What if you chose to study a subject that you hated in grade school?  And then chose to make a career out of teaching it to others?  While most kids do not grow up to be a princess, doctor or firefighter, few choose a field of study that they have claimed to hate.  But this is what I did.  Or rather, what I did inadvertently.


I found this out my sophomore year of college.  It was October and I received a call from my friend Stefanie. She was in San Diego and wanted to visit me at UCSD.  Stefanie was one of my closest friends in junior high.  While we went to different high schools, we remained friends. This was before Myspace and Facebook. It was before I had a cell phone, wi-fi, and social skills.  Our freshman year of high school we kept in touch through a blue spiral-bound notebook that we would take turns writing and drawing in, which we would then exchange on the weekends.


I had almost forgotten about this notebook, but Stefanie had the foresight to bring it with her that October. As I leafed through it for the first time in six years, skimming all I wrote and drew, I realized three things about myself at the age of fourteen. The first was that I was a huge nerd, as evidenced by literally everything that I wrote. The second thing was that I thought cats could play the guitar. But the third was the most surprising.  It was that I hated geometry. I gathered this from the fact that I began every note with the line with "I hate geometry".  Apparently, I also thought that it was dumb and boring.  This memory came back to me the year I decided to become a math major.


Two years later I began apprentice teaching a geometry class to group of high schoolers who I am sure felt the same way I did.  A year after that I began my student teaching in order to become a math teacher.  


So how did I get to the point that I fell in love with math and actually wanted to make a career of teaching it to young people?  Well, while I may not have always loved math, I certainly loved school.  I loved it and excelled in it.  When it came to picking a career, I decided I should use my passion for education to help others.  And when it came to picking a subject, I remembered my high school calculus teacher, Ms. Admiraal.  She was always smiling.  She made teaching math look like more fun than, well, cats playing the guitar.  And hey, I thought I was good at the subject.  So it was settled, I would teach math.  


This began my journey of completing my bachelor’s degree in mathematics and preparing to enter a credential program. When I began to take upper division math courses, I struggled at first.  The professors wanted me to prove things, to think about and justify why things work.  There were no more rules to follow or examples to study.  The task seemed beyond my capacity.  


It was around the time that I wrote my first proof without any help, and actually understood what I wrote and why I wrote it, that I fell in love with math.  I did not fall in love with the math I studied in high school.  The math that was nothing more than a list of rules and procedures to memorize and obey.  I fell in love with the math that transformed the way that I thought.  The math that turned itself into a puzzle and challenged me to solve it.  This is the math that I decided I wanted to teach to my students.


Teaching high school math this past year , and remembering my own past has taught me two important things about teaching math.  The first is that math has a bad reputation, because it is often boring at best and confusing at worst.  But it is a math teacher’s duty to break down this reputation, helping students approach the subject and giving them the opportunity to succeed.  This is done through building the bridge between students’ intuitions and formal mathematics.  


I taught an Algebra 1 class for tenth graders who had previously failed the course.  Needless to say, many of the students did not possess a positive disposition toward the subject.  One student in particular did not do very much work in class unless I sat down to do it with her. As I tried to help her with solving equations, I quickly realized she had trouble adding positive and negative integers. Somewhere along her educational path, she missed out on this topic, and now she was expected to solve equations involving operations on variables.  


As she stared at the problem, we decided her next step was to combine “-12” and “3”.  

“-15?,” she guessed.  
I asked: “What does it mean to be ‘in the negative’ with money?”.  
“You owe money, right?”.  
“Yes, so what if I owed you 12 dollars, and then I payed you three dollars? Am I still in debt?” I asked.  
She said “yes” but the look on her face said “duh”.  
“Well, how much do I owe you now?”.  
“9 dollars” she said, confident in her answer.  
“Well, there's your answer.” I said.  
“That’s it?  That’s easy!” she exclaimed.  

In this moment, math did not seem so scary to her.  It was actually a subject that she knew more about than she had realized.  


I strove all year to build these connections in my students.  Connections between what I’m teaching and what they already know and makes sense.  Though I have a lot to learn as a teacher, I hope that I helped to break down the negative misconception about math that prevents so many students from approaching the subject.  While this is part of how I make math accessible to all learners, I know that not every student I teach will be convinced that math is not hard, scary or boring.  But maybe, just maybe, they will remember how much fun I had teaching it and decide it can’t be that bad.    

Autonomy.  It is one of the best predictors of happiness and success in one's career.  However, as a student teacher, the goal is typically not to be autonomous.  The goal is to observe the "pros"- watch, take notes and essentially mimic the lesson for some time.  My year was no exception. My master teacher was a nothing short of an expert, as well as a self-proclaimed "control freak", unwilling to release control until after high-stakes testing. I can't say I was totally upset about this either.  I did not have to lesson plan each night, and I was pretty good at replicating her third period lessons during sixth period.  

I continued this pattern of observing and replicating for quite some time.  In the beginning, successful lessons felt good.  They felt like a personal win.  But quickly, teaching became routine and boring.  I couldn't take credit for a good lesson, and I could share the blame for a bad lesson.  Everything felt routine and my teaching felt unauthentic, even though it was producing good results. I began to question if this was really even a passion of mine anymore. And then a bomb dropped.

May came quickly and testing was in the past. Before I knew it I was in charge of all planning and instruction for not one, but two different courses.  I almost died.  No, really.  But something great happened during this time.  I stopped observing and started really teaching.  

I taught lessons I created, with strategies that I chose, asking questions that I came up with, and responded to students with my own words.  Not every lesson was a success, but I found myself reflecting on what I did and adjusting for the future.  And on the days that I could see, hear and feel the learning happening, I finally felt the joy of teaching.  

During this time, I experienced some degree of autonomy and freedom for creativity and experimentation, and it felt really freaking good. It was the same joy I felt when discovering mathematics during college and when I was able to connect it to students during my tutoring experience.  This autonomy made me excited to have my own classroom one day.  

I do not tell this story so that we can compare what our student teaching years were like.  I am sure that some of you experienced this autonomy from day one.  I tell this story because autonomy is not just important in teaching, but is an equally important part of learning.  

As teachers, we must ask ourselves, how are we providing students opportunities to take ownership of the material?  Opportunities to try, to make mistakes, to correct their errors, to connect to the material creatively, and to keep persevering until success is achieved.  When we can truly do this, we are not just teaching content, but empowering students and preparing them for life.