Teaching Philosophy 

Sharing with students the enlightenment power of mathematics, imparting students with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and inviting students to experience freedom through the exercise of critical thinking is. Why. I. Teach. In return, teaching gives me something priceless: a sense of purpose. In the next pages, I’ll reflect on my teaching practice. As you’ll see, it’s not perfect practice. It has mistakes and some degrees of failures in it. But it also has many beautiful moments. This is my story in teaching. And it begins with a compass. There’s something very dynamic and kinetic in the act of teaching. Teaching is about setting in motion a shared experience in knowledge. It’s a journey. It’s a voyage in which the travelers, both the students and the teacher, are the destination. Four cardinal values orient me in my teaching activities. They form my teaching compass: 1) students, 2) passion, 3) performance, 4) expectations. In my classroom, they are my North, South, East and West.

As Sam Pickering rightly points out in his Letters to a Teacher, “although the teacher’s “self” affects classrooms, students matter more than we do”. While I teach out of who I am, the entire exercise of teaching is not about me. It’s about the students. It’s about the students becoming themselves, transformed versions of themselves, better versions of themselves, e-du-ca-ted versions of themselves. The point of teaching, for me, is to reveal to students another version of who they can be. Facilitating for the students this act of self-revelation through knowledge gives me in return something priceless: a sense of purpose.

Doing this requires work. In the Art of Teaching, Jay Parini worded it well: “A class is a performance, and the teacher must craft each lecture or discussion as one might craft a poem or story. Students really connect with the material of a literature course (or any other type of course for that matter) when that material is performed, inhabited, dare I say: lived. Why? Because performance in the delivery invites students to, in turn, perform (in) their own learning. It shows the material as a friendly and habitable place. A human place. But the performance is only as good as its content. Mere theatricalities in the classroom can never substitute for depth and meaning. Performance must only be at the service of the material and always push the progression of knowledge. It is the wind under the students’ wings of learning.

I expect a lot from myself. Consequently, I expect a lot from my students. I expect effort. Dare I say: discomfort, loss, and even vertigo. I teach by the very definition of education, from the Latin “e/ductere”, literally, to “be driven out”. But out of what? Out of who you are, out to another you, a you elevated by new knowledge. Meeting otherness is never comfortable or easy. But only otherness, strangeness, can educate us. My teaching methods are student-centered. But the content of my lessons is not. The mirror I put in front of my students is not a complacent one. It requires work, attention, and respect. It’s tough love. But I don’t teach to be loved or to even be liked. I teach so students can understand, know, respect and, consequently, love themselves.