Have you ever been in a bad relationship in school? I have and its name is math Don’t get me wrong, it has not always been like that. I loved math in elementary school and my best experience in math was during my elementary years. I enjoyed learning about the concept of numbers by counting and sorting. I enjoyed how my teachers taught us about patterns and shapes. I also remember enjoying how my elementary teacher incorporated these concepts to teach us addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.
While I might not have been the quickest with my multiplication and division tables, I did understand the concepts but I didn’t want to memorize the tables! In elementary school, the emphasis was placed on learning the basic skills in math, in middle school I was so concerned with trying to learn variables, integers, and exponents that my love with math ended and my bad relationship began. When I look back at a positive influence and experience I remember my third grade teacher, Mr. Campbell. I remember every student wanted him as their teacher. I remember that he created a safe but challenging environment that included many fun activities for us to learn basic math skills.
He made math fun and I believe it was not until third grade that I started to see numbers a new light. Mr. Campbell made sure that his lessons were taught in a fashion that would be easy for our growing minds. I remember being fascinated when we were taught that multiples of five would always end in either a five or a zero and that when you multiplied by the number two or four you would always get an even number. Another example of why I enjoyed third grade math is due to the fact, in the later part of the year, we started to learn how to count money. Mr. Campbell set up our classroom “store” and started with this lesson. We would work with paper money to purchase items like pencils, erasers and candy from our classroom “store”. Everyone had a favorite item they wanted and each day we would wait to be called up to the cashier.
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Depending on how many stars you received at the end of the week determined how much money you would have. This helped with our addition, subtraction and multiplication skills. At the end of third grade, I was excited about all the new possibilities I felt I would have with math. The next two years in elementary school I was excelling in math and had a great relationship with math. This all ended when I entered middle school and then high school. Algebra, Trigonometry, Geometry, Calculus, Statistics, and I did not have a good relationship. However, when I was a junior in high school I student taught a class of third grade students and my love for math returned.
I remembered Mr. Campbell and his teaching style. Suddenly, I loved math again because it was fun and rewarding to see the smiles on the student’s faces when they got a math problem correct. Mr. Campbell encouraged his students to learn with a lot of hands-on activities and in doing so he made a connection with the young moldable students he had in his class. I hope that one day, I can use some of his techniques and become a role model for my students and make them understand that math is not as scary as they might think.
