Two Memorable Math Teachers

Throughout my life, I've had various math teachers- whether it was professional teachers in elementary, high school, and college or the various tutors or friends that had helped me along the way. Today, I'd like to talk about two teachers that had made an impression on me.

My earliest childhood math teacher and I believe the most memorable one is my mother. As a child, I remember her teaching me the basics such as addition, subtraction and multiplication. On a semiweekly basis, we'd go over the material through mandarin textbooks that we brought over from Taiwan cram schools. When I was learning the material, it was frustrating at times for two reasons. One, I had trouble reading the Chinese. And secondly, when I asked her WHY the formulas or algorithms were the way it was, she more often than not could not explain, and told me to memorize it. What was worse was when she told me the reason was "just because that's the way it is". I remember one instance where I was learning about multiplying negatives. In particular, just memorize the fact that two negatives make a positive and THAT was just the way things worked. It was very frustrating not to know the concept and half the time I learned math, I made up my own reasoning for why things worked.

Another memorable teacher I had was in high school. He had a tendency to give an example or question at the beginning of class for us to ponder over, and then went through the classic lecture approach to teaching. But what was different and more engaging to the lesson was the atmosphere he had set up when teaching us using this method. He had set a relaxing and at ease atmosphere that allowed us to ask questions if we needed to and gave us a chance to have class discussion. As well, while he approached the examples he wanted to give to us in class, it was not simply a process of copy and pasting information from his notes to the overhead/whiteboard. Instead, he showed us his way of thinking and worked out the problem with us during the class. By doing so, it helped us stimulate our minds and try to work out the problem in our own way and see if we could obtain the same results as he did. I believe that by giving us the tools we needed to work with first, and then having us work on a problem together in class and seeing if we used the same method of solving a problem- he showed us that there was always multiple ways of deriving an answer.

From the two different experiences, I want to try to reflect on the way I plan to teach. Though I believe in integrating the method of instructional and relational learning, I need to find my balance. I believe that perhaps giving the students the tools to solve the problem is very important, but what is equally important is to give them the concept behind using the formulas and such. As teacher candidates, we should not be having our students blindly using formulas without understanding deeply why the formulas work. As well, giving the opportunity to vary up the lessons such as through visual aids and group work is something that I hope to continuously work on.