My favourite math teacher is my father. He told me math stories to simulate my interest and fostered my mathematical thinking by valuing the process instead of the final answer. As I mentioned in my EDCP 442 blog, my father read interesting mathematical episodes in history as my bedtime stories. These stories stimulated my interest in math. The most impressive one is the mistranslation of rational numbers in Chinese. The original idea is a rational number can be represented as a ratio. However, since rational also can be interpreted in another way, the Chinese translator eventually named rational number as a reasonable number. This story reveals that although math is regarded as a universal language, there are still possible misunderstandings due to different backgrounds. Moreover, my father educated me to have strong mathematical thinking. When I was solving homework problems, he encouraged me to find solutions in multiple ways. Sometimes I got low marks in math quizzes since I made some trivial numerical mistakes and the teacher took off all the marks for these questions. He always accepted my mistakes and told me that the process was more important than the final answer. He is my role model of being a math teacher.
My least favourite math teacher is who taught me in elementary school. She forced the class to do lots of mental arithmetic practices every day. I still remember the pain and stress I felt. However, I also benefited from these exercises. I can do calculations relatively fast and produce my way of visualizing numbers in my brain. I believe developing mental math practice is important, yet in this case, quality is way more important than quantity.
In conclusion, I learned both from my favourite and least favourite math teacher. I hope I can motivate and inspire my students in math learning like my father. Additionally, my experience with the least favourite teacher makes me pay attention to the balance of quality and quantity of assessment in math teaching.
Beautifully written, and what a wonderful thing to have a parent who is so inspiring and knowledgeable, and willing to share! I appreciate your sense that you learned even from your least favourite teacher too.
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