I finally get it
"And what are you studying/did you study in school?"
"Math"
"Oh," [pause & blank stare] "so do you want to teach?"
After getting this question so frequently I was probably more anti-teaching than if I wasn't forced to say, "no, I'm really not interested in being a teacher" over and over again. I really appreciated my teachers and professors but I was certain that I didn't have the patience to coax the painfully ignorant students (as I often was) into enlightenment in one subject after another. Teaching seemed to me near the bottom of the list of desirable professions. Even after volunteering all last school year at Sand Lake I still thought that teaching seemed way too arduous for the benefits and I was completely satisfied with my 1-2 hours in the afternoons.
Then, sometime this fall I finally got it. I finally got a teacher's high. I remember coming away from class one day feeling like I'd improved the world. (Just a little tiny bit, but still...) I realized that teaching could be totally fulfilling and uplifting and a worthwhile use of my time. Don't get me wrong, I still doubt I'd cut it as a teacher and it's not in the career plan, but now at least I understand why people love teaching. Why one of my brilliant friends would struggle through two years of teaching math in inner city Las Vegas instead of getting a PhD and earning fame and money (although she did pick up a Masters degree, I was serious about the brilliant descriptor). I am so glad that I'm getting this exposure to teaching through In The Arena... I think the perspective's been good for me and it's been good to realize that the value of having a challenging and fulfilling career matters way more than the paycheck.
"Math"
"Oh," [pause & blank stare] "so do you want to teach?"
After getting this question so frequently I was probably more anti-teaching than if I wasn't forced to say, "no, I'm really not interested in being a teacher" over and over again. I really appreciated my teachers and professors but I was certain that I didn't have the patience to coax the painfully ignorant students (as I often was) into enlightenment in one subject after another. Teaching seemed to me near the bottom of the list of desirable professions. Even after volunteering all last school year at Sand Lake I still thought that teaching seemed way too arduous for the benefits and I was completely satisfied with my 1-2 hours in the afternoons.
Then, sometime this fall I finally got it. I finally got a teacher's high. I remember coming away from class one day feeling like I'd improved the world. (Just a little tiny bit, but still...) I realized that teaching could be totally fulfilling and uplifting and a worthwhile use of my time. Don't get me wrong, I still doubt I'd cut it as a teacher and it's not in the career plan, but now at least I understand why people love teaching. Why one of my brilliant friends would struggle through two years of teaching math in inner city Las Vegas instead of getting a PhD and earning fame and money (although she did pick up a Masters degree, I was serious about the brilliant descriptor). I am so glad that I'm getting this exposure to teaching through In The Arena... I think the perspective's been good for me and it's been good to realize that the value of having a challenging and fulfilling career matters way more than the paycheck.
posted by LAV at 22:00
4 Comments:
Teach? With a math degree?
You should be working for Google (search algorithms are all math based) or a chip manufacturer (DSP algorithms are all math based), or a finance house (trades are all based on advanced math algorithms - when I did my MBA, I looked at how the stock market may follow Schrodinger's wave equation) ). I could go on and on.
The point being, next time someone asks you want you are doing with a math degree, you reply:
"I'm not sure. First I thought I would help people by improving the social connectivity of Web 2.0 through the use of heuristic algorithms, but then I thought about about making a killing on the stock market by applying triple, partial differential equations to map market peaks, or maybe improving response algorithms in embedded hearing aids for the elderly. I'm not sure yet. What do you think I should do.?"
:-)
-S.
yep, I wish everyone realized how sweet math is. not to mention applicable to just about everything.
I may have to quote you sometime.
Scott makes a good point: the beautiful thing about math is that it not only supports innumerable avenues of inquiry and productivity, but it keeps opening up unforeseen lines of thought even in the midst of what had come to seem like familiar environs.
But this wasn’t your point, Laura—and the one problem with Scott’s reply is that it shuts down the specific epiphany that you yourself had set out to write about.
Having done a lot of teaching, I personally think it’s an experience that can be compared to the trajectory of an asymptote: The line forever tends toward the Y axis precisely because it’s never more than halfway closer than it was at the last increment.
Real education—the kind where students work to ingest a fundamental feel or logic, and not simply a rote body of rules or facts—is like the promise of an irrational number: You keep mastering mechanisms which allow the fissure to be further reduced, and then at some point over the course of this mechanistic process, the nature of the gap reveals itself to you in all its ineffable glory.
I think educators who love their work do so because we’re addicted to this experience ourselves (and not just to the experience of watching students experience it). Research and application is exciting, yet the irony is that the creative rush can sometimes dissipate once your problems and methodology are set and it’s time to finish “doing the numbers.” But to teach (in the truest sense, anyway) is to re-enact that initial magic on a million different scales everyday, for oneself as well as for one’s students.
It’s that same asymptotic tendency, but re-doubled: Natural language never quite lines up with numbers, and so you find yourself struggling to formulate premises which you’ve long-since taken for granted. And the reason you occasionally pull it off is that the gap between the words and the subject matter will sometimes line up with those rifts endemic to the subject matter itself.
In the dimension I’m describing, teaching is a lot like a ski race: The outcome remains uncertain no matter how well prepared you are (and no matter how well-quantified your capabilities). And so it’s the encounter of a certain intrinsic gap the makes the experience in question so real.
Teach? Hell yes, I teach.
CS
CS- do you have a blog? because you should.
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