Letters from Future Students

Dear Ms. Vaid,

I was in your class 5 years ago and I want to let you know how much I appreciated your teaching method! I liked how in class we focused on why mathematics works the way it does rather than just learning how to plug and chug. It made me view math in a different light and it help me have a deeper understanding of mathematics which helped me so much when I got to university! I also appreciated how encouraging you were to everyone in class, you really made me feel like I could succeed in math class even when I was struggling or doubting myself.

Thank you for everything!

 

Dear Ms. Vaid,

I am emailing you to tell you your class was a waste of time for me. I learned absolutely nothing about math from your class. You kept focusing on why this works and never showed us how to do the problems! I still struggle with math to this day, and I wish you would have focused more on how to solve the problems rather than making us appreciate the “beauty of math”. It was because of your class that I decided to not take any math in university and maybe if you had focused more on showing us how to get the answer as easily as possible, I would have taken math in university.

 

From writing these letters I can say that my biggest worry about becoming a math teacher is students who fall through the cracks. I worry that there will be a student in one of my classes who I cannot support the way I want to, or a student whose needs I cannot understand.  At the same time, I have hope that I can teach students to love and understand that mathematics is not just a set of algorithms and that everyone can succeed at mathematics if they try!