Math Teacher's Habits

Four habits of highly effective math teaching

If you were asked what the most important principles in mathematics teaching were, what would you say? I wasn't really asked, but I started thinking, and came up with these basic habits or principles that can keep your math teaching on the right track.

Habit 1: Let It Make Sense

Mathematics courses were and are still using the spiraling to teach, learn and achieve a concept as a complete big idea and this spiraling sometimes takes years to be accomplished.

Students are facing difficulties in mastering mathematics concepts due to the abstraction which characterizes them. So to make it easier for students to master these concepts, teachers should make learning these concepts as meaningful as possible and that can be done when relating these concepts to real life to make sense and motivate students effectively.

Habit 2: Remember the Goals

What are the goals of your math teaching? Are they...

• To finish the book by the end of school year?
• Make students pass the tests?

Or do you have goals such as:

• My student can add, simplify, and multiply fractions
• My student can divide by 10, 100, and 1000.

These are all just "sub goals". But what is the ultimate goal of learning school mathematics?

Consider these goals:

• Students need to be able to navigate their lives in this ever-so-complex modern world.
  
• Enable the students to understand information around us.
• Prepare the students for further studies in math and science.
• Teaching deductive reasoning.
• Let students see some beauty of mathematics. 

Our job, as teachers, is not to teach students the mathematics content as stated in books but it is our responsibility to teach them how to think critically and mathematically and to depend on logic and evaluation as well as creation when learning concepts and not only memorized facts and "sub goals".

Habit 3: Know Your Tools

Mathematics teacher's tools are numerous but the teacher is the one who is responsible for choosing the materials that help in class.

First of all of course the black or white board, or paper - something to write on, pencil, compass, protractor, ruler, eraser and the book the teacher is using.

Also we have computer software, animations and activities online, animated lessons and educational games.
There are workbooks, fun books, work texts and online texts.
Also there are measuring cups, scales, algebra tiles, games, and so on.

So to be good and effective teachers we have to seek for the appropriate materials that fit out learning targets and students so the tools bring effectiveness and motivation to achieve better results and have engaged learners managed in classes.

Habit 4: Living and Loving Math

You are the teacher. You show the way - also with your attitudes, your way of life.

And then: do you like math? Love it? Are you happy to teach it? Do you feel Enthusiastic?

To do what you love you have first to love what you are doing. So you have to love math and teach it through enthusiasm for your students also to be motivated and better achiever.

More for help http://www.homeschoolmath.net/teaching/teaching.php#1

A Guidance or A Follower?

I may oppose Rousseau’s notion which says that the teacher is a companion to the learner at every step since the teacher can’t be as the shadow of the learner which can observe all or most of his/her actions or guess his/her thoughts at every place and at any time and for the second reason which I may take into consideration in which the learner may do something in the presence of the teacher but he/she may do it in the opposite direction at the moment where the teacher is gone and in my opinion this behavior is immoral and more severe than doing the false itself. For such reasons and may be for added reasons I consider myself in the side of Herbert who noted that the teacher should be a moral guide at first and then he/she will assess the actions and thoughts of the learner from a certain distance so that the teacher can estimate the level of the learner’s critical thinking and thus he/she will judge the learner’s morality and that can be more safe and helper to the educator to criticize the learner and may make him/her improve, correct and redirect the learner’s actions and thoughts to become a habit.

Here is the link to download the PDF used as the reference for the above article: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1741-5446.2011.00398.x/abstract 

Sociologists and I

Barbara stated that what students believe and teachers expect is the students’ guides to success (Barbara, 1993). I agree with her point of view as well I support what Rosenthal argued regarding the Pygmalion effect. At the beginning of the year I formed my expectations to my grade eight students taken-into-granted their previous achievements and the results were as I predicted, but then five low achievers astonished me when they achieved what their classmates did exactly after I had encouraged them by my explicit messages “You really can do it” and “I won’t give up on you”

In one of the grades in a school, there were two sections A and B, in which students of section A were “superiors” and those of section B were not. When the “superiors” were taken to section B and the students of section B were placed in section A, the students’ achievements in both sections were opposite to what were in their habitat sections. Also it happened with my grade nine low achievers who remarked their marks and behaviors after they trusted my words that mathematics is significant in our life and they should love it in order to success in it. Though they didn’t reach their high achievers classmates but they jumped to a noticeable level.

Is it “Bright” or “low” students who are praised or punished more? Who are given more wait-time? How can you differentiate students from the first look or impression?

You cannot answer the first two questions unless you are a reflective teacher watching yourself on a video tape after the class or you are a student watching your teachers in your classes. I am sure you will individually conclude how teachers’ expectations and behaviors can shape students’ achievements and behaviors. It really happened with my grade seven student in the physics subject; he gave me three ways to perform an experiment on “the existence of air” when I gave him the chance to do so though he was a low achiever student at the first days of this school year. I am sure this happened due to his hope to get more rewards as he used to have periodically after three successive correct answers.  

Are you a prophet? If you are so then you will predict personalities and achievements from the first impression, however, you are not able. An experiment was done last year in my grade seven class showed that 90% of students, who are labeled as low achievers, were able to answer 80% of my mathematics questions without I even noticed that but the tape records which were fixed to their desks were able to tell the truth. They are now in grade eight and two of them are able to do better than high achievers in certain tasks as proved by the term marks.

These experiments and cases which I faced or did convey with what stated by Barbara and his students and also can show a great similar to what was noticed and observed by Cooper regarding the Pygmalion behaviors (Cooper, 1979, pp. 389-410) and with what Oakes stated about how teachers and schools bring unequal opportunities to students (Oakes J. , 1985).

When minds really think..

“In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra. ”
― Fran Lebowitz

“Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.”
― Walter Cronkite

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“Give a girl an education and introduce her properly into the world, and ten to one but she has the means of settling well, without further expense to anybody. ”
― Jane Austen

“Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.”
― C.S. Lewis

“I am not a teacher, but an awakener.”
― Robert Frost

“[Kids] don't remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.”
― Jim Henson, It's Not Easy Being Green: And Other Things to Consider

“Often, it’s not about becoming a new person, but becoming the person you were meant to be, and already are, but don’t know how to be.”
― Heath L. Buckmaster, Box of Hair: A Fairy Tale

“The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.”
― Plutarch

“Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“A good head and good heart are always a formidable combination. But when you add to that a literate tongue or pen, then you have something very special.”
― Nelson Mandela

“It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.”
― Confucius

Learning Interaction

Good Teachers

• Care about their students and treat them by a lot of respect
• Have clear discipline and standards
• Let their students share in decision-making 
• Have creative ways in teaching
• Vary their models and strategies in teaching-learning process
• Apply the student-centered curriculum
• Seek for students' relaxation and comfortableness 
• Bring safe and interest to their classrooms