July 5, 2012

July 5, 2012

     I will never forget my freshman year taking Algebra in high school when I experienced my first bad teacher. When I say, “bad teacher,” I don’t mean she didn’t know her math or was bad at teaching, I mean she took what little confidence I had and ripped all of it away. For some reason she felt it was necessary to belittle us students in front of each other. When I was a freshman, I had come from a little rural “feeder” school. A school that was only K-8^th grade and after graduating 8^th grade it was off to a new, strange, school. On top of that, I was extremely shy and reserved. I never raised my hand in class and hated being called upon, but in this class that feeling was multiplied by 100! Our teacher would grade our homework by going through questions one-by-one and asking random students what their answer was to that particular question. If you got the wrong answer, she would have you come to the front of the classroom to the chalkboard and do the math question in front of the entire class. I felt it was a form of humiliation. This class was full of bashful, quiet freshmen and a few sophomores that were just coming out of their shells. Anytime you ever asked a question, whether you raised your hand in class or went to her desk, she would yell from where she was and say, “Does anyone else have this issue?!” It would embarrass me to the point where I would never ask questions and I was struggling to keep a C average in her class, when normally I made As. Finally I went to my basketball coach, who was also a math teacher, and he helped me more than anyone ever had by saying these words: “Jennifer, you cannot think about the why’s and why not’s in Algebra, just accept the rules and move on.” After that, I brought my grade back up to an A and never looked back.