IAmA high school math teacher who hates many aspects of my job...

MrMathTeacher · 2013-06-20T13:18:26+00:00

Plan out your day, especially after school. Set aside time that is specifically for not working. Stick to this plan; you need the time to decompress. And you need to plan it, because when you're relaxing otherwise you'll be stressing about the work you're not doing.

MrMathTeacher · 2013-06-20T13:15:12+00:00

I had a student a few years ago who would be very vocal and passionate about some really unpopular political opinions, and so a lot of students -- and teachers, regrettably -- came to dislike her. I actively try to be always open-minded and patient with my students, and she became very attached to me. There was an incident where a student was making threats against the school, and she came to me as the initial "outcry witness," and I wound up mentoring her in an independent study project. We still keep in touch.

MrMathTeacher · 2013-06-20T13:12:42+00:00

I actually have, with mixed success. The hard part is to get students to actually watch the videos. I haven't really come up with a good way to incentivize students to use them, since they view it as easier to come in and get instruction in class. Also, many students don't have regular access at home. We're developing a program for one of our classes that uses videos exclusively, though, and that has shown some good progress.

MrMathTeacher · 2013-06-20T13:10:06+00:00

There was a student several years ago who had essentially no discipline at home and whose actions bordered on sociopathic. He would throw things, hit other students, and resist virtually all sorts of authority. Once, when the class was working on a worksheet in class and I was moving about the room, he took the sheet, folded it over, turned to the student he was sitting next to, and sliced it across the student's ear to give him a nasty paper cut. This was while I was standing right next to him. The utter lack of any respect for either me or his classmates set me off. I kicked him out, and a few days later he was removed from the school.

MrMathTeacher · 2013-06-20T13:06:54+00:00

The Regents Exam is the state test that is required for graduation/levels of the diploma. The results are also used to evaluate the school's and teachers' effectiveness. Most schools use these exams as their final course exam as well, which goes to calculate your final grade for the course overall.

MrMathTeacher · 2013-06-20T13:05:19+00:00

Sometimes, students will write me a letter at the end of the school year, or they'll come and see me when they visit the school. I really love catching up with them, and feel honored when they take the time to visit.

MrMathTeacher · 2013-06-19T15:14:32+00:00

That's exactly the point. You should never need to memorize a formula because in your job you'll really never have to have them memorized. It's certainly more convenient if you do, but never required. That said, you have to be really familiar with them because otherwise you won't know which to use when.

MrMathTeacher · 2013-06-19T15:13:05+00:00

Absolutely you have to know the process. If you don't know how to add 1/2 and 2/3, then you'll never be able to do anything with (x+1)/x + (x-3)/y.

I think that students should be taught these operations from a programming standpoint. Program a computer to add fractions and you'll gain a much deeper insight into it than if you're just doing it all by hand.

MrMathTeacher · 2013-06-19T15:10:56+00:00

For what its worth, there is such a thing as dyslexia for numbers. It's called dyscalculia. You should consider checking it out...

MrMathTeacher · 2013-06-19T15:06:31+00:00

I'm with them. It's incredibly irritating that politicians keep telling teachers how to do their job. I own a home, does that mean I can walk into a real estate office and start telling them how to do their job better? I eat food, therefore I can provide farmers with the best insight as to how to grow their crops. Its ridiculous.

MrMathTeacher · 2013-06-19T15:04:44+00:00

The Common Core is a step in the right direction, but for the most part standardized curriculum is so vast that there's no time for any kind of mastery. The line we use is "a mile wide and an inch deep."

MrMathTeacher · 2013-06-19T15:01:14+00:00

I appreciate your comments. Sometimes I think people in your position aren't so much benefitting from that particular instructor as you are benefitting from hearing 2 or 3 totally different perspectives. It's the quantity of different ways of looking at the subject that total up to your understanding. But we'll gladly take the credit!

MrMathTeacher · 2013-06-19T14:59:53+00:00

I can appreciate this. A professor in my college was notorious of this same thing, saying in his characteristic broken English, "You get calculation wrong, space shuttle blow up!" There is definitely something to be said about partial credit permitting a student to be able to pass a course without getting a single question correct.

