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My Greatest Math Mentors I adore Math. Math has been my favorite subject for as long as I can remember. In fact, my very first memories in life are lying on the rug solving Math problems with my mother. Though all concepts- from Science to Health- can and should be related to real world experiences, I have always found it easier to see the connection between Math and the real world. I have always felt confident in my abilities to do Math; I have always been enthusiastic about Math. Looking back on the way that I learned Math, I find it very odd that I am confident or enthusiastic about Math at all. In general, my former Math teachers did an excellent job of communicating the procedures for a variety of Math algorithms, but we participated in very few hands-on activities or critical thinking tasks. For most students, this was never enough. They did not understand the reasoning for learning to add and subtract decimals or for even dividing decimals, but I did. The main Math influence in my life- my mother- shared enough challenging problems with me prior to my formal schooling to keep me engaged and confident for life! She helped me understand how the “boring stuff” helps us do the “real stuff.” My mother chose to remain at home as a full-time housewife when many women were choosing to enter the workforce or had either already entered the workforce. Despite the many times other women looked down their noses at my mother, she took pride in her duties and taught me how to perform them myself. In doing so, I learned how to budget a family’s income, how to invest disposable income, how to prepare taxes, how to balance a checkbook, how to comparison shop by finding unit prices (before they were tagged on shelves below food products like they are in every store today), and a number of other daily tasks necessary to keep a family functional in a capitalist society. I cannot say my mother was grooming me to become a housewife myself, but she managed to produce a child- and a female child at that- who absolutely loved anything to do with Math. She sparked an interest in me to become an accountant, a banker, a stockbroker, an entrepreneur, a teacher. In addition to my mother, I remember the influences of my sixth grade Math teacher, Ms. MacArthur. Basically, she taught Math like any other teacher I had up to that point (and afterwards), but she did tie in one amazing activity once a week called Geometric Art. She gave us protractors and we created the most wonderful, colorful pieces of artwork. Every work of art came out differently because we could choose how large we wanted our angles to be.
Approximate Word count = 1827
Approximate Pages = 7.3
(250 words per page double spaced)
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