We chose to pose similar questions for the 3 math students and 1 math teacher that we interviewed. Although we asked many more than the ‘5 Burning Questions’ required, the interviews were able to be summarized and contrasted nicely.
The Math teacher we interviewed has been teaching for over 10 years and now mainly focuses on the senior math courses, generally Grades 11 and 12. He is well known among students and faculty and is apparently quite popular within the school environment, many of his former students still keep in touch through email and visit with him surprisingly regularly.
Our student interviewees happened to run the grade gradient and we were able to have one A student (graded at approximately 90 – 95% across all her highschool math courses), one B student (regularly scores approximately 75 – 80% on tests) and a C student (who wasn’t terribly concerned with her math scores). It seems presumptuous and slightly disheartening to be classifying our students by their scores, but we thought that it might help to add a sense of significance to their attitudes towards math. Also important is that the A student and the B student are both in Grade 12 Math and the C student is currently in Grade 10 Math. All 3 students are in the Principles of Mathematics stream and have no interests to seriously pursue Math after highschool.
The interview with our C-student was relatively shorter compared to the others and was therefore fairly stilted. She informed us that she was only studying math because it was required and would probably have stopped if it had been optional except that her parents are 'making her' take math. She also indicated that she didn’t like math because ‘[she wasn’t] good at it’ and that she had a peer tutor to get her through the course. However, there are times where she does enjoy math classes and those are the ‘rare’ times when she feels like she understands a concept. The classes she does enjoy are Music and Science because she ‘gets it’.
Our B-student is a former D-student whose marks were forcibly pulled up after she decided to do math by distance with a private tutor. She indicated that she had been having trouble understanding concepts brought up in class and was too afraid of looking stupid to acknowledge her confusions in class; having a tutor allows her to ask questions immediately and one-on-one which greatly increases her confidence and ultimately her skills. She said that she was constantly unsure of herself and felt lost in the big classroom where many of her peers were understanding and it just made her ‘feel dumb’. She anticipates taking math in a higher level institution only if the program she chose required a math prerequisite. She seems to support the idea of some group work within mathematics to add to the lectures which would allow her some time to listen to her peers’ ideas, commenting that it seemed to her that ‘math just seems so lonely’.
The Grade 12 student who had been consistently pulling an A-grade had a slightly different take on her math class than I had expected. Her attitude towards math was not a question of like or dislike but of competition. This was a class that she felt she could compete in and makes an effort to do so. She likes having other people consider her to be good at it and so she works hard for her grade. She is taking Math because she feels that it is an essential skill for people to have and that it provides her with the opportunity to consider taking sciences in post-secondary. What surprised me was her attitude towards rectifying confusion during math lectures. She said that she was too intimidated to ask questions during class and would often just relegate her attention to copying down the notes so that she could prepare on her own or ask her teacher after class. According to her, math class could be made more accessible if teachers would take small breaks during class to diverge attention elsewhere for a short while to allow students some time to digest the information or just to refresh their minds so that they could return to the lectures with a renewed concentration. Her ideal math teacher would be kind, understanding and fun.
The interview we had with the teacher was equally informative if not more so. He likes to teach from a relational standpoint and stresses that a student who aces the tests is not the same as the student who really understands the material. It was important for us to note that he did not think that it was a challenge to get through the curriculum in the proposed timeline. In fact, he seemed to think that there was a lot of time and that the challenges of teaching were at a far more personal level. He warned us to ensure that we are friendly towards our students but not be their friends because teachers need to remember that they are still in a position of authority and must have their students respect them as such. He also advised us to take our practicum seriously and treat it like a ‘real job’, not just as a ‘practice run’.
Our group really enjoyed this project and found that the varied and sometimes surprising answers to our questions helped us to be more aware of how everyone else views math. It is easy, as students who had relatively successful highschool math class experiences, to forget the challenges that others may have. We expect that this will help us in our practicum and future teaching posts to be aware of the difficulties that some of our students will face and to encourage them and adjust our teaching accordingly.
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