I experienced the education system in the Philippines up to about grade 2 and my education experience was not positive.  When I was younger, I had this separation anxiety from my mom, every time she would drop me off school I felt like she was never going to come back, and this anxiety was so bad where it affected my school work.  I couldn’t concentrate, all I worried about was getting home and seeing my mom and because of this I started to get real behind on all the learning that I was supposed to be paying attention on in class.  This was especially evident in my ability to do math.  I remember my teacher asking students to finish math problems on the board which I knew I could never figure out so I always had my head down and make no eye contact so that I wouldn’t be called or picked on. 

        

        During my elementary school experience in Canada I remember the math portions of the class having such heavy importance on the multiplication times table.  I remember having to do those 1 minute answer as many multiple question as you can and struggled with in.  I knew that my parents found out about my poor performance, so my mom would make me stand at a corner and loudly state the multiplication table from 1 – 9.  Every time I made an error or was too slow to answer the next number my mom would make me redo the whole thing.  I remember becoming so frustrated because of the mistakes I did because I wasn’t allowed to sit or move until I completed the whole thing without any mistakes.  When I was I high school I guess my mom’s teaching strategy worked because those “mad minutes” showed up repeatedly in math class. 

           

        Slowly I got the hang of understand math concepts and patterns to the point where I started to like and maybe even love math.  I felt that I had high self-efficacy in the math so I took higher levels of math class, and took physics 11 and 12 during my senior year and passed with flying colors.  In the article by OECD (2013), the authors talk about how your “Mathematics self-beliefs have an impact on learning and performance on several levels: cognitive, motivational, affective and decision-making” (80), which speaks true about my own experience and my own self-belief about what I believe I can accomplish.  Due to this self-efficacy, I could stay motivated even through difficult problems which then helped me see patterns within the problems presented in class.  However, looking back now I can’t help but questions did I really obtain conceptual understanding?  There was a point where math felt so easy for and started to give advice such as, “all you really have to know is the formula, ones you know the formula just plug and chug”.

           

        Being in PDP now and surrounded with fellow colleagues who want to be math teachers, I can’t help but be amazed at their ability to take their knowledge and construct it in a way that one can easily understand.  For example, during our passion project during 401/402 I had a colleague teach probability and had difficult components such as adding and subtracting fractions which many including myself is difficult to do by head.  However, the way he described it to me step by step helped me create an image in my head that helped me visualize what the answer was without using a calculator.  This made me question my own understanding about math concepts, and questioned whether I even truly understood the process, or was I just re-iterating what the teacher was doing but just applying it to other questions that were alike?

           

        During my undergrad because I had a high self-belief in mathematics, I continues to take math related courses such first year algebra and physics.  Ones I got to second year algebra there was about only 2 other girls the class and the rest were boys.  The professor I had at the time was French had a thick accent, and taught trigonometry the first day which I thought I was good at.  However, because I couldn’t really understand what my professor was saying and annoyed at the fact that the same boy kept answering all the question without really explaining how made me frustrated.  I ended up dropping the class after the second day. 

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Reference

OECD.  (2013), Mathematics Self-Beliefs and Participation in Mathematics-Related Activities.  Retrieved from http://www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/PISA2012-Vol3-Chap4.pdf