Moses didn’t want to lead. Cincinnatus didn’t want to fight. And you, if you’re reading this—well, I doubt teaching math reduces you to delighted shrieks.
(Other kinds of shrieks, perhaps.)
You’re not alone. The US, like other countries, is often left scrambling for math teachers. A few years ago, an Oklahoma superintendent likened his math staffing situation to “showing up in the emergency room with a life-threatening issue.”
That makes you akin to a doctor snatched from the break room and told to scrub up for a surgery you’ve never performed.
All this to say: welcome to math education! And joking aside, I’m glad to have you as a colleague. Math is many things: the music of reason, the science of indirect measurement and the logic-game of inventing new logic-games. Your mission is to help students on this journey. My mission is to offer encouragement and advice for your journey.
Make your own learning a priority
Subject knowledge is vital, and one-shot training isn’t enough. Month by month, year by year, you’ll need to deepen your knowledge of math. Tackle problems you can’t yet solve. Dig into concepts you can’t yet explain. Try to unify topics that seem disparate.
All math teachers do this. I’ve interviewed some of the world’s most decorated professors; they don’t sit around all day just knowing math. They sit around all day learning math. This subject is bottomless: that’s its terror and its beauty.
Find mentors
Teachers are social creatures—at least, I know I am. If you’re anything like me, you’ll learn best not from books, Wikipedia or Khan Academy but from a human you trust. Just as therapists need therapy, teachers need teachers!
So cozy up to the math teachers in your building. Pose questions at the coffee pot or the photocopier. Or, if there are no mentors at hand, seek them out in the larger world, whether on social media or in person.
Don’t cook from scratch
Where will you find the time for all this learning of your own? Here’s a crucial labor-saving step: just use the curriculum you’ve been handed.
It won’t be perfect. No curriculum is. But as a teacher, your job is to follow the meal plan while adding a few pinches of flavor (a Numberphile video here, a math game there). It’s not to bake the whole thing from scratch. The DIY approach of cobbling together self-made and online resources is all too common in the U.S. It’s a recipe not for better learning but for teacher burnout.
Use exit tickets
I spent my whole first year drowning in student work. A healthy diet of practice for the students—say, 20 questions a day—would leave me with an avalanche of 25 x 20 = 500 questions to mark. There was too much to read carefully, so I wound up reading nothing carefully. Giant piles of papers shifted around my desk, yet I had no idea what my students understood.
Then my mentor asked me: Why not a little quiz at the end of each class? Just two or three questions to see what they’re making of the day’s topic. It changed my whole outlook. Reading a stack of exit tickets takes 1/5th the time of reading homework and teaches me five times as much about their progress.
Work closely with struggling students
At my first teaching gig, I had to spend two hours a week after school tutoring a handful of students who were struggling in my classes. I wanted to grumble about the imposition, but I couldn’t deny how useful it was.
Not just for them but for me.
Watching the students work problems at the whiteboard, I could ask questions, give hints, and probe every aspect of their thinking. There’s so much I missed in the hubbub and bustle of the classroom. The tutoring sessions taught me so much—about how students think, what they need, and where my lessons had been falling short.
Bring some joy
My wife, Taryn, is a math professor; she fondly recalls one of her elementary school teachers. “She was nervous and didn’t know the content very well,” Taryn says, “so she just did her best to make it fun for us.” That was the year Taryn learned about Mobius strips, the four-color theorem, Pascal’s triangle, and more.
Can every lesson be silliness and games? Alas, no. The curriculum matters. But the year is long, and morale matters, too. Finding occasions for mathematical joy—especially on days when you’re drowning in work and need a five-minute lesson plan—isn’t indulgent. It’s a sensible calculation. And “sensible calculation,” I’m proud to say, is your new line of business.
Welcome, once again, to math education. You can help your students learn great things, and it begins with you learning great things yourself.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
_________________________
Subscribe to SmartBrief’s FREE email newsletter to see the latest hot topics on edtech. It’s among SmartBrief’s more than 250 industry-focused newsletters.