My favourite math teacher is my grade 12 math teacher. He was very jolly and had a huge sense of responsibility. Being the head of athletics as well as teaching a computer science class, juggling between all of these tasks and maintaining a good teaching attitude made many people look up to him. He explained the math problems using different colours on the smartboard, so it captivates people's attention. Telling stories as well casually in class and jokingly says "thank you, I was just testing you" whenever someone points out his mistake. When things did get out of hand he would tell us to just do what we want, sit down, and we would realize we misbehaved over the limit. He comes back up and explains he genuinely cares for our learning, but if we don't give him the chance to speak/present, then we might as well do it ourselves - which isn't feasible. But this rarely happened and the class was in good shape most of the time. So he was a very reasonable person overall, caring for the well-being and the learning engagement of his students, which inspired me to continue in his work. My least favourite math teacher was a math professor. For many profs, they are very smart in their own eyes because they have had many years of training and accumulated lots of knowledge. He would speak demeaningly to students. When we struggled, he wouldn't really explain the concept to us, but just tells us to refer to the textbook he wrote. Overall he wasn't helpful and didn't build strong relationships with the students. This is a red flag for me since having good communication with students is a good start for further engagement and exploration for them.
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Thanks for this interesting reflection. The contrast between these two teachers is mostly about their attitudes towards students and student learning -- their humanity and respect (or lack of the above), rather than solely about their knowledge of mathematics as a discipline. Role models are very important to us as we work on our teaching throughout our careers!
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