from the great hearts faculty survey
Please tell us more about what you enjoy and do not enjoy about your job.
I enjoy showing kids the beauty of mathematics. They have been shackled---SHACKLED!---their entire lives and have seen nothing but SHADOWS of mathematics dancing on the wall. They have memorized formulas---they have not FELT mathematics. I love going in the first few days with a pair of bolt cutters and snapping their chains! I love that thrill of intellectual revolution. And I love that, having instigated the revolution enough times, I can now do so very subtly---all I need is a sentence-long samizdat, the right question here or there, and I can get them to start thinking about math for the first time. I can get them to start operating the same way they do in art class. I like that.
On the other hand, while I get to instigate the revolution, I don't actually get to take part in it. The kids are having their mental worlds upturned by mathematics, but this is the fifth or sixth time I've seen univariate calculus. I understand it a little better every time, but the gains are decidedly at the margins. I am, to be honest, jealous of them: they get to see all this beauty new and fresh. They get go to six classes every day and learn so much about so many different subjects.
There was a conversation in the faculty office a few months ago: if you knew you would forget everything at the end of the day, would you still read Kant? Dickerson said no---reading Kant is difficult and not particularly pleasant; if you're not going to learn anything lasting, what's the point? Fink said yes---the mere process of reading, while difficult, is enjoyable. I said that I'd actually prefer to read Kant that way---because then it would be new and fresh and weird and strange, every time. Of course, the goal then isn't wisdom, which can only be attained through sustained and repeated reading. The goal is a visceral, intellectual thrill---the mental equivalent of riding a rollercoaster.
In addition to watching the violent overthrow of a tyrant, I also enjoy watching the creation and maintenance of a stable political order that induces excellence in its citizens. I'm not just giving the students a charismatic guest lecture on why math is really cool. I'm not just blowing their mind with a single theorem quickie. I enjoy the depth in which I can work with students---I enjoy teaching them for an hour a day, five days a week, for two years. I enjoy watching them genuinely mature as mathematicians. I enjoy listening to my 12th graders have passionate arguments about the connection between logic and reality, and I enjoy watching my 11th graders discover for themselves the entire theory of antidifferentiation. There are long-term benefits, which can be hard to acknowledge on a day-to-day basis.
But which are exactly the point. Except it's not clear what we actually want from our students in the long term, or how teaching them math contributes to that. We don't just want them to be excellent antidifferentiators, or even excellent mathematicians. Those things are far too particular. We want them to be excellent human beings, yes, but what does that mean? How does guiding them toward proving the Pythagorean Theorem by themselves contribute to that? How does learning anything contribute? I think I like what I'm doing, but I'm not actually sure what that is.
I also don't like waking up at 5 AM, I don't like living in Phoenix, and I don't like having to give quantitative (i.e., A,A-,B+, etc.) grades.
I enjoy showing kids the beauty of mathematics. They have been shackled---SHACKLED!---their entire lives and have seen nothing but SHADOWS of mathematics dancing on the wall. They have memorized formulas---they have not FELT mathematics. I love going in the first few days with a pair of bolt cutters and snapping their chains! I love that thrill of intellectual revolution. And I love that, having instigated the revolution enough times, I can now do so very subtly---all I need is a sentence-long samizdat, the right question here or there, and I can get them to start thinking about math for the first time. I can get them to start operating the same way they do in art class. I like that.
On the other hand, while I get to instigate the revolution, I don't actually get to take part in it. The kids are having their mental worlds upturned by mathematics, but this is the fifth or sixth time I've seen univariate calculus. I understand it a little better every time, but the gains are decidedly at the margins. I am, to be honest, jealous of them: they get to see all this beauty new and fresh. They get go to six classes every day and learn so much about so many different subjects.
There was a conversation in the faculty office a few months ago: if you knew you would forget everything at the end of the day, would you still read Kant? Dickerson said no---reading Kant is difficult and not particularly pleasant; if you're not going to learn anything lasting, what's the point? Fink said yes---the mere process of reading, while difficult, is enjoyable. I said that I'd actually prefer to read Kant that way---because then it would be new and fresh and weird and strange, every time. Of course, the goal then isn't wisdom, which can only be attained through sustained and repeated reading. The goal is a visceral, intellectual thrill---the mental equivalent of riding a rollercoaster.
In addition to watching the violent overthrow of a tyrant, I also enjoy watching the creation and maintenance of a stable political order that induces excellence in its citizens. I'm not just giving the students a charismatic guest lecture on why math is really cool. I'm not just blowing their mind with a single theorem quickie. I enjoy the depth in which I can work with students---I enjoy teaching them for an hour a day, five days a week, for two years. I enjoy watching them genuinely mature as mathematicians. I enjoy listening to my 12th graders have passionate arguments about the connection between logic and reality, and I enjoy watching my 11th graders discover for themselves the entire theory of antidifferentiation. There are long-term benefits, which can be hard to acknowledge on a day-to-day basis.
But which are exactly the point. Except it's not clear what we actually want from our students in the long term, or how teaching them math contributes to that. We don't just want them to be excellent antidifferentiators, or even excellent mathematicians. Those things are far too particular. We want them to be excellent human beings, yes, but what does that mean? How does guiding them toward proving the Pythagorean Theorem by themselves contribute to that? How does learning anything contribute? I think I like what I'm doing, but I'm not actually sure what that is.
I also don't like waking up at 5 AM, I don't like living in Phoenix, and I don't like having to give quantitative (i.e., A,A-,B+, etc.) grades.