Challenges Anyone?

After receiving a message from one of my colleagues in the states, it occurred to me that I tend to talk about all the very positive experiences that I have, and tend to leave out the struggles I face in the classroom.  The person who wrote the letter said, “I’m finding teaching math to be a challenge, especially teaching the conceptual understanding of things, which you seem to be doing more successfully than me.” Well, do not be fooled my friend (Mary), my blog highlights mostly positive points. Yes, you are  right. Teaching the conceptual understanding of things is difficult for me to, I have just chosen to write about activities that worked and moments of success in my blog posts. So, this is probably a good time to highlight some of the many struggles and challenges I am facing as I continue learning about being a teacher. Let’s begin with conceptual vs. procedural knowledge.

Mary is right. It is difficult to promote the conceptual understanding of various mathematical concepts. Helping students to attain a conceptual understanding rather than simply possessing a procedural one is something that I have tried to focus on in my pre-service education. For me this focus includes (but is not at all limited to) hand’s on learning, using multiple visuals for teaching single concepts, and using mistakes as a catalyst for academic progress. Though I try to plan my lessons with these components in mind, I find it to instigate an internal battle within myself as I plan lessons, mostly due to the wretched inevitable and unstoppable driving force behind educational pressure…time.

Here is an example of what I mean. Here, in Uganda, we follow the Ugandan National Curriculum. Already, we had the midterm assessment and on that midterm were concepts that I was just a few days away from covering. The book that I am following for Primary Four is expected to be finished and taught by the end of term. The end of term test will basically cover every topic in the book. Thus, if I do not teach each topic in a timely manner, I fail the kids because they will fail the questions on the exam that they did not learn. However, if they can do the questions without really understanding why, say, multiplication works the way it does, how will they do later in higher level math classes and have I still failed them as an educator (does this sound like a familiar topic of controversy America?) ? More importantly, if I focus on planning a lesson that aims at teaching a topic with a conceptual focus, and the kiddos just aren’t getting it, have I wasted instructional time at the expense of a skill they will need to pass their exams? So you see, it is difficult to plan and teach while trying to accomplish various objectives. I know there are ways to find the best of both worlds, but I am still searching for it as a developing teacher.

On that same note, the lessons where I felt I had promoted a conceptual understanding of a topic may have really only spoke to a certain percentage of the class. Furthermore, sometimes those deep understandings fade without reinforcement. I have had it where I think a student has no problem with a concept after an informal assessment, and then when they are formally assessed I am taken back by my error in judgment. All in all, I think the lessons and activities I have been planning have been speaking to the students, but they are not without flaws and errors in instruction. This leads nicely into the next major challenge I have faced…assessment.

Assessing students has been difficult for me, partially because of personal disorganization, and another part due to the barrier between the language of my students and I. My students can write and speak in English, but it is much more academic than personal. When I speak with them casually, it seems much more difficult to communicate than when I speak with to them about understanding. If I ask them direct questions that is related to the content, if they are having difficulty they can at least pick up the patterns of the topic and communicate as if they are knowledgeable enough about the topic at hand.  Similarly, if I assess strictly based on written practice problems that were derived from skeleton structures, they will naturally seem to understand better than if they were creating their own sentences and such. This took longer than it should have for me to realize, and I found myself trying to play catch-up reviewing content.

Since that realization, I have planned much more application exercises rather than using skeleton structures, especially in English. For example, the directions for an exercise might be,” write ‘do’ or ‘does’ to complete the following sentences.” Students can pick up on this fast without really being able to apply their knowledge of the patterns to their own work. The first two weeks these were the types of practices I was giving, and I was like, “Yeah dude, I am rocking at this teaching bit!” Then when it came to applying, for example, their knowledge of “do” and “does” to constructing their own sentences, the assessments did not match up. Then I was like, “Dude, what was I thinking and what am I doing wrong.” To make an already long story not as long as it could be, assessment and addressing the results of those both individual and class assessments has been a big challenge. I feel that I am improving, but this is something I will definitely focus on as a learning objective for myself as I finish my students teaching and begin working in education.

More to come…for now I need to sleep. I am rambling.