on assessment, ways to identify and address misconceptions, and lists of problems with discussions of solutions and problem-solving strategies not commonly found in textbooks. Contributions may also explore themes of the National Curriculum Framework for School Education 2023 and the challenges it discusses.
Three Languages and Free Access
At Right Angles is published in three languages — English, Kannada and Hindi — extending its reach beyond English-medium schools to the government-school teachers who educate most Indian children. All of the university's school-education magazines are available at no cost: readers can download individual articles or the whole magazine free from the university's publications portal, and a printed copy can be requested by writing to the magazine with a postal address.
Free distribution is an editorial decision with real consequences. A commercial mathematics magazine would concentrate on affluent private schools that can pay. At Right Angles, supported by a university and foundation committed to public education, is designed for the teacher in a rural or small-town school as much as for the metropolitan educator — and its Hindi and Kannada editions meet those teachers in the languages of their classrooms.
Mathematics Beyond the Textbook
A recurring promise of the magazine is mathematics beyond the regular curriculum: beautiful results in school-level mathematics written about and discussed, non-routine problems to solve, and readers' own observations and discoveries shared in print. The founding vision for the magazine spoke of the serious need for platforms, in print and online, where teachers and children from schools across the country can read about matters outside the syllabus, solve problems, interact, and contribute their own findings.
This enrichment function matters for talent as much as for remediation. India's Mathematical Olympiad culture and its research community both depend on children encountering mathematics as a living, puzzling, beautiful subject early — often through a teacher who has somewhere to feed that curiosity. At Right Angles gives such teachers material, and gives their students a first sight of mathematics as something people write about with pleasure.
Pedagogy: Misconceptions, Differentiation and Assessment
The magazine's practitioner heart shows in its attention to how children actually learn. Its calls and contents emphasise identifying and addressing misconceptions — the predictable wrong turns, in place value, fractions or negative numbers, that a teacher must diagnose rather than merely mark wrong. Differentiated teaching, for classrooms where one teacher faces many levels at once, and honest treatment of assessment, are likewise recurring concerns.
Because articles are written by practising teachers and contextualised locally, the pedagogy is grounded: strategies are reported from real classrooms, with real constraints of time, class size and materials, rather than imported as theory. The university describes the magazine's approach exactly so — a balance between the academic and the practitioner oriented.
Its Sister Magazines and the University's Mission
At Right Angles sits within Azim Premji University's wider commitment to school education in India. The university, established in Bengaluru by the Azim Premji Foundation, works on education and development, and its magazines for school teachers — At Right Angles for mathematics, iWonder... for science and Pathshala for school education generally, now all available in English, Hindi and Kannada — are offered free to build teacher capacity and facilitate more experiential, meaningful engagement inside and outside the classroom, while strengthening the school's engagement with the communities it serves.
Read alongside its sisters, At Right Angles is the mathematical specialist of the family: deeper in one subject, sharing the same conviction that the practising teacher is the most important reader in Indian education.
Why At Right Angles Matters
Three times a year, in three languages, free to any teacher who asks, At Right Angles brings Indian mathematics teachers classroom activities, pullouts for difficult concepts, problems and their discussion, reviews, and the recorded experience of colleagues across the country. Edited from Bengaluru by Azim Premji University with the Community Mathematics Centre at Rishi Valley, it treats school mathematics as a subject worthy of a serious magazine — and its teachers as a professional community worthy of one. For a system working to replace fear of mathematics with understanding, that is a contribution out of proportion to the magazine's modest, practical format.
