Teacher Essay: Reflections on Teaching

       Teachers nowadays are required to have a portfolio. This portfolio is a collection of everything about a teacher: his/her credentials, achievements, linkages and many other important and relevant information. Part of this portfolio is for the teacher to write his/her reflection on teaching. And let me share to you my own personal reflection and insights about teaching which I have written in my personal portfolio. These reflections are actually the views and philosophy I uphold about teaching as far as my experiences, values and my principles are concerned. You may or may not agree with me...

Teaching for me really isn’t just a profession. It is a vocation. It requires self-sacrifice, and being able to offer oneself for the sake of the students. This job may not be one of the highest paid jobs in this world, but I think it is on top of the most rewarding and self-fulfilling job man has created. It is so because teaching creates other professions. This may sound cliché but this really is true. We will never have doctors, lawyers, architects and any other profession if not for a teacher who has painstakingly taught us and saved us from ignorance.

Being a teacher as far as my experience is concerned has opened my eyes to a lot of things. A teacher who may have exemplary credentials on his/her back can never be sure if he/she will be successful inside the classroom. It hit me in my head that I should not be complacent about myself. That there are things I need to improve and change about myself. I need to think creatively, innovatively and resourcefully in order to make my class successful. I need to prepare each and every day. Every day is always a brand new day. What happens inside the classroom is always unpredictable.

For me, a true “called” teacher isn’t just a person who teaches and comply all the things required by the curriculum. It is very true that to be a teacher, one has to be competent: an expert of his/her subject matter, has a command on the medium of instruction, a manager of his/her own right inside the classroom and has mastered the art of pedagogy. And I think these teachers are many. However, I can’t ignore the fact that to be a teacher, one also has to have the right attitude, the enthusiasm to teach, the respect to the dignity of the teaching profession, the care and love for the students, and to love learning itself. And I must say these teachers are rare. How I wish that I may belong to these rare finds.

As a teacher I wish to win the hearts of my students. I want them to be inspired, to be genuinely motivated to learn. I want them to remember me as a kind of teacher who has made them learn not by coercion but rather by inspiration. To be honest, I would rather wish to win the hearts of my students than to win the hearts of my superiors. I teach not for my superiors to be impressed of me. I teach for my students. They are my honest and sincere critics. This drives me to improve myself more and more every single day that I am a teacher.

The mediocre teacher tells.  The good teacher explains.  The superior teacher demonstrates.  The great teacher inspires.  ~William Arthur Ward

I personally believe that teachers are most remembered not on how they have made students learn, but rather on how they have made the students feel. And because of this, I learned to be very sensitive with the way I deal with my pupils. I learned to let them feel the care, concern and warmth of a teacher. I may sometimes hurt my students’ feelings intentionally or unintentionally, but I hope they know that learning sometimes is a painful process. We have to offer sacrifices and that includes giving up our old, comfortable but wrong ways. And to wake ourselves up from these wrong ways, we have to slap our face (and I don’t mean this literallyJ). I sometimes do this not because I want to but I have to.

Based on my experiences, I learned that we need first and foremost to motivate our learners. As Horace Mann said, teaching learners without motivating and inspiring them is like hammering a cold iron. As a teacher, I need to make them appreciate and develop the love for learning. They will never, ever learn unless they allow learning to occur in their minds. Learning is an experience which occurs inside the learner and is activated by the learner. This poses me a challenge, that as a teacher, I really need to think of various, creative and enjoyable activities that can arouse my students’ desire to learn.

Finally, I personally adhere that teachers nowadays must focus on the moral and the value side of learning. Yes, it is true that we need to make our learners competent, equipped with all the skills and knowledge necessary for them to become globally competitive. However, we need to mold well-rounded individuals, future citizens that can raise and morally recover our world’s present condition. It is through values that our learners can create meaning and connect the content and skills they learn to their lives. That they can use their learning for the common good, and make positive changes not only to their lives or family’s lives, but rather to other people as well, and to the world as a whole. Without focusing on values, we teachers may create persons with big heads but small hearts, intellectual giants but emotional dwarfs.

To end this, I hope and pray that God will provide me more strength and power to fulfill this mission. Sometimes, part of being a teacher is accepting the reality that not all students will appreciate you. Some students may not listen to you, some will just forget you and the worst, some will disrespect and back-stab you. And as a human being, this weakens me as a teacher. But like God who was also a teacher Himself, He never hated His students despite the neglect and betrayal He experienced. I hope that I can also be the same despite of my shortcomings. Bearing in mind that teaching and making others learn without asking in return is enough as a reward itself.

A teacher's purpose is not to create students in his own image, but to develop students who can create their own image..  ~Author Unknown

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Dyscalculia: Nature and Definition

      After my comprehensive examinations this December, and hopefully getting a passing grade, I will be starting doing my thesis. And until now, I am still undecided as to what topic will I be doing. Actually, I am torn between two exceptionalities: dyscalculia or ADHD. I think both of these exceptionalities are anonymously pervasive in regular classrooms so I really want to tackle these conditions. Anyways, let me discuss to you dyscalculia. I am currently a Mathematics teacher and this condition really caught my interest since most if not all students are more or less poor or underachieved in Math. Perhaps knowing about this condition may possibly enlighten educators or teachers that some students are not necessarily dumb or dull with Mathematics. It just so happened that they have this certain disability and that this should be given due considerations.
    This is just one of the posts in my series of discussion dedicated to dyscalculia. I really hope that teachers and parents will find these helpful especially in understanding their child who has difficulty in math.

Definition of Dyscalculia

Dyscalculia is a term referring to a wide range of life-long learning disabilities involving math. There is no single form of math disability, and difficulties vary from person to person and affect people differently in school and throughout life (National Center for Learning Disabilities, 2006).  

