Sep 21 Favorite Math Teacher and Future Student Letter

 

Favorite math teachers

My favorite and least-favorite math teachers were both from university. In high school I only had a few math teachers but in university I had many. My favorite was my first calculus teacher. He emphasized the applicability of everything that we covered. He used lots of visuals, like graphs to explain things and almost all of his questions were word problems. One day, he spoke about how math is about trying new things, experimenting to see if things work, and making realizations that have never occurred to you before. It was also my first semester of university so I was a bit mystified, excited, and enthralled by the university environment that would soon become commonplace to me.

 

Least favorite math teacher

My least favorite math teacher was in Math 232, linear algebra, in my second semester at university. He had enthusiasm and excitement for the material we covered every day, but I think it was mostly caffeine-induced. He spoke with a thick accent and very rapidly and constantly scribbled his notes on the overhead projector at such a fast pace that I struggled to keep up. He described math as like building a cathedral but before we could build the beautiful spires, we had to build a solid foundation. That even sounds boring. I never did really grasp the beauty of the invertible matrix theorem, which, if I remember correctly, was the main theorem we used. However, I passed the course without too much hardship, and moved on, never to do math like that again.

 

My positive description from a future student, 10 years later

Mr. Gregson taught me a lot about math and how to apply it to my everyday life. Thanks to him, I went from someone who hated math and couldn’t do it, to someone who enjoys and excels at math. I always thought math was mostly useless until he showed me ways to apply it to almost anything. Once I realized how important and useful math is, I started to actually try my best at it. Now, I work in finance and every day I do math and do a job that I would never have been able to do without Mr. Gregson’s help.

 

My negative description from a future student, 10 years later

Mr. Gregson never taught me anything. His class was such a waste of time. He’s one of those teachers that knows how to do it himself, but not how to teach it to someone else. He shouldn’t be a teacher. He never even tried to help me when he saw that I didn’t understand because he didn’t even care if I learned or not. Why do they even teach math anyways? It’s totally useless unless you’re going to be a math teacher, an astronaut or a scientist or something like that.