My Math Story

In this post, I want to tell you my math story.  Everybody has a math story.  That is, your experience with math from when you were knee high to a grasshopper right up until this very moment. 

As part of my first "teaching math" class, our instructor gave us an empty graph and asked us to label the axes however we liked and create a graph based on our math journey.  This is an Excel version of what my graph looked like:

As you can see, I put my age along the x-axis and my love for math along the y-axis (on a scale from 1 to 10). 

In elementary school, I don't remember having any strong feelings about math.  I didn't hate it, but I don't remember saying that it was my favourite subject either. I think I would describe math in elementary school as "unremarkable".  On the graph, I put that time in my math journey at a solid 6.

When I got to high school, I started to really enjoy math.  I can remember going through grade 10, 11, and 12 math and almost looking forward to doing my homework.  It was in OAC (yes, I'm old) that my love for math peaked.  I wasn't as keen on OAC Finite Math (now grade 12 data management), but I absolutely loved Calculus.  At the time, Calculus was a separate course to Vectors, and, as such, the course covered a lot more than is covered now in grade 12 Calculus.  (I truly lament the loss of topics such as implicit differentiation, related rates, and basic integration in high school Calculus, but I'll have to save that rant for another time.)  I can remember making up derivative questions to solve for fun.  I know, I know, you can laugh.  But it's true!

It was during my final year of high school that I made the decision to take math in university.  I thought, "Wow, if math is this amazing in high school, how much more amazing will it be in university?"  Unfortunately, it didn't turn out that way.  First year university, and even second, was pretty good.  In fact, there was a first year algebra course which focused on matrices that I really enjoyed!  Calculus was good, but it went super fast and it wasn't always easy to keep up.  Having said that, I was ready to keep going and see what else I could learn.  I hit the wall in third year.  It was all theoretical math!  That is, no more concrete steps to solve problems, just proofs, proofs, and more proofs. I learned very quickly that the concrete math was what I loved.  Stats provided some respite, and I did quite well in those courses, but stats was never something I was too interested in. 

In fact, I still have a poem that I wrote during my time at university.  Here is an excerpt from that poem which shows how I felt at the time:

Math was great in high school
That's where it reached its peak
'Cuz here in university
It's not math, it's Greek

Delta, pi, and epsilon
Sigma, phi and theta
Where alpha is preferred for a
And b's not b it's beta

In short, math became a chore and a source of frustration, rather than a joy.  No wonder I didn't feel like going on to become a math teacher once I graduated in 2003 - I was all math'd out!  I ended up going back and doing a second degree in Linguistics.  Linguistics was amazing, but I didn't end up going into a Linguistics related job.

Fast forward to 2015.  I had 12 years to reminisce on my math journey.  I came to realize that, despite my experiences in university, my love for high school math remained.  I was talking to my husband and I mentioned that I should have become a math teacher.  We ended up agreeing that it's never too late.  I threw myself into volunteer tutoring at the library, and I volunteered at two different high schools in the classroom.  These experiences served to solidify my desire and resolve to become a high school math teacher.

And here we are now, in 2017, and I have officially begun my journey to become a teacher.  My love for math is now back at a high point and I'm so excited to see what the future holds!

That's my math story and I'm sticking to it.