Do I Really Want to Teach High School Math?

It finally happened this week! We went to observe high school classrooms! I can honestly say that I have never been so excited to enter a room filled with freshmen as I was when we first arrived on Monday. This excitement was accompanied by nervousness. I wasn’t sure what age I would be observing, and it was stressful to think that they could potentially be just two years younger than me. Even though there is a sizeable maturity gap (experience wise) between college sophomores and high school seniors, it was scary to think that I would be in a room with students that are basically my peers. Therefore, when I received my freshmen Foundations of Math I room assignment, both my nerves decreased and my enthusiasm heightened.

However, my clinical experience didn’t go as smoothly as I had imagined. I constantly found myself taking notes on things I wanted to make sure did not occur in my future classroom. Before the students came back from lunch, my group and I had a few minutes to get to know our clinical educator. She was thrilled to find that I was pursuing math education but was also very hesitant about my plan to stay in North Carolina. While I am used to others having negative feelings towards teaching math, it was extremely disheartening to witness the same attitude from someone in the profession. From this point, I knew it was going to be a rough hour long observation.

When the students arrived back from lunch, I recognized almost automatically how loud and disrespectful they were based on the forceful tone my clinical educator had to use. She maintained a high volume for the entire class period and asked her questions in such a way that demanded immediate, monotone responses from the rest of the class. As some as the students asked questions during her guided practice, she became frustrated quickly by all of the other happenings and gave blunt answers that provided no depth for understanding. This frustrated me to end because finding meaning in the processes of what you’re learning is important, especially in math.

As Foundations of Math I students, I imagine these were students that had no affection towards math. This in turn made attitudes overwhelmingly strong from the get-go. I observed many sassy eye rolls and a lot of mumbling under breath as the students clearly did not want to be doing the problems assigned. This was my clinical educator’s third class of the day and I could tell she was mentally drained from trying to facilitate learning from “life expert” freshmen all morning long. For this reason, she had no hesitation to telling them to use their calculator to distribute simple fractions across parentheses [y+2=¾(x-8)] as well as threatening to have them write formulas for slope-intercept form and point-slope form 25 times each if they did not have them memorized by tomorrow’s class.

While I found it extremely hard to sit through this class, it did provoke a great deal of thought about how I will manage situations and students like this. How would I arrange the desks/students at them to break up cliquey attitudes while still condoning an enjoyable environment? What parts of this lesson could I turn into a game or activity that got the students up and moving around? What would I use to ensure organization of notes and problems while not making the notebooks a stressful mandate? How could I truly assess my students without just calling on them randomly to recite the next step we were to take in that problem? Although I did not find the perfect answer to any of these questions or have an epiphany about my philosophy of math education during this class, this experience did allow me to better see what is in store a few short years down the road. This not so picturesque opportunity helped me realize that even though secondary education isn’t a walk in the park, it is exactly where I want to be.