Mathematics Educators Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for those involved in the field of teaching mathematics. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
If you were starting to teach now (as I am), what advice you wish you had gotten?
Things as:
EDIT: I know this is a bit generic, but here is a bit more of information about my situation. I will be teaching high school level math. Here in my school we teach everything, so advice on any subject is welcome.
I will tell you as a previous teacher my hope that I wish I didn't have was that I was going to teach my students math and that they would understand because I was going to teach them the "how". This is an unrealistic goal (particularly for a beginning teacher). This pessimistic view will probably be met with down votes, but you need to hear it as a beginning teacher. You should lower your expectations.
Even if you are a great teacher, it's unlikely that you will be successful for your first few years. You need to lower your expectations. You need to both lower your expectations for what you think you can teach and, especially, lower your expectations of what your students already know. You are likely going to have to reteach many topics that you think are prerequisites to your course (whether it be geometry, pre-cal, algebra, etc.). You cannot teach assuming your students already understand/know the requisite skills.
Assuming this is for high school/junior high education, the thing I wish I had been more knowledgeable about was classroom management. This is far more important that your knowledge of mathematical topics. If you assume that you are going to keep your students' attention by explaining things in the most perfect way then you are seriously mistaken. High school and junior high students are not in your classroom to learn about math, they are in the classroom because they are forced to be there and I guarantee that a majority of your students don't want to be there.