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, otherwise known as DSM listed dyscalculia as mathematics disorder (DSM-IV 315.1) and defines it as:

“A. Mathematical ability, as measured by individually administered standardized tests, is substantially below that expected given the person's chronological age, measured intelligence, and age-appropriate education.

B. The disturbance in Criterion A significantly interferes with academic achievement or activities of daily living that require mathematical ability.

C. If a sensory deficit is present, the difficulties in mathematical ability are in excess of those usually associated with it.”

The ongoing development for DSM-V proposes that the word “dyscalculia” be consistently used from “mathematics disorder” and should be defined as:

“A. Difficulties in production or comprehension of quantities, numerical symbols, or basic arithmetic operations that are not consistent with the person's chronological age, educational opportunities, or intellectual abilities.

Multiple sources of information are to be used to assess numerical, arithmetic, and arithmetic-related abilities, one of which must be an individually administered, culturally appropriate, and psychometrically sound standardized measure of these skills.

B.    The disturbance in criterion A, without accommodations, significantly interferes with academic achievement or activities of daily living that require these numerical skills.”

In addition, the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems by the World Health Organization listed dyscalculia as specific disorder of arithmetical skills (ICD 10 F81.2). According to ICD, dyscalculia “involves a specific impairment in arithmetical skills that is not solely explicable on the basis of general mental retardation or of inadequate schooling. The deficit concerns mastery of basic computational skills of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division rather than of the more abstract mathematical skills involved in algebra, trigonometry, geometry, or calculus”( WHO ICD 10 F81.2).

IDEA on the other hand includes dyscalculia as a specific learning disability or a disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes that includes performing or doing mathematical calculations. Just like any specific learning disability, individuals with dyscalculia may have more or less normal intelligence and may just have trouble performing specific types of skills or completing a task.

Causes

There is no universal consensus about the causes of dyscalculia. There are different investigations about the roots of dyscalculia considering various aspects such as neurology, memory, genetics and others. One popular view is that dyscalculia has been associated to dysfunction of mathematical processes and areas in the brain.

Recent research suggests dyscalculia results from brain impairment in areas of the brain known to process mathematics (specific parts of the parietal lobes, which may have been caused by genetic and developmental disorders such as Turner’s syndrome, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, and low birth weight (Isaacs et al., 2001; Kopera-Frye et al., 1996; Molko et al., 2003). Hereditary influences may also play a part since parents and siblings of a child with dyscalculia are ten times more likely to have dyscalculia than members of general population. According to Shalev and Gross-Tur(2001), fifty-percent of the siblings of pupils with dyscalculia can be expected to have the condition as well. Dyscalculia appears to be heritable, but this does not mean that all cases of dyscalculia are inherited.

Symptoms

According to Dimalanta(2009), the following are the common symptoms of a child/individual with dyscalculia:

a.    Normal or accelerated language acquisition: verbal, reading, writing Poetic ability. Good visual memory for the printed word. Good in the areas of science (until a level requiring higher math skills is reached), geometry (figures with logic not formulas), and creative arts.

b.    Difficulty with the abstract concepts of time and direction. Inability to recall schedules, and sequences of past or future events. Unable to keep track of time. May be chronically late.

c.    Inconsistent results in addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Poor mental math ability. Poor with money and credit. Cannot do financial planning or budgeting. Checkbooks not balanced. Short term, not long term financial thinking. Fails to see big financial picture. May have fear of money and cash transactions. May be unable to mentally figure change due back, the amounts to pay for tips, taxes, etc.

d.    When writing, reading and recalling numbers, these common mistakes are made: number additions, substitutions, transpositions, omissions, and reversals.

e.    Inability to grasp and remember math concepts, rules, formulas, sequence (order of operations), and basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and division facts. Poor long term memory (retention & retrieval) of concept mastery- may be able to perform math operations one day, but draw a blank the next. May be able to do book work but fails all tests and quizzes.

f.     May be unable to comprehend or “picture” mechanical processes. Lack “big picture or whole picture” thinking. Poor ability to “visualize or picture” the location of the numbers on the face of a clock, the geographical locations of states, countries, oceans, streets and the like.

g.    Poor memory for the “layout” of things. Gets lost or disoriented easily. May have a poor sense of direction. May have difficulty grasping concepts of formal music education. Difficulty sight-reading music or learning fingering to play an instrument.

h.    May have poor athletic coordination, difficulty keeping up with rapidly changing physical directions like in aerobic, dance, and exercise classes. Difficulty remembering dance step sequences, rules for playing sports.

i.      Difficulty keeping score during games, or difficulty remembering how to keep score in games, like bowling, etc. Often looses track of whose turn it is during games, like cards and board games. Limited strategic planning ability for games like chess.

Assessment and Diagnosis

At the time of writing the main method for finding objective evidence of dyscalculia is by using the Dyscalculia Screener devised by Brian Butterworth (2003). This is a computer-based test that measures reaction times which are then compared with other measures that have been found by Professor Butterworth to be associated with the condition.

Intelligence tests are also conducted such as the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WAIS-IV) to identify the child’s overall intelligence score that may help define the strengths and weaknesses that child may have in relation to mathematics. It has to be noted that children with dyscalculia have more or less average or normal and intelligences, and that learning disabilities such as dyscalculia is not brought about by other conditions like intellectual disability, autism and others.

Some assessment procedures and tests can also be conducted to test the co-occurring conditions that may have caused the difficulty in learning mathematics. These include:

a.    specifi c language delay

b.    dyscalculia

c.    dyslexia

d.    dyspraxia

e.    maths anxiety

f.     attention defi cit disorder (ADD) or with hyperactivity (ADHD)

g.    understanding and using the language of maths.