Did I Love Teaching?

A lot of the time, I found myself teaching topics I loved, to a mix of (1) students who did not want to learn the stuff---or did not want to have it presented the way I was presenting it, and (2) students who were happy with the material, and mostly OK with the presentation.  Some of the time I tried to 'sell' the material to the entire class; some of the time I focused on those who were enjoying the lesson, basically writing off the dissatisfied ones.

I tried to be creative with the exams I gave; I made sure that they believed that I wanted to know what they knew, as opposed to what they didn't know.  I worked hard to make sure that all of them could answer a core of questions correctly, so that I did not have to grade out of, say, 40 points, and then add sixty to their score!  (There are teachers who do that.). I think this was the most creative contribution I made for all my years of teaching---it shows just how much testing was emphasized in my classrooms, in contrast to the present-day departure from that philosophy.  But in my book, taking an interesting test is a learning experience.

One course that I enjoyed teaching---for the most part---with every sort of student, people who hated the subject, and those who loved it, was Geometry.  Only students who were pre-service (going into the teaching profession) were expected to take this course, but word got around that it was an easy course, and other sorts of (non-teacher) types got onto my roster, and I let them, hoping they would learn to love mathematics.  You might not expect this, but I was weak in what we call synthetic geometry, which is building up geometric proofs by constructing additional lines and circles, in contrast to analytical geometry, which I had concentrated on everyone I had graduated from high school, where you calculate properties using Cartesian coordinates.  So we were all discovering the logical structure of geometry together, in the early years of my teaching.

So, to summarize: with a topic that I liked, with eager students, and where I had some latitude regarding the curriculum, I was in heaven.  In all other cases, teaching was somewhat of a chore.

Arch.