My Math Teachers

 

My Dad and I, a long time ago.

My Math Teachers

I will tell you about my favourite moments learning math because I had different special moments with several people around me, and I identified that what made those moments special were additional aspects beyond the person who taught me.

My friend Jaime, during my first year of engineering, taught me matrix transformations. We have been in the same class, but I failed the first exam. For the final exam, I sat with Jaime to study and try to review the problems in preparation for the exam. After reviewing the concept of transforming the matrix, the rest of the subjects made sense, and I felt like a revelation. The essence of the revelation was to draw the matrices as bidimensional arrays instead of linear notation separated by commas, which the teacher used to use. It was a simple difference, but it became a game-changer for my matrix algebra from that moment.

My Friend Jaime and I

I didn’t have happy moments with my math teachers during high school. I think my teachers had an ok performance, and my parents overshaded their performance in some way. My parents were teachers and intellectuals. My dad taught Literature at the university, and my mom did a lot of Chemistry research on the sugar cane plantation efficacy. Both my parents loved math and science, and my brother and I were always surrounded by questions about Math concepts, sometimes after dinner, or while we were doing our homework. If we had doubts about our homework, my parents were always there to solve it with interest and curiosity.

My memory of my least favourite teachers lies with those who dedicated more than 20 minutes on the chalkboard to write a long integral calculus procedure. I think I had difficulties following along, and I remember panicking when I was trying to understand, and it was time to erase the board to keep writing.

As a Math Teacher, I want to build bridges with the students, to identify their different ways of learning, and accordingly prepare my lessons. I will take advantage of the technology available to create visual scaffolds that support the learning of abstract concepts.