day of class at Bowman would be an understatement.
Talking about math was one of her favorite things to do, and talking about it with other people who loved math as much as she did? There was nothing better. But teaching required her to develop a rapport with people who didn’t necessarily love math—or even like it—and she wasn’t exactly brimming with confidence in her oral communication skills.
Upper-level classes were easier, because they were populated by math majors who were there because they wanted to be and were actively engaged with the subject matter. But the core curriculum classes like Mia was teaching at Bowman tended to be full of students who didn’t care about the subject and were only in the class because they needed the credits to graduate.
She’d TA’d enough intro classes at UCLA to know what those students could be like. Bored. Distracted. Disengaged. Sometimes even downright hostile to the material.
Mia didn’t know how to relate to people who weren’t interested in learning. She didn’t know how to talk to them when they only wanted the bare minimum amount of information required to pass the class. Mia didn’t know how to do the bare minimum, so they sometimes got frustrated when they came to her office hours for help, because she wanted them to understand the concepts, not just be able to fake it enough to earn a passing grade.
Sometimes it felt like she was speaking a completely different language. But she supposed maybe it felt that way to her students too.
Additionally, Bowman was a teaching-focused university, which meant smaller class sizes to allow for more one-on-one interaction between students and instructors. There would be no teaching assistants to help with grading or offer additional assistance. Mia was on her own.
When she walked into her Calculus I class on Monday, she didn’t know what to expect. She didn’t know what her students’ secondary education had been like or what they hoped to do after they graduated. She didn’t know how many suffered from “math anxiety”—a persistent and almost always false belief that they were naturally bad at math—but it was sure to be a nonzero number. Some might have even failed previous calculus classes and already developed a strong aversion to the course.
Nerves roiled Mia’s stomach as she watched her first batch of students file into the classroom Monday morning. They appeared evenly balanced between male and female. Most were typical college age, but she noted a few older students in the mix.
Once they’d settled, Mia pasted on a smile and introduced herself, pleased that her voice only shook a little. Once that was out of the way, she launched right into her first lesson.
A lot of professors started the first day by going over the syllabus and outlining what would be expected of their students over the semester. Mia chose not to do that, because she felt there was no faster way to make undergrads’ eyes glaze over than reviewing a list of topics that didn’t mean anything to them yet.
So she started off by throwing out a deceptively simple question to the class. “Who can tell me what sixty miles per hour means?”
Before they tried to start learning calculus, Mia wanted them to understand why it was useful. Otherwise, they’d just end up mimicking the techniques without actually knowing what any of it meant.
After a moment’s hesitation, several hands shot up, and Mia called on a young woman in the front row, asking her to introduce herself before answering the question.
“I’m Madison,” the student declared with a confidence Mia envied. “Miles per hour is a British Imperial unit of speed based on the number of miles traveled in one hour—which in this case would be sixty.”
“Thank you, Madison.” Mia rewarded her with an approving smile and mentally cataloged Madison as a type A overachiever.
She’d found it useful to identify different personality types in order to tailor her approach to people. Overachievers, for instance, thrived on praise. But their enthusiasm needed to be tempered so they didn’t monopolize class discussions.
“We use a combination of distance and time to express speed,” Mia continued, addressing the class again. “If you keep going at the same speed for one hour, you’ll have traveled sixty miles. Pretty simple, right? But when we’re driving our cars, do we always go the same speed the whole time?”
She was pleased to see lots of heads shaking around the room, which indicated they were actually listening to her.