Math gets a bad rap in the United States.  It’s the black sheep of the commonly taught school subjects; nobody ever seems to say that they like it, and most people are content to malign it, boasting about how they “never use it,” or how it “doesn’t apply to their lives”.  Maybe it has something to do with how the subject’s been taught.  I remember going through K-12 and having teachers treat math like a chore, like it was this distasteful but necessary topic that they were being forced to teach.  They pared it down to the hard facts and theorems, and ran us through them like they were ripping off a bandage.  

 

It wasn’t until I met my high school Trigonometry teacher, a woman with a solid math background and real enthusiasm for the subject, that it even occurred to me that math could be interesting.  

 

One Master’s degree in Mathematics later, I can safely say that she was right.  Math is interesting.  Actually, interesting is an understatement; math is the byproduct of one of mankind’s oldest and most persistent intellectual pursuits.  It has captivated the human mind since the very inception of number, and the field it spawned is wide and weird and wonderful.  Today’s K-12 students wouldn’t recognize most of it.

 

This is why I want to teach math.  I want to be the kind of teacher who can bring in the enrichment and the enthusiasm that the subject deserves.  I want to be the kind of teacher who can connect the day’s lesson to the bigger picture in a meaningful way.  I want to be the kind of teacher who is flexible enough to seize teachable moments as they arise, and knowledgeable enough to drop in anecdotes about Pythagoras and Newton.  I feel that students deserve more than the hard facts and theorems, and I want to be the kind of teacher who delivers that.

 

And, when I say teacher, what I mean is something like a guide.  After all, what are students if not explorers in search of knowledge?  Their learning, the internal process of acquiring that knowledge, can happen without a teacher, but it is so much more effective with someone there who is ready and able to help guide them.

 

This vision of teaching  helps to explain my teaching style.  In the past, when I’ve had the chance to run my own classroom, I heavily favored the Socratic method, questioning and probing my students rather than giving them the answers.  I do this because I believe that it is important to model the internal questioning that forms the problem-solving thought process.  I believe that if I teach the students how to think and problem solve that they will not only be able to solve the problems I assign them, but to apply this problem solving outside of math class and in their lives.  I believe that teaching students in this way can train them to think like mathematicians, and that’s an ability that I’d like to see more of.