The camera focuses on a teacher with her back to her students. She writes a formula on the whiteboard and asks, “Who knows what sin α is?” One of the students responds by tossing a paper airplane at the teacher. At first she demands to see the student’s parents, but when the teacher picks up the paper airplane, however, she discovers that the insolent student — who happens to be former President Shimon Peres — wrote the correct answer on it. “You may amount to something after all,” says the teacher with a faint smile.

The ad is part of the Ministry of Education's "Give Five" campaign, intended to double the number of students completing five units in mathematics (the highest level) in their matriculation exams. As part of Education Minister Naftali Bennett’s “Startup Nation” strategy, the campaign has already angered teachers, parents and students alike, and it’s come under criticism from experts in the field. For example, Ron Aharoni, a professor of mathematics at the Technion in Haifa, told Al-Monitor that even students who pass five units of math in their matriculation exams “don’t have the greatest ability to think when they come to us.”

This isn't the first time that Israel has tried to improve the situation of high school math in general and increase the number of students completing five units in math in particular. For example, the number of students who take the matriculation examination at this level dropped from 13,000 in 2005 to about 10,500 in 2010. The situation has continued to deteriorate since then, and Israel has failed to impress in international rankings.

The campaign itself is estimated to have cost 1 million shekels ($260,000) of the 75 million shekels ($19.5 million) that the Ministry of Education budgeted for its overall program to bolster the study of mathematics in high school. However, many students felt that the program was dismissive of other, nonscience subjects.