So there’s a story published (yes I’m way behind in my weblogging) about an engineering student who quit his major because of lousy teaching and lack of assistance in the US system. I’m fascinated by this, since I had the same experience in a couple classes but had a teacher throughout high school who knew exactly the way to explain things to my hungry mind. This, in my mind, made all the difference.
I learned Calculus in an environment where problem sets were optional but questions and understanding were not. If you didn’t do the homework, it was forgivable. If you didn’t understand and didn’t ask, that was not. Mr. Fee wasn’t always charming, but he wanted you to get the concepts behind the math. I left high school knowing why calculus worked as well as how to solve the problems.
I then found a teacher like the article describes teaching calculus (yes I had to retake semester 3 on a technical oops) in college, but I slept through it and used the tools I already knew. When I got into mathematics as a major at LMU, all the teachers I worked with were inspired. That could be attributed to being one of the inner math circle at that time, but they were all very interested in passing along their insights and knowledge.
Perhaps there is a gap… math teachers love teaching the really hard stuff to the students who want to know all of it, and there are inspired early school teachers who can teach math as well as other subjects. The area between – requiring specialists to teach but not enough mind power to engage the specialist teacher – seems to be the danger zone. Are there equivalent experiences out there? And if so, what do you see as a potential fix?
