Interview: Locally Developed Classes, International Teaching, Challenges & Ideas for Improvement

The following is a brief interview I conducted with an educator who has experience teaching math in both public and Catholic high schools in Ontario, along with three years experience at a senior secondary school in Australia.

1)      What math courses are you currently teaching?

Currently I am teaching Grade 9 and 10 locally developed math at a district high school in London. Earlier this year I taught Grade 9 academic and applied and grade 11 functions.

2)      When it comes to teaching a locally developed class, what have you found to be the biggest challenge?

The biggest challenges are the students’ negative attitudes towards math. Most of these students will immediately confess that they hate math and suck at it. Having to build up their confidence can be extremely difficult but completely worthwhile, especially when they realize they can understand and are capable when they put forth an honest effort.

3)      I know you have significant international teaching experience. Did you find teaching secondary math in Australia much different than teaching it here in Ontario? Maybe you can provide an example or two to help explain your answer.

Yes there were some differences in terms of the material I taught, but overall you still have student’s streamed based on academic levels, similar to Canada. The biggest difference was how much pressure the state placed on Grade 12 students. Students were either working towards a Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) – for academically minded students or a Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning for student who were hoping to land an apprenticeship or join the workplace immediately following graduation. Those in VCE across the state all had to write the same standardize exams for each subject and then not only were the schools ranked but each student was ranked statewide. This was not only tremendous pressure on the students but extremely stressful for the educators as their students’ performance could easily be reflective of the teacher, whether good or bad.

If you are looking for specific examples of how the curriculum differs, Australia focuses a lot less on quadratics and functions and more on matrices and networks. Only in the advanced mathematics classes do they explore quadratics and functions.

4)      How do you respond to a student who asks “when are we ever going to use math in the real world?”

To be honest this can be a tough question to answer on certain topics in math such as factoring, using the quadratic formula, or graphing functions etc. Typically those specific skills will only be used in a limited number of professions (such as engineering). For many students I work with, this is not a career choice for them. In that case I simply explain that we are training certain areas of your brain to problem solve, use deductive reasoning and make inferences about the many situations we may face.

For more general math skills like measurement and proportional reasoning, I always seem to keep a few specific examples on hand, that I know each student will face in their lifetime (or have already done so without realizing it) to help make them see the value in what they are learning.

5)      What are some things that you do to make math fun in your classroom?

I try to incorporate technology and manipulatives into my lessons each day. Whether it’s watching silly math youtube videos to grab their attentions on new topics, playing kahoot for unit review, or using linking cubes to investigate volume, having the students fully engaged is my number one priority. Of course not every second of every math class can have only bells and whistles but bringing in various ways for students to discover on their own is essential. Math is heading in a new direction of teaching to big ideas through inquiry base learning and I have been having fun trialing out some of these new concepts instead of focusing specifically on the curriculum.

6)      If you could make one suggestion that you think would improve the way math is taught in school, what would it be?

Good questions!
There are many different areas that we can improve on in Mathematics. For example I believe that more elementary schools need to adapt a rotary program so a math specialist can excite students in math rather than deter them from it. If teachers are not passionate about what they are teaching, very rarely will they put in the effort to make it extraordinary (for the record, I feel strongly about this in all elementary subjects).
I also feel as though the curriculum expectations should be shorter in most grades. At times I am concerned about meeting all the expectations in the semester and at times I feel as though I do not have time to complete as many student-based learning activities (i.e. investigations) as I would like. 

Thanks for your time - much appreciated!!!