End of Semester Self-Assessment

What are my strengths as a teacher? I still feel that my greatest strength as a teacher is my ability to empathize with my students. As I stated at the beginning of the course, I try and make mathematics make sense to my students. This course has given me several techniques that I can use with my students to help them understand mathematics better. I have also began to understand the importance of concrete models in explaining mathematical principals to students. I now plan to try and introduce new mathematical concepts using concrete models and then move students towards the abstract algebraic calculations.

I still feel that another of my strengths as a teacher is the ability to improvise and be flexible. There are many times when I am teaching that I realize that students are not grasping what I am saying and I seem to have the ability to find things that I can use in the classroom to make my point. Since, beginning this course, when making my plans I think more about the concepts and where students may have difficulty. I then try to develop concrete models that I can use in my explanations. I still have problems finding concrete models for many of the concepts in my upper level course but at least I am now making a conscious effort to look for concrete models for topics rather than just teaching the concepts the same old way.

At the beginning of the semester I said that the one thing that I would like to improve is my patience. I do not know that this course has increased my patience, but it has given me some other ways of teaching and looking at concepts. Perhaps in using the concrete to explain the concept initially students will have a firmer grasp on the concept and have fewer problems with the concept. I also think that using the cover sheets to allow students to ask questions and to allow me to discover misconceptions that exist will increase my patience. I will know that students are having difficulty and will seek other ways to explain the material in advance.

In terms of my confidence with mathematics I felt at the beginning that I was extremely confident with mathematics and I still feel that way. I do however feel that this course has increased my awareness of mathematical terminology and the importance of the correct use of it. I now find myself thinking about what I am say and when listening to teacher present lessons, I am more acutely aware of the terminology that they are using. Is this a plus, in my own classroom it is, but when observing others I am not so sure. I sometimes find myself cringing when I hear how some teachers are presenting the material. For example, the other day, I was listening to a teacher explain a concept. The students were doing something with dividing fractions, instead of telling students to multiply by the reciprocal of the second term, they said “cross-multiply”. While the procedure works, I got upset that the mathematical concepts they were teaching was incorrect.

I still love teaching mathematics and am learning more and more every day how much I love teaching it. The one thing that I truly miss this year is not being in the classroom every period. I love working with students and I enjoy seeing the light that comes on in students eyes when they finally “get it.”

At the beginning of the course I said that I would like to learn to enjoy teaching Algebra I and to learn some “tricks” and some ideas that make Algebra come alive to students. I think that this has been accomplished. In our discussions and problems that we did in class, I realized the importance of using manipulatives and picture proofs to explain concepts to students. In the past, I have felt that some of these things were just “ways to kill time”. I now realize that they perform a vital role in the teaching of Algebra. Showing students why things work and allowing students to explore topics and discover thing on their own drives the concepts home. It allows them to take responsibility of their learning and thus they will retain the concepts much longer than if they just perform rote manipulations. Hopefully, if I use what I gained in this class and share these ideas with the other teachers I work with, we can create an Algebra program where students are successful and that students feel that Algebra is fun and that it is not “so hard”.