Coburn Palmer / Roundup
We’ve all had bad math teachers. We all know how painful they can be. A teacher who just opens up the book and reads from it, and then copies the problems onto the board while you sit there and struggle. A teacher with no patience for you and your lack of knowledge and who is unwilling to compromise on their way of doing things.
In college we all have to take classes we don’t necessarily like; they’re called general education requirements (GE’s). We only suffer through these classes to get to our major or to transfer.
Sometimes we run into teachers who we just can’t learn from and we wind up dropping the class, or worse trying our best and failing the class anyway.
We all learn in different ways. Some of us learn by doing, some by seeing, and others by hearing. A good teacher will incorporate all of these techniques into a lesson plan that the whole class can understand. A bad teacher will stick to one way of doing things no matter what.
These math teachers might be highly intelligent people, maybe even geniuses in their field, but for some reason they can’t teach.
The LA Times recently rated teachers based on students’ test scores. This is not the only way to rate teachers and is in fact highly controversial, however, if a large number of students can’t pass a standardized test then something is wrong.
Yes, there is a math lab with tutors wandering around available to help the struggling, but it would be nice if they weren’t needed. It would be nice if the teachers that were hired to teach us actually taught us. It can be incredibly frustrating to sit through a whole class and feel you learned nothing, and then trudge over to the math lab where another student tries to help you.
No matter how good the tutors are, they are merely students at a higher level than us. They haven’t received any special training on teaching; they hold no specialized degrees. They haven’t spent the last five to six years of their lives learning how to teach.
We can’t afford to let bad teachers of any kind stay and teach poorly, and with an economy as bad as ours we need to watch every penny. If any teacher our school employs has a large number of their students find their way over to the math lab on a daily or weekly basis, then something is wrong. We have no need to spend money paying a teacher just to pay more money to tutors that correct their mistakes.
When Ph.D.’s are applying for janitor jobs and California’s unemployment rate is near 12 percent, good people can be found. They are out there; why aren’t they in here?
Students who find themselves in this situation are being done a disservice. If we really feel that education is the future, then we need to be paying more attention to our teachers.