My Maths Learning Journey

I can not remember how many teachers I've had in my life. However, besides many of my great teachers in schools, I think my favorite teacher is the one who taught me maths in my early life and built confidence in me, it is my older sister. I remember she taught me counting and skip counting, backward counting, simple additions, and etc when I was really young. However, this benefited me when I did an interview for enrolling in school. I still remember the shining face of the interviewer who impressed by my fluent backward counting down. This simply gave me confidence about numbers and maths at a very early stage. Another great teacher for my math learning I think is my best friend from grade 5 in elementary school. In grade 5, I was doing well in maths for academic requirements without knowing much about this subject outside of the curriculum.  However, my best friend was so into groups involving math games and Olympic competitions math outside of math class and she got a big reward from it. She gave me the inspiration to explore other interesting problems and patterns in math beyond the classrooms. I wanted to have fun learning math just like my best friend did. This inspiration helped me learning mathematics with a passion.

Think of the least favorite teacher, I don't have a particular least favorite teacher I remember but  I would say I heard one of my students said he had not had a great 6 and 7 math teacher who didn't teach much for the years which causes the student had a big gap in some math concepts when he went to grade 8. I think this related to responsibility which is one of the most important qualities a teacher must-have. Because of the irresponsibility of the teacher, the students may lose interest from this subject or might have never caught up with their learning. 

By thinking of the great teachers and not-so-great teachers, helping me to imagine myself as a new teacher to be a role model and to be responsible, encouraging, and inspiring my students when they have their math learning journey with my own as a teacher together.