Tom and I had a conversation with a math teacher who has been teaching for approximately three years. We felt that it would be beneficial to meet with a teacher who has not been teaching for a very long time because we believed a “younger” teacher would be able to relate to us and the questions we had. Overall, we found the conversation with the teacher to be very educational because we learned a lot about the different kinds of activities we can do to keep students interested and how to make sure our students are successful.
The teacher we met with, who we will call Miss D, mentioned to us that she emphasizes both instrumental and relational understanding. Miss D determines what understanding to use based on the concept that she is teaching. She told us that relational understanding is important because it helps students understand the importance of a concept – and if they do not understand the importance then they will not be interested in the concept. Instrumental understanding is also important because it gives the students the capacity to retain the information that is being taught.
Furthermore, Miss D explained to us that introducing a new concept with a 10 to 20 minute lecture followed by review games and hands-on activities is very effective. Some of the activities that she has her students do are questions from the textbook, working in groups to answer questions which will be presented to the class, and having students teach problems to the class. She finds that these activities keep most of the students interested in math. Moreover, Miss D told us that a good way to convey the relevance of math to students and to further their interest is by relating math to life outside of the classrooms. Furthermore, Miss D indicated that it is very important for the teacher to provide extra help for students whenever they need it. Overall, we really enjoyed the conversation that we had with Miss D.
Manjeet and I talked with a student who had recently completed grade 12 math. The result was interesting – as his general attitude towards math is anything but “keener”, we got a realistic version of how math is seen through a typical math student’s eyes. We asked him a few questions that mainly covered the topics of ‘how it should be taught’ and ‘relevance’.
His ideal change to the math curriculum would be to cut out all the material that you don’t use in the future once you graduate. He added that the best part of Math 12 is the graphing, because it is more common sense than anything; conics, on the other hand, is very useless after high school. This response was surprising, as conics had been mentioned the day before during class as a necessary precursor to calculus. It would seem that it is more of a specialty topic for those who want to pursue university level math, but not suited for the average math student concerned with real-life applications.
Our student goes on to discuss the relevance of math to him, saying that math is used every day in our lives and it’s important to be able to figure out problems using math (i.e. car loan interest, measurements for baking); however, if the math is not applicable to real life, then it becomes boring.
We also asked his views on using technology to teach math – he interpreted it as the use of calculators and computers to solve math equations, while we were also inquiring about illustrating/teaching through technology; nevertheless, his response was heartening: “math should be taught with the least amount of technology as possible, otherwise we wouldn’t know what to do if we didn’t have a calculator or computer. Plus if we relied on computers everyone would someday not know how to do a simple calculation.”
While our student’s responses weren’t all that shocking, it was very interesting to hear his take on what math topics were useful. It is good to hear that even though he is not passionate about math, it still holds some significance for him as preparation for real life.
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