Favourite Math Teachers

For me, I liked math and numbers enough where the way math was taught to me didn't make that much of a difference. Looking back on it now, I think that's a testament to the fact that I never had any outstanding experiences in math class. For the most part, all my teachers delivered a lesson on the chalkboard, assigned us questions from the textbook and left us to do the work. This is as much as I can remember from my K-12 education - university is a whole other story we don't need to discuss. 

There are two moments that stand out to me: my sister and one specific experience in grade six. My sister is who got me into math. She's six years older than me and for many years I remember her trying to teach me whatever she was learning. I can't really recall much but I do remember her teaching me extremely basic algebra when I was around six. Another experience I recall was an extracurricular from grade 6. We used to stay after class doing extra math sometimes and I remember once our teacher was taking us through this, what I thought to be, very interesting patterns (I love number patterns). He would write out two rows: term (x) and value (y) and the value was the pattern (ie. 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, etc.). Then, he would ask us to give him the difference of each successive term until we had a constant - in the example above it would be 2. Then he would say, now give me a way to get to the value, from the term so we would give him y = 2x. We kept going, and he started giving us patterns where we constants would come up at the second or third difference (ie. 1, 3, 7, 13, 21, etc.). I remember having so much fun thinking hard, trying different formulas in my head and then finding the right one. Looking back, I'm realizing that he was sort of teaching us polynomials which is cool. I'm also recalling another anecdote from that class. We used to play a game where we would have 4 or 5 piles or 4 or 5 tiles (20 in total). We could pick up 1, 2 or 3 tiles at a time, taking turns. Person who picked up the last tile lost. That was a lot of fun, we figured out that whoever got left with 11 tiles lost. That must be some kind of math too. 

I take it back, my grade 6 teacher was great and I've always maintained him as my favourite teacher. I remember many things from that class vividly. I haven't visited him in several years, God willing when I go back to Toronto in December I'll pay him a visit. I've brought him and his class up too many times in the past couple of weeks not to see him and make him aware of his impact.