Patch 21
I honestly don’t remember the point in my teaching career when I realized how hard mathematics was for most of my students.
It’s not that I’ve ever been especially brilliant at mathematics. Sure, I can do a great deal of number crunching in my head without a second effort. But when the vector calculus or the differential equations got too sophisticated for my calculations in my own graduate research, I just looked for somebody else’s software or algorithm and twisted the mess out of it to make it do what I wanted it to do. I could handle the rudimentary stuff. I was horrible at setting up any integral but the simplest, for crying out loud. I knew the guys in my discipline who could handle the hard stuff and who were on another plane, and I wasn’t one of them. Surely I’m the guy who can relate to students who fight mathematics.
But when I started teaching algebra-based physics at the two-year school in the Georgia swampland, and I had my first instance of a student who simply couldn’t handle solving v = v0 + at for a, I had to take a step back and wonder how to bridge the chasm. When I had the first student who simply couldn’t wrap their head around converting centimeters to meters, I had to take a couple of more steps back.
Based on the extract above,
As educators, we feel, that every student should understand our methods, material, and pedagogy. We often assume that explaining a concept once is sufficient, we follow it up with a “do you have any questions” and assume all is fine and hunky-dory. However, there are those in the classroom who require more than one way to understand and reproduce the skills that are required to successfully achieve the grade.
After many years of teaching, I have had to change my teaching philosophy, taking on the responsibility upon myself. I am only successful in my teaching, as much as my weakest student.
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