Published on 12, July, 2020
I'm just watching this Yo Samdy Sam video and already noticing (in spite of her posh, private school education - privilege alert!) that many of the teachers' observations are almost exaclty the same as on my own. Almost eerily, in fact, although I went to a very rough comprehensive in the North East of England. My reports were, on the face of it, rather good, but there are some little asides which indicate constant high levels of anxiety combined with my supposed "giftedness" (I was actually terrified into appearing "gifted", I now think). When I look back, I'm getting more of a feeling of, "My goodness - what did they do to me?" Very interesting, I think, And I'll probably reflect some more on this as I watch the rest. My "giftedness" didn't exactly carry over into most of the workplaces I got myself trapped in and I then experienced decades of anxiety and fairly poor mental health. So... and if you care to share, how was it for you? www.youtube.com/watch
Apologies if this is going a little off-topic... There was a Maths teacher at my secondary school who was (to put it politely) a bit of a character. To this day, I am convinced that he thought he was teaching a class full of university students. Toward the end of the 2nd year, there had been an exam. Not one person in the class scored higher than 30%. As his reaction was to scream at us that we should have been paying more attention, I think one can safely assume that it hadn't occurred to him to consider that maybe he needed to adapt the way he taught Maths.
Maths, the only subject I truly enjoyed in school. Eventually I understood it better than the teachers, who often were awful. A classic case of 'if you can you do, if you can't you teach'.
It was only at university that I met maths teachers who were my equals.
Maths teachers and short tempers seem to go together in my mind. Or maybe those are the only ones I ever experienced or heard about and most are lovely.
Maths and foreign languages are always taught in a way that only appeals to people who find them interesting in themselves. Maths seemed to me to be just a series of things, you learned how to do the 'thing' (simultaneous equations, integration etc.) then spent a few weeks doing problems - just the 'thing' over and over again with minor variations. It bored me rigid. It would have made more sense to me if the practical reason for the use of the 'thing' - navigation at sea, how one thing changes as another thing changes, with examples - was explained beforehand.
We had a fair few that were considered to be "a bit of a character". In reality this meant we had to put up with a lot of stuff which really shouldn't have been tolerated. I've noticed this in the workplace too. Loudspoken, domineering, borderline bullies are apparently also in that category. Either that or, "It's just their way. You'll get used to them". And I want to scream, "No! It's not just "their way". Those behaviours are ill informed, rude and/or bullying and we shouldn't be meekly adapting to them!" Of course, as a rather meek introvert, that's exactly what I felt compelled to do. :(