I am
not particularly concerned that Doug Ford might want me to take a math test.
Mainly because I’m not convinced I will need to prove any more competence than
the level I’m qualified to teach. I’m a Junior/Intermediate teacher whose
teachable was English. I am the English teacher, I teach English. Will they
really make me master grade 12 trigonometry? Nobody ever asks me to teach
trigonometry because that’s not what I was hired to teach. I never claimed I
could teach trigonometry. It’s not on
my resume, not on my OCT profile. In short, it’s not my field. I fully expect
to prove competence in own field and don’t expect even the Ford Government to
care what I can do outside of it (and Mr. Ford’s field exactly?).
The
other important words here are Junior-Intermediate.
I work with kids. I know as much math as I need to teach to kids. That is,
grades four-to-nine. At the junior-intermediate level, your ability to work
with kids is more important that subject knowledge. It’s good to have subject
knowledge, because kids are better served by knowledgeable people, but your
specialty are your pupils, not your subject. So if Mr. Ford wants to test me, I
will prepare for a grade nine test (maybe ten), and simply won’t worry about
anything past that because I have nothing to prove beyond that.
Having
said all this, I have taught math, and I have enjoyed it. I once spent the better
part of a year teaching math to a young man preparing for his college entrance
exam. We started at Grade 6 and blazed through to grade eleven, before I had to
hand him over to an expert. They didn’t give him to me because I was a
mathematician; they gave him to me because I was the only teacher he trusted
and could form a good working relationship with. In teaching, that sort of
thing matters – or used to anyway. We learned together. I was challenged and
stretched in brand new ways and pulled off things I’d never have seen myself
doing. Any subject can be enjoyable if you like your students, but I actually
found I myself enjoying the math – it was like working through a puzzle.
Solving a mystery. Some nights it actually felt like a game. So I’m not afraid
of Mr. Ford’s test.
A lot
of arsty-fartsy types have convinced themselves they’re hopeless in math,
usually they’re shell-shocked by childhood horror stories – sleep deprivation,
humiliation, self-loathing etc. They should tell themselves what they tell
their pupils “You’ve Got This. You CAN do this.” It’s amazingly affirming and
empowering to do what you never thought you could do.
As
teachers, I think it behooves us to step outside our boxes. Teaching only what
comes easy to us can make us complacent at best or out of touch at worst. I
found I had to work harder, prepare more, pay greater grater attention to
different learning styles, and to empathize more. I had to teach myself before
I could teach anyone else, and realized if something didn’t work with me, it
definitely wouldn’t work with anyone else. I had to explain things the way I
wished somebody would have explained it to ME back in school, and I could
anticipate difficulties because they were the same ones I was having.
On
thing I noticed was how inadequate the resources tended to be. Text book
examples often had nothing to do with the exercises the preceded (showing us
how to do two step problems then giving us three step problems for example).
Answer keys almost never demonstrated how the answers were arrived at. Instructions
were often not clear. These materials were designed by experts, and deemed
adequate by experts for the benefit of potential experts. They figured they
need only demonstrate a concept, and all else could be extrapolated from that.
It didn’t occur to them that it might not be enough. That some folks might need
more examples, more explanations, more practice. . .
Off
topic a little, ESL resources are a lot like that. Native English speakers are
all experts, having unconsciously mastered a ridiculously inconsistent and
arbitrary system of rules and idiosyncrasies. Even (presumably) experienced ESL instructors
will assume prior knowledge, or overlook anomalies they themselves simply take
for granted. I have yet to find an exercise book, for example, that doesn’t introduce
new concepts half way through, say, switching the verb tense during an exercise
on pronouns. For us native speakers, the adjustment is as natural as breathing
and unconscious as digestion. For a language learner, it’s a whole new lesson,
thrown at them while they’re trying to learn something else. We simply don’t
anticipate how weird our language really is, and throw up more road blocks
without even realizing it.
But that’s for another post. At the moment, we’re talking
about Ford’s math test. Could Ford pass such a test? I don’t suppose it’d be
any less important for a public official?
But what do I know, a mere teacher.
Now, I suppose they could insist on hiring only mathematicians
to teach in schools, though they’d have a fine time finding teachers after
that. I draw the parallel to French. When I graduated, only French native
speakers and those with University degrees in French could teach French.
Perhaps not coincidentally, they couldn’t find anyone to teach French. It was
the only kind of teacher they did not have a superabundance of. I thought it
curious that they would entrust me, expect me, DEMAND me, to teach kids all
about budgeting, healthy eating, sex education, self-esteem, technology,
spiritual awareness, consumer awareness (if not critical thinking), patriotism,
bullying, geometry, geography, history, baseball, football, soccer, volleyball,
reading, writing, and ‘rithmitic. . . but they didn’t trust me to teach
nine-year olds how to count to ten en
Francais. Whatever. Let ‘em find someone they do. Good luck with that!
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