Learning for all ages

My Teaching Passion

My passion for teaching started in 2015 when my high school track coach asked if I could tutor her daughter in mathematics. My whole life I had always loved math, but I had never considered teaching it. From that day forward my client base grew by word of mouth and I have seen so many kids go from hating math to loving it. Seeing a child’s confidence grow as their skills improve is such a beautiful thing. I started implementing very unique teaching strategies with my students that just seemed to make sense to me. One lesson that I taught a lot with two brothers was multiplication soccer. That’s all they ever wanted to do. The instructions are very simple.

Multiplication Soccer: I asked player one five mul- tiplication questions and depending on how many they got right would determine how many shots they got to take while player two was playing goalie. We would switch back and forth for a certain amount of rounds until we had a winner. The winner was the player who scored the most goals across all the rounds.

I always try to make the math as fun as possible because most of the kids I work with either struggle with math or don’t like it or both. I incorporate games like Jenga, Mancala, Connect 4 and war. I also use other outdoor activities when teaching including sidewalk chalk, croquet, Spikeball, bocce, Frisbee and more. When I meet with students online, I have had to get really creative on how to make the lessons fun and engaging since there is a screen between us. With one student, I worked on adding decimals with them by having them using Lego’s. Another activity consisted of asking a student to walk around their house and graph different rooms as coordinates on the X-Y plane. A third example of an engaging activity that I did virtually was I had one of my students create an art collage of different shapes that we then found the area of. Parent permission is granted for photos.

I have always had a drive and desire to motivate kids to learn with the games I incorporate. But, what if I could take their interests a step further by showing them the value of mathematics in the world today?

Why is Mathematics Important?

I think back to my personal experiences with math growing up and I always loved it. Why? Because I understood it fairly quickly and easily and I love solving problems to come up with correct solutions. But now as I think about all of the other students in my school who hated math, I conjecture that a huge aspect of their disinterest is due to their experiences. In my own school experiences, no one ever talked about why we had to learn math. We just had to do it. We took many standardized tests, which may have been a reason for this disconnec- tion. It was a part of the core curriculum and I feel like students never completely understood why. Did all the teachers even understand why?

Why would a student who struggles with math want to put in time and effort to practice it if they are not told the importance of it.

Math is all around us and some of us don’t even realize it. Math is a part of nature. Math is involved in telling time and reading cal- endars. Math was a part of creating the building that you are in now. Math is a part of technology, sports, money, cooking and driving.

I could go on and on about how math is involved in so many dif- ferent aspects of our lives because it’s practically everywhere. Even I sometimes forget about the many applications of math because dur- ing my tutoring sessions my students usually just have very abstract worksheets that they need help on from school and very little is related back to real life applications. My belief is that if we want students to want to learn math we need to give them a reason that it will benefit them. A purpose. This thesis aims to explore middle school students’ motivation and engagement towards mathematics when the lessons are created around students’ interests and use non-traditional pedagogies.

To continue reading my thesis check out my resources page.