The Ugly Side of Teaching

There are just some people that have no business taking math classes. I didn't always think that. Actually, before I began teaching I was adamant that the math education in our country was abysmal and everyone should be required to take higher level mathematics. In my mind this would teach everyone the ability to do logical deduction and reasoning. I used to cringe at the thought of universities (such as my undergrad institution) having "College Algebra" - a glorified 7th grad math class. Since I've begun teaching (4 years ago), I've determined that they might have been on to something. I feel like I'm quite the good expositor, I mentally return to the level of someone learning calc for the first time and teach accordingly. I remember where I struggled, what I found difficult, what confused me and incorporate the inspiration, distinction and process of discovery into each one of my lectures. I would say that this method seems (in the past) to be successful; none of my tutoring students complain. However, some of my students ask such basic questions that it is incredibly difficult to keep myself from flopping my head down into my hands in disbelief.

I know that I have a serious problem with patience - I always have had. However, in my defence after the 5th time of explaining the same concept (something like limit as n approaches infinity of n/(n+1)), I'm seriously ready to move on. Today, I had a student who stayed after to ask me questions on terminology and she was having a serious problem distinguishing between absolute and conditional convergence... well, if you take the absolute value of a series and it converges then it converges absolutely otherwise... conditionally. This is not a hard concept to grasp - but for her it was. I feel bad saying this, but I had to leave the room because I could feel my voice raising in frustration with her. It's awful that I feel that way - just one more reason that I'm staying away from teaching.

Before you think that I'm completely horrible, I gave my class a quiz last week where the title was "Geometric Series and Probability." Would you know that there were people who did not get a geometric series on either problem? Part of me wants to stand at the front of the room and state: "Come on people... use your heads - if you didn't get a geometric series, then you probably did something wrong." On that note, I had a student who finished the quiz in 7 minutes - watched everyone else scribble frantically for an additional 13 minutes and was surprised that she hadn't done one of the problems correct. And, again, before you begin to hate me - I did one of the problems in class the day before. The average was 11 out of 20. Yes, I recognize this entry has turned into a rant against my students, but I do feel that is part of this process. Because of being required to teach my last year, I feel that this will be a major part of of the drama that stands between me and my Phd.