The disconnect between expectations

Individual student emotions are often neglected during math class

Students have their own expectations about how much they should learn, and how fast. Usually these expectations differ from what their teacher expects them to do. Generally, math syllabuses are designed with an “ideal student” in mind. The material is covered and organized in a way that suites the teachers, and the small percentage of “straight A” students. Whoever can keep up with that pace, gets the A, others get lower grades.

In my one-on-one tutoring sessions, I have the opportunity to closely observe student reactions to their math workload, and to the pace at which their teacher is covering the material. Often I find myself addressing and somehow mitigating the emotional stress some students are under because of the huge chasm between their teacher expectations and their own expectations about their performance, and their learning pace. Sometimes, while going through their homework students make comments like: “Boy! They really want to drill this stuff into your head, don’t they?” Often all these students want is to get it done and over with as soon as possible, and forget about it.

Recently one student told me about the freezing fear she experienced in elementary school when one of her teachers timed the class on multiplication exercises. She felt terrified every single time they had such timed drills. All she learned from those experiences was that math is awful, something to avoid; that she was bad at math, and that she was going to struggle with math for the rest of her school life, which she did.

One more tutoring day

A new writing style (for me, in this blog)

This is my first post here in four months. It has been a long time without writing anything. Thankfully, I have been very busy lately. I have decided that, in order to keep this blog active, I need to change my writing style to something lighter, more alike social media status updates, if I want to find the time to keep posting entries in this blog at all. So, here it is, something that could fit somewhere between five and ten tweets, just a short report on another day of tutoring math, and loving it.

Yesterday I had six math tutor sessions, on Advanced Algebra, Discrete Math, Algebra 1 (two sessions), Calculus 1, and Calculus 2.

I like working out the multiplication table of specific finite groups, small ones. As the table builds up, I feel I am getting to know the group a little better, and more and more comfortable using the basic relationships between the group generators.

I usually enjoy tracing runs of algorithms to find out what they do, although sometimes with some simple examples I go: “Come on! Can’t you just see that value is not on the list? Just look at it, why run anything?” Then I marvel at how much we humans have come to rely on machines working for us, and we just keep doing it more and more, to the point where many times I wonder if it is not us who are working for them.

Learning styles are very varied. Some students want to race through the material as fast as possible, while others want to take their time to make sure they don’t miss any single detail, so they feel good about their skills at test time.

The more I tutor in Calculus, the more I like it. When I was a college student myself, many years ago, I did not appreciate Calculus as much as I do now. I noticed I started liking Calculus more when I started teaching Calculus classes. Since then, every time I have taught or tutored in Calculus, my fascination with its ideas deepens.