Favourite and least favourite math teachers

Math has always been a big part of my life, with math classes being present in almost 20 of my 25 years on this planet. Throughout this time, I've had a variety of math teachers: my father who taught me the times tables after dinners, various YouTube videos and playlists, and high school math teachers. For this response, I want to highlight the first winter term of last school year, when I took two 300-level math courses at UBC to get into this program. During this time, I experienced two professors: one that I've hailed as the best, and the other being one I view far less favourably.

My all-time greatest UBC math course professor was phenomenal during my time in Calculus IV. While a basic point, I have to note his professionalism. He had a clear syllabus outlining everything we needed to know during the class, whenever he couldn't make it we would get ample warning and a recording or move lectures to Zoom (if he was sick, for example), and all notes and other reference materials were clearly organized. In addition, marking was rapid, which was great for getting feedback and knowing how we were doing. Exams were also very fair, with no surprises. Everything so far may feel like a bare minimum, but when contrasted with the other professor, the completeness of his professionalism shined greatly and I want to be a teacher who can do the same - no surprises, communicating, and well organized.

Aside from that, he was also personable, passionate, and had a sense of humour. (He also made sure the class knew he was a Swiftie, which added to the funniness.) Because of this, he was very approachable, and we all knew that if we had a concern or question, it would be addressed with utmost care and consideration. The course also had a Piazza forum set up, which he participated in very actively with great attention to detail. Before each exam, he would set aside time for everyone to practice with a set of NEW practice questions and walk around to observe and check in with students. As such, I and many others in the class could feel his genuine care for our learning, making us all want to do our very best for him and ourselves. 

If I were to use attributes to describe this professor, some things that come to mind are caring, competent, confident, and charismatic. A takeaway I got from this is that if you go above and beyond as a teacher, the students will return the favour. The high class averages for assignments, exams and the final grade are some pieces of evidence of this, and I want to note: scaling was very unlikely to have happened. Anecdotal conversations with my classmates also reflected these sentiments, as well as the large Piazza "helpful" or "thank you" counts when the professor replied to grateful thank you threads, and the perfect 5/5 RateMyProfessor reviews.

On the other hand, the other professor (for an intro course on complex variables) felt like he was lacking in many aspects. Sure, he got the bare minimum done: assign homework related to the lectures, do lectures, and administer exams. He was also a nice person, so at least he was approachable after class. This is where the similarities end. 

The biggest issue was his attention to the class, or lack thereof. One time, when my friend raised his hand up, I turned on a stopwatch to see how long it would take for the professor to notice. The professor had plenty of opportunities to pause and ask for questions (which he never did), but it took almost 4 minutes before even looking up to address my friend! While he was receptive to a small verbal nudge, this complete lack of attention towards the large audience felt inexcusable. Additionally, his speaking voice was quiet and his notes were particularly hard to decipher, which made basic note-taking and listening difficult. Exam and assignment feedback also took a long time, which made gauging ourselves a frustrating process. He also struggled to respond to Piazza posts at all, which made us feel disconnected. While the previous professor made us all want to do well, this one created a confusing and unnecessarily difficult experience.

This term was the only term in my entire 7 years taking UBC courses where I filled out professor evaluation forms (for both of them), partly due to the stark contrast of teaching quality in front of me. Both professors highlighted many things that would serve as good example of what and what not to do, from bare minimum tasks, to how I fit myself into the class' social ecosystem. The pains of the latter professor and the sheer joy and passion of the former have certainly inspired me to strive towards being a teacher more like the former, and I feel that I can look back at this articles for ways to conduct myself and my classes as a means to achieve it.

EDIT:

In my response above, I went into the strategies and methods that each of the professors exhibited. Here, I hope to elaborate a bit further on how they directly impacted my learning and the outcomes of said strategies and methods. 

With my favourite professor, I mentioned the many ways that he exhibited professionalism, confidence, and approachability. I feel that because of his professionalism, I felt confidence in him. In EPSE 308, we discussed the 5 parts of motivation, but I would like to draw attention to credibility, which concerns the capacity of a student to believe in their teacher. Credibility could be split further into care, competence, and passion, which my MATH 317 professor exhibited wonderfully as described above. Just because I was able to believe in my professor wholeheartedly, it made myself and my classmates intrinsically put in more work to improve. We were very active in helping each other, which gave us opportunities to teach each other (and teaching is one of the best ways to learn). As a result of me teaching and answering a lot of people on Piazza and on the course group chat before the final exam, I went in with a strongly rooted understanding. With minimal reference to my cheat sheet, I confidently finished the entire exam and got a final course grade that I felt reflected my learning at the time. Even now, with most of the content being forgotten, I have a strong feeling that I can relearn the material very quickly if need be, which I cannot say for MATH 300's content. To finish this part off, I also want to say that because the professor was so active on giving feedback on Piazza and adding helpful comments on returned exams, we gained the benefits of constant formative feedback. Knowing if we were off-track early meant that unnecessary stumbling time was saved, but at the same time we were given room to struggle through questions as a way to learn. I believe that this feedback component is particularly important, and once again, the "bad" professor lacked in this department as well.

The points I raised regarding the MATH 300 professor included inattentiveness, lack of confidence, and an absence of feedback within a reasonable timeframe. While the care, competence, and passion of the "favourite" professor above led to great results, the opposite led to poor learning, poor motivation, and overall a poor educational experience. For context, MATH 300 is an introductory course to complex variables, which is inherently a more challenging but very interesting topic especially once you explore zeroes, multifunctions, integrals, and all the intricate workings of the complex number system. Because of the professor's unpreparedness, I can say that the care and competence components were lacking. He was a passionate person about the topic, but it wasn't enough to save his credibility as my motivation dropped with my fellow front-row seated friends. There were frequent stretches of pausing to reread notes, which made me wonder if he was even qualified to teach! In conjunction with the traditional mind-numbing lecture-assignment-exam format that has shown to be weak for the learning process (compared to engagement and activity, which the professor wasn't able to meet the most basic criteria of eye contact engagement), the content was not delivered well with messy handwriting, soft speaking, and all these other factors that made myself tune out and doodle on my notes instead, which made me less prepared. For the final exam, my preparations were done by watching a YouTube playlist covering the same contents, and I feel that it was responsible for me surviving the course. Unlike MATH 317, I don't think I could relearn the content as quickly because my mentality was driven to a survival instinct where I tried to game the assignments and exams such that I could get a high score. The professor's pedagogy demotivated my learning for an inherently interesting subject, and instead amplified the difficult aspect of it, which in turn created a feedback loop of killing my motivation. My exams were disastrous attempts to "salvage as many points I can get" and I got bogged down by the UBC math exam specialty of time crunching, and when everyone got scaled up, the average was still low and I felt like I didn't earn my above-average grade at all considering how little was done by the professor to ensure retention and instilling of ideas. To sum up why I didn't like my 300 professor, it's because he was just a script-reader reading the script for the first time, which is in stark contrast to the confident, prepared style of my favourite professor.