A YORK maths teacher has proved he is top of the class with his ABC as he wows the nation on Channel 4’s Countdown.

Kirk Bevin broke the record for a contestant in the challenger’s chair when he notched up a score of 127 at the start of his run on the long-running numbers and letters game earlier this week.

Letter-perfect in his fourth appearance yesterday, he beat his own best score, with 130.

Now his students at All Saints’ RC School are brushing up their mental maths so they can beat him at quick-fire calculations and are quoting obscure words to each other after watching him magic them out of a mishmash of consonants and vowels.

“They are really positive about it,” said Mr Bevin. “They are motivated to watch Countdown and they remember these words. A Year 8 boy stopped me in the corridor and said ‘vibrio’ (a kind of bacterium). He’d learnt it from me and from Countdown.”

The teacher even outdid the experts in the dictionary corner when they disallowed his seven-letter word “hedarim” (Jewish schools) only to allow it later on when they found it in the dictionary listed with its singular form “cheder.”

“It is fantastic how well he has done,” said head teacher Bill Scriven. “In the staffroom, the talk is all about Kirk.”

Now students race home at the end of the day so they can turn on the television and test themselves against their teacher. Mr Bevin only started at the secondary school in Nunnery Lane this year, his first teaching job, and was popular before his TV success. He has a long-time love of the programme and went into strict training in-between preparing lessons and marking schoolwork.

“It’s just practice,” he said. “I played Countdown again and again.”

He won’t let on how long his run lasts or what his final tally is. Apart from standard classes, he holds maths surgeries at lunchtimes for less able students and works with G and T (Gifted and Talented) groups after school. He mostly teaches Key Stage Three classes for pupils under 14, but also has a GCSE class.