by Valerio Palamara, Mathematics

Math is hard! Most students have shared this point of view at some point in their education, and it’s important to examine the causes of this problematic approach and understand what these can entail for us prospective instructors in this field.  

The amount of difficulty we experience with this subject primarily depends on personal experience: each of us was taught mathematical notions differently, both from technical and conceptual standpoints. It is clear, for example, that students who are passionate about math were likely exposed to problems involving patterns, shapes, and numbers from a young age, which eventually allowed them to break through the apparent rigidity of mathematics to find beauty and comfort in it. Unfortunately, this is not the case for many students, who arrive at college suffering a lack of understanding and interest in any math-related activity, symptoms that arise from years of puzzling and boring experiences with the subject both at school and in daily life (and this is arguably worsened by a popular culture that normalizes being bad at math).

As a first-year graduate student getting ready to teach my first math class, this situation poses a considerable challenge, mainly because of the dual task of ensuring students gain the required coursework knowledge while acquiring fundamental analytical and technical skills to be applied during and beyond their academic journey. When preparing to become a TA in math, it is thus extremely important to set goals and strategies that can help us respect this contingent responsibility.

Regarding teaching goals, certain values we might want to set for our class are likely not to be directly compatible with the aims and expectations prioritized by students. For instance, the passion we put into explaining mathematical concepts and ideas might not be rewarded with interest from the students if what we emphasize is not correlated with their grades in the class. This discrepancy in what we (from our own experience) identify as useful for succeeding in a math class and what students reckon as important information is a big hurdle to surpass. Another big challenge is making sure students know the importance of resilience when working on mathematics. Analogously to how most students do not have an early, positive encounter with math, most are not properly conditioned to failure when working on both highly computational and conceptual problems. As it becomes evident in higher-level courses, being resilient toward mistakes is an extremely important skill to have, and it is perhaps through enough study and work that students can appreciate the deepness of certain mathematical ideas. It is thus the job of the teacher to impart the usefulness of practice and self-assessment especially in lower-level mathematics classes.

From these considerations, to be a good instructor it is imperative to understand the factors influencing the attitude of students towards mathematics and to apply this knowledge to better structure our teaching goals and practices. Satisfying these requirements as a TA can set a high teaching standard and improve the learning experience of students.