Four years of schooling cumulate into one point, graduation.  Still, what does the fact that I’m graduating mean? I’m graduating with a degree in Mathematics Education so I can go on to teach students mathematics.  I’ve spent the last four years learning the how to’s, and the deeper mathematics concepts so now, as I go to impart knowledge on young people’s minds, I’m hopefully prepared.

With that in mind, graduation becomes a stepping stone into real live, where I need to actually get a job. Getting a job, especially a teaching job, can be daunting.  The process is: Apply, Interview, Demo, Get hired.  Well, I did start applying, and then got an interview (for which I was incredibly nervous about).  That all amounted to me getting called back for a demo.  Say what?! Yes a demo! This means that I needed to go in and teach a lesson to a class for the administration to see if they liked my teaching! So that’s what I did! This past Friday I went into an amazing school, with wonderful philosophies of teaching, and went to teaching a demo.  I was so nervous, but I went and, if I do say so myself, I conquered.  Not necessarily conquered in the idea of getting a job, but conqured some of my own hesitancies.

Goldfish Colors

My lesson focused on the Strong Law of numbers.  As a class we explored how the more experiments we do, the average, or mean of the collected data, gets closer to the Expected Value.  This is a valuable conceptual lesson for understanding why we can use parameters, like n*p=µ in statistics, and thus I thought it would be a fun way to discover it if we did our own experiments with goldfish.

Honestly, it was the most fun I ever had teaching a lesson, and after my confidence was at an all time high for the next three days.  I can’t say that it was a perfect lesson, by any means.  What I can say is that, for the first time, I wasn’t nervous about a major lesson, but rather had fun teaching a lesson I felt confident in, and a lesson that I knew embodied my own philosophies of teaching.

My take-away from that entire experience is that, even if I don’t get the job, I feel more confident in myself, and my ability to impart knowledge into the lives of my future students.

As I write that I’m chuckling to myself.  Today marked the last undergraduate assignment that I ever will need to hand in (with the exception of possible post-baccalaureate in Biology) – today was the deadline for my educational portfolio.  Sprawled out across the pages of my portfolio are visions of the teacher that I want to be – someone who makes a difference in the lives of students.  My demo lesson was ideally placed in the timeframe of my life in that, as I handed in my portfolio today, I handed it in with the knowledge that I am capable of reaching my goals as a teacher, all because of that simple experience from Friday.  I have more than empty philosophies, and unfruitful ideas, but I have the ability to act upon my knowledge; I have the ability to actually impart onto my future students the ultimate goal, that math truly is beautiful.