Philosophy of Teaching
I'll try to keep this relatively short and sweet. I could philosophize all the live long day. My philosophy revolves around hard work.
I realized this when I taught in a private school in Colombia. The biggest problem I faced there was that many students felt entitled to things and did not understand how to work for something, in this case understanding of mathematics.
Hard work is the antidote for many things and I have seen many students succeed because of will and fail because of a fundamental misunderstanding of how learning is connected to effort. In fact, this may be related to a pretty commonly held conception that the world is broken into those that have "it"
(the ability to do mathematics) and those that don't. While I recognize there are students that have brain wiring which makes it very difficult to succeed (past mathematical trauma, mental misfires, anxiety issues, inability to deal with stress) all of those things can be overcome with a system favorable to students and hard work. There, I said it.
My role is to create a system which is favorable to students and to me that means one in which you are given many chances, meaningful work (opportunities to see the connections between what we do in class and the real world), and that I try to make the atmosphere fun, lively, interesting, etc. But then the ball is back in your court
- I have high standards - some students have complained I expect too much, but I just don't believe that any "easy" class is a useful experience. There is a lot more I could say, but I think this paragraph captures the most important pieces of how I approach teaching and learning.
