teaching styles
Undoing the Work of Other Teachers
It’s an inescapable fact of education that what we do as teachers today affects the work of other teachers later in a student’s life. That means we inherit strengths a good teacher built, which is great. It also means sometimes we have to fix mistakes other teachers made.
This fact came to mind last week as my classes worked on proportions. Some students referred to something called the “Fish Method.” Let’s use this proportion:
Start with the number in a fraction with x (in this case, 8). Draw a line from the 8 diagonally up to the 2 (multiply those numbers), curve down to the 3 (divide by that), then diagonally up to the x (your answer equals x). What you’ve drawn looks kind of like a fish.
To be clear, this isn’t a “mistake” I had to fix. Rather, it’s a case of students clinging to a method that only works in a limited number of cases. For instance, proportions like these had them flailing.
We had to discuss other methods that had broader scope. This isn’t a bad thing—I’m all for discussing multiple methods and their respective limitations. But whenever something like this comes up, I try to tread lightly. I don’t want to say that their other teacher was wrong, bad, or not as cool as I am.
There are other situations, though (not like this proportions situation), where that’s exactly what I’m thinking. It even happened to me as a student. When I was very young, I was told by a teacher (a student teacher, to be fair) that “it’s” always has an apostrophe, whether the contraction or the possessive. Yes, really. It took me a few years to (a) figure out she’d been wrong, and (b) correct my bad habit.
I’m sure it can go the other way, too. A teacher instills all kinds of wonderful things in a student, and another teacher down the line destroys all that work.
Is there a way to avoid it? Maybe not. There will always be human error, whether intentional or not. All I can do is try not to be one of those “bad” teachers, and try to repair damage where I find it.
Have you observed or been affected by cases of teachers working against each other? How did it impact you?
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2 commentsTales of a Tutor
The past couple of weeks, I’ve been helping a friend’s daughters with a college math course they’re taking over the summer. I’m geeky enough that this is fun, and getting paid is a nice bonus.
While doing so, certain things have struck me more than they might while working with my own students. So I figure, why not share?
Even math teachers don’t remember all the math, all the time. Conic sections … I’ve never actually taught them as a whole topic. I’m fine with circles and parabolas, because those come up regularly on their own. Ellipses and hyperbolas, however, not so much. I remember some general things about them, but not how to find the coordinates of the foci, or how to rewrite an equation to the proper form. Fortunately, all it takes is twenty seconds glancing at the right material in the book.
Math teachers don’t always agree. When tutoring, I almost always come up against something where the way the teacher showed them is bonkers (in my opinion). I try to determine if there’s any good reason to do it that way. If there is, I go along with it. If there isn’t, I try to determine whether the teacher will know or care if the students do it a different way. If not, I’ll show the kids my way, explain how it relates to the teacher’s way, and tell them they can choose whichever they like better.
Math teachers don’t always act rationally. Often these college courses don’t allow the use of calculators. I understand the idea—with some calculators these days, you could solve every problem on the test without engaging more than a couple of your own neurons. But it’s kind of ridiculous when the long division to reduce a fraction takes longer than applying the math concept that’s actually being tested.
And the thing is, I’m sure I’m guilty of all of the above in my own math classes. Somewhere out there a math tutor is saying, “Miss Lewis said that? Is she nuts?”