Growing up in my household it was expected that you would either be a maths whizz or absolutely hopeless. My brother, father, gran, grandpa and great aunt all have the incredible ability to tackle most equations with ease. However half my family have never needed a calculator with more than 19 buttons.
Regardless of my background of secondary school maths teachers, a doctor and a lawyer I was not considered a maths whizz. BUT I wasn’t hopeless either. My relationship with maths is a fond one.
In primary school I was a square. This means I was in the middle group and as desperate I was to become a pentagon I never made it, but this didn’t dent my relationship with maths at all it merely pushed me to try harder. In secondary school my first maths teacher explained to my parents on a parents night that there was more than one way to cook an egg, me being the egg.
Beginning to understand more complex mathematics moving through high school I only gained confidence and regardless of small blips along the way I completed, Standard Grade, Intermediate 2, and Higher eventually. Although now I could probably not even hope to understand a higher maths paper I still consider myself highly confident in maths as a subject and how I use it in the real world.
That was until it came to teaching in my first placement. I struggled with creating maths lessons because I could not simplify in my head the topics so that I could convey it to the class in manageable chunks. With the help of my class teacher I was able to conjure up a few appropriate lessons for the kids but I was still so confused. How could I know exactly how to approach the maths and still not be able to simple it down and teach it? Why were all my ideas so complex? So now I’m stuck- I’m confident whilst being clueless. With this barrier I saw the “Discovering Mathematics” module as a perfect opportunity to understand why I struggled to teach my class, whilst cementing my own knowledge as well. I hope to use this module to get myself back to the fundamentals of mathematics and take it from there.
