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Dec. 19th, 2021 11:08 amThis will start out sounding braggy, but stick with me, please.
When I was very young, I had a talent for math. This talent was sharpened by a teacher that thought group punishment for individual transgression was proper, so if one kid was acting up, everyone did multiplication tables. 1x1=1, 1x2=2...12x12=144 and all points in between. I hated it at the time, but it was actually a huge favor. It unlocked a door in my brain, and I could just solve things in my head, fast. So fast that in 4th grade, I was "skipped" to 6th grade. This didn't work out well, as all the much bigger 6th graders just bullied me into doing their homework for them and I failed my way back to my regular classmates.
I did, however keep just effortlessly keep crushing it in math classes. In 8th grade I had some bull-headed wrestling that somehow was also teaching Accelerated Algebra, and he hated me, not sure why. As an adult, I have realized he should never have been a teacher. "Show your work" is a tool, a thing that if a student is getting the wrong answers, you can look at their paper go step by step through their work, and teach them when they strayed from the path. In his hands it was a bludgeon, not used to teach you where you went wrong, but just a place to score you lower if you didn't include it. My ability to look at problems and know the answer confounded him, and he daily wanted to see how I did it. "I looked at it and just knew the answer" wasn't a simple statement to him, but a challenge. He would assign homework, I'd do it, turn it in, get all the answers correct, and get a 25% because I didn't show my work. My mother lost her shit. He was told by the Principal that if I had the correct answer, regardless of how I got it, I got full credit for the question. Problem (temporarily) solved.
Then came Geometric Proofs. He'd provide the problem and the answer, and the students were to step by step solve the problem, naming the mathematical law used for each step, like "POO" which is the Property of Opposites. I sucked at this. I even invented by own mathematical law "PVO," Process of Visual Observation. That lasted for one assignment, and he actually commended my cleverness, and promptly banned made-up laws. The end result was that, by the end of the year, he had completely stamped out both my ability to do anything but the most rudimentary arithmetic (thanks, multiplication table drills!) in my head, and any love I had had for math. Possibly the worst teacher I ever had.
When I was very young, I had a talent for math. This talent was sharpened by a teacher that thought group punishment for individual transgression was proper, so if one kid was acting up, everyone did multiplication tables. 1x1=1, 1x2=2...12x12=144 and all points in between. I hated it at the time, but it was actually a huge favor. It unlocked a door in my brain, and I could just solve things in my head, fast. So fast that in 4th grade, I was "skipped" to 6th grade. This didn't work out well, as all the much bigger 6th graders just bullied me into doing their homework for them and I failed my way back to my regular classmates.
I did, however keep just effortlessly keep crushing it in math classes. In 8th grade I had some bull-headed wrestling that somehow was also teaching Accelerated Algebra, and he hated me, not sure why. As an adult, I have realized he should never have been a teacher. "Show your work" is a tool, a thing that if a student is getting the wrong answers, you can look at their paper go step by step through their work, and teach them when they strayed from the path. In his hands it was a bludgeon, not used to teach you where you went wrong, but just a place to score you lower if you didn't include it. My ability to look at problems and know the answer confounded him, and he daily wanted to see how I did it. "I looked at it and just knew the answer" wasn't a simple statement to him, but a challenge. He would assign homework, I'd do it, turn it in, get all the answers correct, and get a 25% because I didn't show my work. My mother lost her shit. He was told by the Principal that if I had the correct answer, regardless of how I got it, I got full credit for the question. Problem (temporarily) solved.
Then came Geometric Proofs. He'd provide the problem and the answer, and the students were to step by step solve the problem, naming the mathematical law used for each step, like "POO" which is the Property of Opposites. I sucked at this. I even invented by own mathematical law "PVO," Process of Visual Observation. That lasted for one assignment, and he actually commended my cleverness, and promptly banned made-up laws. The end result was that, by the end of the year, he had completely stamped out both my ability to do anything but the most rudimentary arithmetic (thanks, multiplication table drills!) in my head, and any love I had had for math. Possibly the worst teacher I ever had.
