I've always been interested in mathematics and following redundancy from IT consultancy in 2009 I returned to university for two years to retrain as a secondary mathematics teacher.
The first year of this study was spent at the University of Hull studying mathematics on a Mathematics Enhancement Course (MEC), a course aimed at preparing graduates from non-mathematics disciplines to teach mathematics in a secondary school. This involves studying the subject to a level somewhere between A-Level and a degree in order to give its paticipants a deep enough knowledge to be able to teach the subject with confidence. The course is a prerequisite for non-mathematics graduates to be accepted on the Secondary Mathematics PGCE. Having passed this course I then spent another year taking my PGCE in Secondary Mathematics where I studied teaching methods and theory at Hull and had two teaching practices at local secondary schools teaching students from year 7 (11 years old) to A-Level (17/18 years old).
Although I didn't go into teaching after this I have continued studying the subject online via massive open online course (MOOC) run by the likes of Coursera and Udacity. One topic of particular interest being that of number theory and problems relating to prime numbers and their use in encryption and how it is relied upon to keep secrets secret based on an as yet unproved assumption that there is no substantially quicker algorithm than used at present to decrypt.