The New York Teaching Fellows
To teach does not mean to impart knowledge; it means to inspire a love for the struggle of thought. The first day of class, I remember my Algebra teacher told us, “There is no such thing as subtraction,” and in order to resist the impending sense of being lied to our whole lives, our young minds were determined to follow each of the rest of her words with competent awareness and anticipation. We would not let her shatter our universes. So, we challenged her, and she rose to the occasion. She returned the challenge, and we wanted to be worthy opponents; we wanted her respect. Her approach was friendly and genuine, and it was she who showed me the beauty and mystery of mathematics. It was in her classroom that I felt drawn to mastering the material and subsequently drawn to teaching it.
Mostly anyone can piece together a puzzle given the picture on the box. But as John Dewey poignantly asks in his essay The Child and the Curriculum, “Of what use, educationally speaking, is it to be able to see the end in the beginning?” I believe that presenting and practicing the skills of mathematics before allowing the students to search for their own interpretation of the material is detrimental both to academia and to the scholars themselves. Teaching the skills of mathematics creates intellectual followers instead of leaders, and it strips the students of their creative ability to begin the thinking process. Without fumbling through the mistakes and the reasons why one approach doesn’t work, it is not always easy or possible to understand why a different one does. I feel as though much of my education has taken away the very ingredient that makes learning fun: the opportunity to be challenged, to accept the task, and to decide using trial and error and communication which path leads to truth. It is in the process of arguing and defending logic that the value behind a lesson is realized, and it is then that a student can transfer ideas across domains since they will have proved to themselves the value of their newest idea and answered all their own questions through meaningful investigations. I want to teach because I believe that there are valuable elements of learning that are not currently incorporated in the educational system, and I cannot imagine my life without such a magnificent opportunity to expand the number of avenues through which future leaders may interact with the world around them.
In traditional classrooms, students come to trust that their teacher has given them the right information needed to solve a problem, and if given a problem outside of the context that they have been taught, those students will not necessarily know how to depend solely on themselves to determine a method of approaching such a problem. By continuing to use teacher-based instruction, we implement the idea that the child’s mind is a blank slate, and this gives the impression that learning is passive since the teacher holds all the knowledge and is waiting for the right time in the year to dispense it. We must create thinkers; otherwise, we create another new generation of people who don’t have to fully understand anything or even have the confidence to try.
I have spent the entirety of my life thus far surrounded by suburbia, and I have come to feel a distinct distaste for it. I’m ready to challenge myself. I know that the majority of the world is not living the way suburban America is living, and I’m hungry for a way to use my education as a means by which to act on behalf of my desire to cultivate equality in our educational system. I think a lot of times people aren’t drawn to high-risk areas because after so much formal education and many additional years of socialization, we forget that teenagers are extremely communicative and that high-risk teenagers are fierce because they haven’t been spoon-fed academia with the same urgency that economically privileged students have. I am not a proponent of the spoon-fed, memorize-everything mentality, and I want to teach in a high-need school because I believe that there is profound value in students across demographic and economic lines, and I feel that it is a great misfortune that urban districts are usually large and lacking the money necessary to create learning environments equivalent in opportunity to those in suburban and affluent areas. I want to make my students feel valuable as thinkers and provide them with a spectrum of possibilities for their futures.
Born of two very logical people, I have been raised to appreciate methodology. Thus, the part of mathematics I find most uplifting is the discovery of many approaches to solving the same problem. This is the greatest strength that I will bring to a career in education. As a teacher, I can map out individually how each student is relating to the foundational ideas behind the structure of mathematics and guide them accordingly. Creating a classroom culture that is based on the appreciation of methodology removes the threat of silence by social hierarchy since it values the opinion and ideas of each student as a budding mathematician.
My greatest success in my pre-professional work was getting one of my students, M, to share her thoughts in class for the first time. The day that my host teacher let me write a lesson plan and teach it to her class was the first time I saw that M was bored, not incapable. When I had the class work on investigational activities, M voiced her ideas articulately and professionally, defending them against her peers’ questions and elaborating on their mathematical soundness. It was the first time she had ever voiced an intellectual position in the class, and it was the first time I felt reassured that, though I won’t ever have all the answers, I’ll always have the desire to evoke meaningful, accessible educational experiences that reach each of my students.