Interview with Math People (Personal Reflection)

Communicating with math teachers and students provided me with great insight into the current status of math in schools. Contacting math teachers allowed me, as a teacher candidate, to ask five questions about the teaching profession in order that I might learn some handy hints. Interviewing math students allowed me to ask five questions of my future “audience” and to understand what challenges I will have to face in order to help my students.

Many of the teacher’s responses coincide with what I envision doing in my own classroom. According to the teacher interviewed, one of the biggest challenges faced by him is keeping students interested when going over basics and keeping struggling kids from giving up. I agree with this response from the teacher. It is also one of my fears as a teacher candidate: “Will I be able to teach to the whole class and not lose anyone?” Students who understand basic concepts are bored during initial review and students who do not understand have immense frustration learning them. I hope that I will be able to compile my own repertoire of games suitable in high school math classes. In conjunction with what I have learned in my science education class, the teacher suggested a class format, whereby the beginning of the class consists of a game, followed by lecture and assigned questions (with the time lecturing and working on assigned questions are equally weighted).

Some of the areas of difficulty in math for the students reminded me of the articles that we have read by Skemp (1976) and Robinson (2006) stressing the idea of relational understanding instead of instrumental understanding. When the students expressed a dislike of word problems and graphing inverse and reciprocal functions, I realized that these types of questions are disliked because of their higher-level assessment. Word problems require one to synthesize the question into a practical question. The difficulty with inverse and reciprocal functions comes from not knowing why the graphs look like how they do. As a teacher candidate, I hope to incorporate “buzz groups” and other forms of group discussion into my math classes because the students may be more open to asking for help from peers than from the teacher.

In summary, this interviewing assignment has helped me see both sides of the class and, from an external perspective, assess how I might react in those situations. It also has helped me to give me realistic expectations of a classroom setting. I hope that I can utilize the information gained from this assignment and become an effective teacher.

Teacher’s Questions

1. What is the biggest challenge in teaching students that learn at different paces?
2. What is the most difficult section/topic to teach?
3. What techniques/methods do you use to engage the class in active learning?
4. How often do you give the students a small break from lecturing? (Anecdotes or math questions.)
5. What is some advice you have for math teacher candidates such as ourselves?
   

Student’s Questions

1. What is your favourite part in math and why do you like it?
2. What do you think is a challenge for math students like you?
3. Can you think of a time where your math teacher got you really interested in math during class? What did he/she do?
4. Is there something you wish you could do in math class to make it more interesting?
5. Do you think there should be more group work in math classes answering problems?