The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

During my studies I’ve come across many math teachers. Many different styles, personalities, views, approaches. Some were more in sync with me, some were less.

The Good was a high school teacher that I had. Ironically it was the teacher that gave me my worst math grades before university. I’ve always liked math, it was like a game to me. A puzzle. A challenge. So I’ve always been interested in math and was good at it. Regardless of the difficulty I may have had in other classes and subjects, I’d always get 95% or more in math. That teacher was the one to break my streak. They would challenge me more. Not only more than the previous teachers did, they would push me beyond what they would expect for the rest of the class. I asked if they could make the tests harder for me, and they were happy to. That means the tests were way harder and that reflected in my grades. But instead of getting a boring and expected 100%, I’d get a hard fought sweaty 80%. And the challenge was worth way more than the grades for me. It made math fun again. No regrets!

The Bad, on the other hand, was a thermodynamics teacher in university. Not exactly a math teacher, but it was a math heavy subject. That was a teacher that expected the students to memorize all the formulas. And as I mentioned earlier on a previous post, my memory is not that great, so that didn’t really work well for me. To be completely honest, it is possible that they didn’t really expect the students to memorize all the formulas, as they would seemingly “accept” that the students would cheat. They’d just turn a blind eye, leaving the classroom unattended for most of the time during exams. Another problem that I have is that I can’t cheat. My mind just blocks me. I tried once. I had a piece of paper inside my shoe. Just knowing it was there made me unable to focus on the test because I’d just be sweating, shaking, and drooling. I know that was just an incompatibility between me and the teacher’s style, but other than just personal capacity, I think that style silently passes the message of “this subject is so hard that regardless of how much you study it won’t be enough and you’ll have to resort to cheating”. I’ve had other physics teachers with equally hard topics that would provide the students with the formulas. That was the physics department’s policy, but was not the same for the engineering department.

That leaves the Ugly to me, I suppose. Ugly throwing shade at my future colleagues…