TEACHER INTERVIEW REPORT

Group Members: Feda, Zhi Song and Mandeep

          This interview was conducted with a high school math teacher from the east end of Vancouver, where she has taught Math Essentials (Grades 8 through 10) for the past two years.  Much of what this teacher revealed in her interview confirmed what we’d expected to find in a typical math class.  In her interview, the teacher discussed how maintaining class discipline and getting her students motivated and involved in her class were often the most difficult parts of her job.  She found the students who were the most disruptive in her class often happened to be the ones who were struggling the most with the material that was being taught.  One way in which this teacher tries to address this issue is by giving all her students a clear set of goals and guidelines.  With these goals clearly defined, the students know what objective they have to work towards.  The goals may vary for each student; for some students, the goal may be to get an A as a final mark in the course, while for others it may be to simply improve their understanding of topics they hadn’t understood very well in previous years.  In each of these cases, the one thing this teacher makes sure to do is to ensure that each student is aware of the goal he or she is individually striving towards.  This way, the students can evaluate and re-evaluate themselves throughout the term or semester and reflect on how they’re doing towards reaching their goal.  The teacher found this method helped to enable students to take more of an initiative in their learning or “ownership of their own work,” as she likes to calls it.

            Another technique this teacher uses to keep her students involved in her classroom is giving her students different responsibilities.  These responsibilities can at times be academic (ie, giving out bonus assignments as a challenge) or they can be simple classroom tasks like writing the homework on the board, helping to hand out worksheets, etc.  What the teacher found with this approach was that students felt more engaged in her class and made them more comfortable to participate in class activities.

            A part of the interview that surprised us occurred when this teacher was asked which grade level she found most challenging to teach mathematics.  Her response of Math 8 was not entirely unexpected but her reasons behind this answer were interesting and something we as teacher candidates had not considered before.  The teacher found Math 8 to be more demanding to teach at times not because eighth graders usually have more energy thus require more attention; instead, the teacher found it more difficult to teach because in this grade, the teacher usually spent a lot more time teaching basic learning skills not directly related to math than she did at any other grade level.  Examples she discussed included teaching students how to write homework in their agenda, instructing them on how to take good notes, getting them to all show their work in a neat and organized manner, etc.  The teacher found teaching these skills ate into a lot of their class time, making it stressful for her to get her students through all the material in the curriculum.  We find this to be of interest because it was something we had not given any thought to until now

            In summary, we found this interview to be very informative and helpful to us as teacher candidates.  Teaching can at times be very challenging career but it is also obviously a very rewarding and enjoyable one as well.