Teaching Math in a New Way by Marika

Teaching Math in a New Way by Marika - October 2019 Scholarship Essay

The person who has most influenced my trajectory in life is my high school math teacher, Ms. Speckl. She was the first teacher I had ever had who addressed the difficulty of math. Other teachers would tell the class that math didn’t need to be hard. This always made me feel inadequate when I struggled with a problem. If math wasn’t hard but I was still having trouble, did that mean that I wasn’t smart enough? But Ms. Speckl never told us that math wasn’t hard. She recognized that it was hard and that we would struggle, and that was the way it was supposed to be. On the first day of class, she told us that in school math never just “came naturally” to her; she had to work hard to understand every problem. This took away some of my belief that some people are just born good at math. Ms. Speckl made us feel like we were smart enough to take on whatever problem was in front of us. I started to recognize that grappling with a math problem didn’t mean I was dumb. It actually made me smarter. Thinking hard about how to solve a problem was becoming something I enjoyed. I liked the satisfaction of finishing a problem that I had really struggled with more than I liked breezing by problems that didn’t require a lot of thinking.

In Ms. Speckl’s class, I also started to question the teaching methods I had seen other math teachers use. For example, other teachers would put a new theorem on the board and read it verbatim in technical math terms. Then we would move on to practice applying the theorem to different problems. This always left me feeling uneasy and slightly panicked. I didn’t understand the language in the theorem, and I definitely didn’t have time to process how it could be used to help solve a problem. Ms. Speckl, on the other hand, used a different method. She always explained math in ordinary language instead of explaining math in math language. When she put up a new concept on the board, she would explain the underlying concept of how we would use this new idea in ordinary language before we moved on to using it in practice problems. This took away some of the panic that comes when I’m faced with a confusing mess of symbols and numbers. Ms. Speckl’s system of teaching made so much more sense to me than any system I’d experienced before. I wondered why all math teachers didn’t consider talking about math in simple terms, and taking away some of their students’ nervousness when it came to learning new things. In Ms. Speckl’s class, I started to think about becoming a math teacher myself.

Today, I am a sophomore in college. I’m majoring in math with the hopes of eventually becoming a high school math teacher, or teaching math to kids in some capacity. My drive to do well in college has stemmed in large part from wanting to be the best teacher I can be. I would not have been given this motivation if it weren’t for Ms. Speckl’s way of teaching. From Ms. Speckl’s class, I want to take not just the math that I learned, but also the understanding that math is supposed to be hard. In my classroom, I hope to convey that every student has the ability to succeed.