math woes

I cried at work today. Okay, I'm lying. But I did cry, very briefly, in the parking lot of the Bank of the West which is between work and the 7-11 where I get my Dr. Pepper fix. I was crying because one of my students got an F on the test he took today, and which I helped him prepare for yesterday.

This is hardly the first time since I started teaching that one of my students has failed a test, and I knew that he was really struggling with the material, but for some reason I just found it particularly devastating. Obviously I can't control the grades my students get, but I do feel responsible, partly because I don't know if I am doing a very good job teaching this particular student. He is in Pre-Calculus, a subject which I neither enjoy nor excel at. I don't know how to make it interesting to him, because I don't find it interesting. His class moves very quickly, and is very challenging, so I don't have time to linger over underlying concepts or to review the stuff he should have learned in Algebra 2 (apparently his Algebra 2 class last year was kind of a mess, so his foundation in terms of understanding functions and graphing is really weak). As a result, there's a lot that he doesn't understand, and therefore much of what he knows how to do he knows by rote rather than through actual comprehension. That's the way I learned math in high school (I think that's probably how most students learn it), and it contributed to both my lack of success and my hatred of the subject.

The upside is that my feelings of failure are motivating me to seek out and embrace my inner Pre-Calculus Goddess. I plan on taking a copy of his textbook home with me over Thanksgiving break so that I can immerse myself in the next few chapters, both to understand it in a less superficial way and to figure out what is interesting and cool about it. I'm hoping that my brother will be helpful in this endeavor (although I have a sneaking suspicion that he hated Pre-Calc too...it's kind of a stupid class because it's a hodge-podge of semi-difficult concepts that are sort of helpful to know before Calculus, but it has no unifying theme the way that, say, Calculus or Geometry do). Anyway, maybe I'll be a better Pre-Calculus teacher after Thanksgiving.

One bright spot at the end of the day was that I taught a class for one of my coworker's students. The coworker is Mr. W, who is probably my closest work buddy, and who sits across from me. Our desks face each other, so pretty much all of his students know who I am (and I know them). The particular student I taught today is this really funny, outgoing sophomore, and she absolutely cracked me up for the whole hour I was with her. We were learning about the different methods for proving triangle congruence, which involve combinations of angles and sides. So if you know that two triangles have two pairs of congruent sides and one pair of congruent angles between those sides, then you know that they are congruent using the "side-angle-side" method of congruence, referred to as "SAS". But this student says "Saaaassss!" in this really funny voice, and for SSS congruence, she says "Sssssssssss!" And then in the middle of class she was like, "Do you want to scratch my ear?" I said, "Um, no, not really. Did you want me to scratch it?" "No, I just wanted to check." It's good that she's not usually my student, because I have a hard time keeping her focused (because I have a hard time staying focused, because I just want to sit around and gab with her and let her crack me up).

Well, there's discouragement in every job, and at least if I feel like a failure with one student, there's always another one that I feel like I'm doing great with.