I have seen in secondary classrooms that students are in school for a wide variety of reasons.  Many of them are social, some are to get into a particular college or career.  Very few students are in class hoping to learn something, to change their way of thinking, or to expand and change their minds and the way their brains reason and process information.  There is an emphasis on procedure over reasoning.  Students want to know how to do a problem so that they can pass a test.  They rarely want to take the time to think why the procedure exists or how it works.  

    The purpose of a teacher is to guide the learning of the students.  As a teacher, I am not there simply to discipline bad behavior, though of course that is a part of it.  I am there to help, to spark ideas, to inspire creativity and thoughtful responses.  It is easy to get caught up in all of the other things we do as teachers and forget about the purpose for all of us being in education.

What should education be?

    “The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think - rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with thoughts of other men.”  John Dewey

    My most memorable classroom was my AP Calculus class as a senior in high school.  My teacher was unconventional.  He didn’t dress, talk or look as a teacher normally would.  We worked as a whole class, in groups and occasionally on our own.  We had parties where we were given calculus assignments.  More than one observer of the classroom referred to it as “organized chaos”.  We often worked together with the teacher to figure out a problem that even he didn’t know the answer to.  It reminded me of what I had heard about the first philosophers, sitting around discussing to try to come to truth.  We were a team with a common goal: the AP test.  And nearly all of us passed it.  What was effective about his classroom was the guided discovery of each concept.  We were rarely told how to do something, we were sometimes shown, but nearly always, we came to the solutions through discussion and working with other learners.

As I have spoken to students and friends about mathematics and mathematics education, they often state mathematics as being boring, as not applying to them.  I am met with the comment, “when will I ever use this?”  The truth is that we do use mathematics every day in some form.  And while it is true that most of us do not use calculus or other advanced mathematics on a daily basis, the logic and skills that are gained in the process of learning mathematics are invaluable.

    It is no accident that many of the great philosophers that we look to for logic and reasoning were also great mathematicians.  Take the geometric proof.  Students are asked not only to make connections between pieces of information, but they are asked to defend those connections with undisputable facts or with theorems that have been proven to be true.  Each algebra problem a learner solves requires a logical set of steps followed in a logical pattern and each step is where it is for a reason.  If students discover the reasons for these steps themselves rather than learning by rote, they have gained a process of logical, critical thinking that will help them become better thinkers and better decision makers.  

My Objectives as an Educator

    Based on these experiences, my main objective as an educator is not to give students information, but  to give them the tools they need to discover the information themselves and help them come to a desire for that knowledge.  My own experience has shown me that I understand a topic much more in depth if I come to the conclusions myself rather than being told by others.  

I recognize that each learner is unique with different learning styles and abilities.  For each unit of a course, the students with higher aptitudes might change.  My goal is to recognize these differences and challenge each student individually throughout each step of the learning process.  If each student also has the goal of maximizing their learning in our classroom, then they can each find challenges by delving deeper into the topic at hand.  

I plan to encourage an environment of learning and discovery.  Questioning will be encouraged and negativity discouraged.  I have learned through my experiences in the classroom that I prefer an active classroom with group work and discussion, especially including questions that make the entire class think.  

Defining this purpose and these objectives gives me a goal to always keep in mind.  While administrative tasks are necessary and teaching life skills is important, my main objective is to create learners and everything I do in the classroom should reflect this objective.  When things are difficult, when there are behavior problems, when students are overwhelmed by problems at home, keeping these objectives in mind will keep me focused and I will be able to transfer the value and love of learning to my students.




References

Beattie, Bill. (2012). www.quotegarden.com. Retrieved June 6, 2013 from http://www.quotegarden.com/education.html