My Favourite (and not so favourite) Math Teachers

Favourites: 

In high school, I think that what made my favourite math teacher stand out was a combination of his professionally, passion, and care for students. I actually remember that Math 10 was the first year of high school where math was kind of challenging for me. This teacher really stuck by me when I was struggling.  I remember going to multiple office hours where he pretty much gave me one-on-one tutoring and would continue to repeat example or rephrase reasoning until I finally understood.  

In university, I think what made my favourite math instructors were the clean structure of the class, the relatability of the lectures to the assignments, passion for the subject, and care for the students. I suppose that all my instructors were passionate about math, but I think that my favourite math professors were borderline cartoonish in lectures. I'm not actually sure if their personalities made me enjoy math more, or if their unique personalities was just highly correlated to other important factors to me. 

Not as great: 

I think that the worse instructor I had possessed quite a few opposite qualities of the instructors that I outlined above. The instructor that comes to mind would give lectures that appeared to almost be improvised and would not be able to be recorded into note form, topics sometimes felt like they would jump around, the assignments that they gave were sometimes (literally) impossible to solve, and they would be of very little help in office hours. It was just stressful being in their class and going out of the exam, I had very little idea of how I would do in the course because I knew it would be scaled heavily. I think what annoyed me most about this instructor was just the lack of consideration for the students and our learning.

What I take from it:

I think the biggest hope that I have from these experiences, as a future teacher, is that I am able to convince my students that I care about them. I also think that professionalism and structure in the class is also something that I want to imitate in my practice. Really I think I look to my Grade 10 Math teacher and I inspire to help students the way he helped me. He was just one of those instructors where I don't think I would be where I am without his help.