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1. The difficulty in this exercise is that most teachers I have had over the course of my math journey have either been out of this world, or just not my style. Therefore, my least favourite teacher wasn't necessarily an ineffective teacher, but I didn't understand his methods.
My least favourite teacher, let's call him Professor Brown, taught by writing notes and having us copy them. However, the notes were not structured in a way that made sense to me. Also, he tended to jump between pages without allowing us the chance to copy the notes, and creating confusion about what we were talking about. We as students were part of the problem because people seldom asked questions in class except to have the page flipped back, and sometimes we were told to copy off of our neighbours instead or to come see him after class. I often went to office hours because I was having trouble with class content but Professor Brown's explanations didn't make any sense to me. Over top of this, one time I asked a question and someone else at office hours tried to explain their method to me, which made sense to me. However, Professor Brown was angry with this student because he said it was his office hours and that the question was posed to him so he would answer it. This lack of flexibility made the professor intimidating, and was detrimental to my learning, causing me to seek outside help for the course. I did alright on tests but the scores almost always scaled up so my mark never reflected my comprehension.
My favourite teacher, let's call him Mr. Ezylryb, had a mixture of structure and exploration in his classroom. Mr. Ezylryb started his classes with an explanation of the topic. During the explanation, he would break to give us time to work on select problems. He would then go one by one to each student and have us answer those questions. If a student didn't know the answer, they could ask for help from the class or the teacher. After the lesson was over, we would have worksheets or an activity to do. Worksheets were generally straightforward and reflected what we learned in class. Activities, however, allowed us to play with concepts. For example, when learning trigonometry, we went down to the wood shop and used compasses and rulers to create designs. We made note of the different properties of each angle and realized certain combinations of angles were impossible to create triangles with. Another activity I remember was a tessellations project where we created a base design, cut it out, and used it as a tracer to create a repeating pattern (keeping the spaces even was especially difficult!). Aside from an engaging class, Mr. Ezylryb was always willing to help out. He helped anyone who came to him with questions during and after class, during breaks, or even after school. He also allowed retests as long as we completed a worksheet that demonstrated we had improved.
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2. A letter from a student who wasn't too happy with my class:
Dear Ms. Sharma,
I hope everything is well with you and your family. I'm writing to you to express my thoughts based on my experience in your class. I'm sorry to say I didn't enjoy your class. I found your explanations confusing, and the notes didn't help much either because they weren't very organized. Particularly, it seemed that we were given several methods for one topic, but the methods weren't really explained well aside from the one that you were most comfortable with and used the most going forward. I also didn't feel comfortable asking you questions because your explanations didn't make sense to me so I just nodded along because I didn't want to look stupid. I don't mean to be rude - I just wanted to let you know my experience in your class in case there are others like me in the future.
Sincerely,
Olivia
A letter from a student who liked my class:
Dear Ms. Sharma,
I hope everything is well with you and your family. I just wanted to let you know that I loved your class. I liked that we didn't just take notes for the whole class and were allowed to experiment with the content a little more. Your tests were really great too because they stayed on topic and even the challenge problems were doable with what we covered in class. I'd also like to thank you for always being willing to help. It was reassuring to know we could come to you if we were confused.
Sincerely,
Tiên
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