How Math Teachers are making the world a better place…

C’mon we gotta start with the positives 1st!!!
Math Teachers…

See how everything grew silent, that’s the powerful effect that they have on the world. Everyone has had math teachers, EVERYONE..even if you dropped out of school, you had a math teacher in primary school, and secondary school, right?

A few days ago, I ran an informal survey on my facebook page, asking friends to share their experiences about math in high school and I have posted the chart below with the percent breakdown. We have more math haters than math lovers (it would have been a higher margin, except for the following disclosure- a lot of my friends are professionals who use math on a daily basis and we made up the brainy bunch when we were in High school.)
I wasn’t surprised by the responses that I received, even among those that liked math when they were in High School, few attributed their love for it to their teachers, most gave homage to their relatives, friends and inner motivation. Among those who loathed it, their math teachers were spoken of with loathing, recrimination and regret.

One poster even recollected one of our most dreaded teachers in our school and yet, years later I shuddered at reading his name.

This morning I re-read the posts and imagined how differently the posts would have read if we had had well trained, motivated math teachers. We’d have people who were excited about estimating their bills, looking forward to working on their taxes and using math to problem solve day to day. I get so excited just thinking about that!

I am excited because I am that dreaded creature, a math teacher! Hahaha. Of course I wrote from the vantage point of self interest, I desire for everyone to respect us and treat us better instead of with dread.

My mission is to humanize math with both adults and children when I meet them. I show them math in everything, how real it is, how much fun it can be and how it is fundamental to life itself. I see math everywhere.

Mathematics gives order and eliminates chaos. It enables us to reason, be creative, gain abstract or spatial thinking, develop critical thinking, acquire problem-solving ability
Snails make their shells, spiders design their webs, and bees build hexagonal combs. These are but a few of the mathematical patterns in nature. There are countless examples of mathematical patterns in nature’s fabric.

In our current age, we all have games around us, most games require mathematical logic and deduction. Without our math teachers who work so hard (haha) to imbue this knowledge in us, imagine the boring lives we’d have now.

Math keeps us safe, we use codes and passwords for just about everything these days. Yep, good old math teachers teach us about permutations and combinations in math class, both of which form the bedrock of cryptology.

Praise a math teacher today for the thankless job that they do, in fact statistics all over the world shows that we need more of them, so perhaps by your gratitude, you will make a difference in changing the tide.

Bless a math teacher, today, y’all!

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