My headmaster sent me a link to an NPR story that he thought I’d enjoy. I sent the following response…
This reminds me of a story I may have told you before: one reason I enjoy teaching calculus and post-calculus courses is that math at Rice made little sense to me when I took it there because of the “math-major way” in which it was taught. I ended up leaving my required math courses feeling as though I simply couldn’t understand higher math.
A number of years later, I decided I really wanted to learn quantum mechanics, which depends on math I “couldn’t understand.” So, I spent a fair amount of time learning the math I needed by taking time, getting multiple perspectives, and working through stuff. My motivation was not that it was a course, but that it was a means to something I really wanted to learn.
A by-product was that I learned I actually *could* do higher math albeit not when taught as Rice used to teach it to math majors. So, one of my goals in math teaching (well, teaching in general I guess) is to present things from multiple perspectives, allow more time for students to work through things, and try to find interesting questions/problems in a variety of areas. I also tell my advanced classes this story; and every year, several people come up to me to say that it really helped them to know that “this material was hard for you the first time, too!”
There are certainly some things a person who is brilliant in his college major can do well. But there are other aspects of teaching wherein it helps not to have had success come effortlessly.
I may also have told you that I think part of my success as a teacher comes from not really having taught in my major field. Hence, in every subject I taught, there was always a lot to learn. I think experiencing that learning makes me more aware of how a student who hasn’t already majored in a subject in college might feel when encountering the ideas.