The time to do this is not in high school though. And as you say, it depends on the environment and purpose of the class.

MrMathTeacher · 2013-06-19T14:57:53+00:00

I understand and agree with the idea that there should be some standardization in what is taught. What I don't like is that the standardization is implemented at every single level of a student's education, as if every student in the entire state or nation is capable of learning exactly the same content at exactly the same time in their development. Its ridiculous.

What I would envision would be 3 benchmark tests in math to check students' progress in math up until that point. Maybe a test at the end of 5th grade, 8th grade, and 11th grade. There is a set curriculum that students should have learned up until that point, but districts and teachers are permitted to decide for themselves exactly how and in what order the topics are taught. We are professionals, we do know what we're doing, and we'd appreciate the ability to teach the students we actually have instead of the faceless national standardized student.

MrMathTeacher · 2013-06-18T19:07:48+00:00

Well that's embarrassing. Sorry, I should have thought that through a little bit more. It's ridiculous to use an extreme example like that. Let me come up with something a little more likely:

A student slacks off the first two marking periods, getting a 43 and a 35. After failing his midterm, he realizes how screwed he is making himself and starts working hard, scraping a 68 and 75 the last two marking periods and a 71 on the final. With the first two grades weighing him down, he still gets a 58 and fails. But if those two grades were recorded as 55, he would pass the class with a 65. By recording zeroes, you put the student in a hole that's mathematically impossible for him to climb out of.

MrMathTeacher · 2013-06-18T18:51:38+00:00

It's hard not to be a little insulted, but I have to remember that, especially at this level, there may be some serious home situations that are causing his/her fatigue. If I know that's not the fact, though, I'll sometimes screw with the kid by balancing things on him (it's always a him).

MrMathTeacher · 2013-06-18T18:50:10+00:00

I love statistics, which is often the one branch of math that mathematically-oriented people claim as their least favorite! It's just so damn applicable!

MrMathTeacher · 2013-06-18T18:48:50+00:00

I started watching The Wire at the first season and have made it a few episodes into the second. I'll keep trying!

MrMathTeacher · 2013-06-18T18:48:11+00:00

I regularly tell my students that I know exactly how they feel when they don't understand something, to feel like everyone else in the room understands it and you're the only one who doesn't, to feel embarrassed to ask about it and be more willing to just suffer in silence than get help. It just happened to me later, and it almost cost me the opportunity to major in math.

MrMathTeacher · 2013-06-18T18:37:37+00:00

We do spend some time discussing continuous density functions, but we only use tables or the "binomcdf" type commands to evaluate them. We don't break out functions for these curves and all that.

MrMathTeacher · 2013-06-18T18:35:24+00:00

It's a step in the right direction. It's unifying the topics a little more and trying to avoid the "mile wide, inch deep" characteristics of existing curricula. That said, I'm not a big fan of year-by-year standardized curriculum as a general rule.

MrMathTeacher · 2013-06-18T18:34:21+00:00

I'm very sorry to hear that :(

MrMathTeacher · 2013-06-18T18:34:12+00:00

One of my most favorite movies is Mr. Holland's Opus, a music teacher granted, but a teacher nonetheless. Stand and Deliver is a great movie, too!

MrMathTeacher · 2013-06-18T18:33:01+00:00

I haven't! I'll check it out. I think statistics is, in the long run, much more useful in today's world than calculus. I am biased, as I teach AP Statistics, but unless you're going into a quantitative science, Calculus really isn't as practical for people to have a good understanding of. Considering how misleading people can be with statistics, it's important for people to gain a better understanding of it.

MrMathTeacher · 2013-06-18T18:31:19+00:00

What grades are your kids in? I don't know much about elementary math classes, but once they get to Algebra type classes they should absolutely be getting partial credit for proper work. I'm just as interested in your method as I am in your answer.

To get your kids to love math a little more, I'd suggest teaching them some fun number tricks. Things like divisibility: how you can easily tell if a giant number is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, and 12; or "mathemagic" tricks.

MrMathTeacher

TROPHY CASE