Introspective Writing: Teachers, the Good and the Bad

    I'll start with an account of my least favourite math teacher. They struggled to convey information, they demeaned the students, they failed to interact meaningfully with the class or the students' learning. A particularly egregious error was that they provided no resources outside of class, this mandated that every student show up to class where the students must find what little knowledge was dispersed to allow them to succeed on the tests. This taught me that students will mitigate the harm of your bad teaching when given resources to do so and that more resources in the students' hands tends to lead to the student adapting their learning to your teaching. Furthermore, tremendously late marking, on the order of a month or more, lead to an interesting case where students were interacting with material further in the course with no guarantee that their fundamental understanding of the early material was accurate. 

    My favourite math teacher would have to be an IB math teacher in high school. They made classes engaging but more importantly comfortable. In a quickly paced course they made sure to take time for concepts to sink in. They made sure to mention their own learning, as they were doing a masters at the time, emphasizing how important it is to continue learning and how no one knows everything. After some negative experiences in the IB program they were instrumental in rekindling my love of learning, something that has been invaluable to me in the years following my time in their class.