I have been very fortunate to be working with a teacher candidate from a local faculty. She is a very conscientious teacher and we got into a good discussion on the nature of teaching math during her last classroom visit. She made the comment that sometimes what her and her teacher candidate friends see at the faculty sounds very good in theory but when the rubber hits the road and they are standing in front of a room of students that they need to present the content and make sure it sticks. And so the model of teaching that emerges is very much the same method that they may have been exposed to when they were students. Stand and Deliver.
I really appreciated her candor and I know that this isn't unique. I've been fortunate enough to visit faculty candidates in another school over the last few years and I usually hear this comment made by a few of the teacher candidates. I know I felt the same way when I was in the faculty at Mount Allison in New Brunswick. It was survival mode and so with a very limited repertoire of strategies I fell back on what was familiar. Although there was the one moment at Amherst High School in Nova Scotia where I strode into my Grade 11 class with a powdered wig trying to do my best Isaac Newton impression in an attempt to connect Newton's fluxions and Leibniz's development of the calculus. It morphed into an study of the history of math and that was a glimpse into what was possible outside the box. Its a message that I have often repeated to teacher candidates. The placments they get are opportunities to try the strategies they are learning. They shouldn't feel so afraid to make mistakes in their teaching...isn't that how learning (whether its math or teaching math) occurs?
At one point I asked if she had read Paul Lockhart's "A Mathematician's Lament". She promptly pulled it up on the computer and started reading. I recall the impact when I read it. I read it at a critical moment in my own teaching career. It is an indictment of the way math is taught in too many classrooms. I was ready for the message at the moment I read it and it confirmed to me my desire to change the way I taught math. Coincidentally, Lockhart's Lament came up again over the weekend. I have been very lucky to meet some amazing educators and quite honestly thinkers (you know who you are) in my teaching career and I would include Sunil Singh in this group. Sunil was a guest on the ZPC podcast (Zone of Potential Construction) hosted by Chris Brownell. The podcast is Episode 5: Mathematics, Happiness and the Joy of Discovery. Sunil was talking about his soon to be released book "The Pi of Life" (Nice title Sunil...any tigers in this one?). During the podcast, Sunil talked about the inspiration that Lockhart's Lament provided him in his career and the impact it had on the way he views the teaching of mathematics.
And so I wondered what is keeping us from addressing what are systemic issues in the teaching of math. I am not sure I have resolved the issue...not sure anyone ever has or will. But one thing that keeps nagging at me is this perception that the constucts within which we teach math are its greatest enemy. By the constructs I am referring to the insitutionality of our system of education. It may be time to consider that we are to trying so hard to fix something within a system that may make it impossible. There are some amazing educators doing some creative and innovative things in the classroom but, in the end, even they are limited by the parameters within which they work. Our boards and schools do their best to support teachers with grand schemes of support that usually happen in some banquet hall to little or no affect. It may be time to think bigger. It may be time to significantly shift what we consider to be the way students are taught math.
All this from a single conversation with a very honest teacher candidate. And perhaps that is a reason for optimism. The next generation of teachers will take up the torch and at least raise the questions again and again. But I hope it isn't an infinite number of times.
