I didn't find anything easy about teaching math at my sponsor school. It's not that I found the subject difficult, but teaching math in a way that was still exciting to students was a challenge. When it comes to relative difficulty, however, I realized that I preferred to use the whiteboard over the tablet in a classroom, which is a huge revelation for me, because I always thought I did really well with the tablet. There's still something about moving around when you teach that, according to one student, is more appealing about teaching on a whiteboard, whereas I found that the tablet keeps you locked in one place, for the most part. In general, tablets are big and bulky and can't really be held up for walking around the room. I found it easy to talk to students, though; that was nice. I think I'm still young enough to be able to talk to them (I realized I use a slight touch of slang, like "s'all good" or "no worries"; though, is that slang, or just an expression used by my expression? I definitely called a large math expression a "holy mother of a cow". This seemed confusing to some, but I had their attention, which was nice. It was pretty easy for me to connect with the students, which was nice. They weren't shy when I would ask them questions, which was nice, and I asked them for their honest feedback. Although there was slight hesitation, I pointed out that I was a student learning to be a teacher. Although that's a dangerous move when it comes to keeping authority, they were still able to tell me what they liked and what they didn't like.
The most difficult thing was probably to make math exciting. I did a lot of activities which were very upbeat and didn't allow for practice of material as much as I think I should have. I tried the "Japanese model" of teaching we discussed in one of the articles (Hoffier?), but I quickly found that students have come to expect being fed information and practicing it, so when I gave them a problem, there was such a large amount of complaining! My goodness! And with the small number of students in the school, by the time the next grade 8 class had come in, the previous class had already informed them that the class involved "a very difficult activity that nobody got", even though the students had learned all the information they needed to solve the problem. Although I don't expect all students to be problem-solvers, I realized that for the second class, I needed to explain a little more about how to solve the problem I had assigned, and from there, some people pounced on it immediately. Also, time management! Tiiiiime management, I'm still struggling with this so much! I've finally got control of my students, which is thanks to my sponsor teacher, who suggested that I have clear transitions between activities, and that worked. Also, I realized how not to be boring. That was huge. I realized as I was boring myself to tears, that other people were probably also pretty unimpressed at the moment, and so I became a little more theatrical. It helped!
I think the most interesting thing about teaching math is how helpful it is to have a problem worked out ahead of time. A problem in surface area, for instance, is much easier to teach if you have information prepared ahead of time and pre-organized. Another lovely thing; I divided up my boards into three columns to organize my work, and that helped tremendously. Finally, no matter how you try to turn cards into a teachable moment in probability and statistics, the junior level will always want to play poker, so don't use playing cards to organize people into groups....
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