Remembering Math Teachers

There are two very memorable math teachers from my highschool years that influenced me to become a math teacher.

The first math teacher was the one who I was able to talk with to understand the job and life of becoming a math teacher.  I was able to connect with this teacher because he was also our school's badminton team coach while I was the badminton team captain.  We talked a lot about tactics and ideas we could use and execute to help the team become better.  Eventually, when we exhausted all ideas for the badminton team, we would usually talk about math and about his life as a teacher.  I was in his class and was tutoring others at the time, so I would constantly go visit him after school to get more information to use in tutoring others and just chatting about math concepts in general.  This teacher supported my idea of wanting to become a teacher and was able to tell me the hardships and benefits to expect, so he was able to prepare me for what was to be expected in the future of my career.

The other math teacher I had was actually my grade 10 honors teacher.  He was the head of the math department at the time, so everyone expected him to have a great amount of knowledge for math.  I remember we had a test for factoring polynomials, the only way he knew how to factor was using long division, while I knew how to use synthetic division (which was easier and faster for me).  I got the test back with a lot of marks being deducted due to him accusing me of using a method he didn't understand or know of (my answers were correct).  I directly went to the math teacher I talked constantly with to ask for support to my marks back from the head math teacher.  The result was better than I expected, majority of the math faculty came into my class when class ended to view my synthetic division and some were able to confirm that my method was correct by recognizing the method, which obviously made the head math teacher blush and cave into apologizing to me and giving me my marks.  I don't know if that incident made that head teacher have a reason to hate me, but a few weeks later, we had a homework quiz, where I wrote an answer like 192, but the page had a black dot on it, which ended up showing my answer as 19.2.  I got the quiz back and again I lost marks, I checked my homework solution and brought it up to the head math teacher and he said that my solution contained a decimal, but I argued it was a dot on the page, not my writing.  He was persistent in thinking he was right, he took an eraser and started erasing at the dot, he erased either too hard and multiple times that the paper ripped on the spot, thus again showing that I was right.  Hence I got my marks back again.  This teacher made me realize that regardless of your position, there are always methods and ideas you don't know about, so as a teacher you should be more open minded and giving students chances to justify why they should be right.

I am grateful to have both these math teachers in my highschool year, because it helped me in determining the kind of teacher I would like to become and portray to my students later on, to give them the best educational experience possible.  Hopefully, I can inspire my students to become better and more open minded in life decisions, in order to succeed to their optimal potential in society.