The Discussion In Class About The Paper

    In Monday's class, we had an interesting discussion about our first paper. I shared my paper with Michael and Victoria.Although we had a small group which was only 3 people, we had an interesting conversation about the paper we wrote. After the exchange of paper, I got Michael's. Michael's interviewee is his grandmother.His grandmother is a high school teacher and in that reason she can help him a lot in this paper. She told him how to attract the audience and catch everyone's interests. 

    

    Then,I thought about my grandmother. My grandmother is a teacher too. She teaches chemistry in the university. When I was in the middle school learning chemistry, evey time I had questions she would teach me patiently and point out the mistakes I made. Time flies, now she needs the help of the glasses and the educational books to solve the problems because she is quite old. I hope that I could spend more time with her but due to her heart issue she cannot fly a long time. I could only use online chatting apps to talk with her and I missed her a lot. I want to become a math teacher like her in the future and I think I won't let her down.

The Experience of Being a Math Teacher

    I am in college now so in summer vacation I would like to find jobs and gain the experience in the society. Like my grandma, she was a chemistry teacher in a famous university in Shanghai, I want to be a math teacher in the future. I have set up my goal since I was 10 years old. Although my parents helped me to find some jobs in the business field last year, my high school teacher offered me a math tutoring job in the continuation class in the summer vacation. I was so excited when I knew that I was able to become a teacher in a young age and my dream came true.
    At first, I thought it was easy to become a teacher and it was just a job to tell the knowledge to the students. But I was shocked when my teacher handed me three 400-page books and told me to finish reading it in a week. Fortunately, I have learned more than 70% of the knowledge in the book in high school and college. It still took me a long time to read these books and I started feeling the difficulty of being a teacher. I was so nervous in the classroom in the first class even I prepared a long time and made a lot of notes. I tried to be a funny teacher and the feedback from students was good.
    I have taught math a month and I find that become a teacher is not as easy as I think before. A teacher needs to do enormous preparation not only the knowledge in the books but also the questions that students may ask. The teachers’ responsibility is heavy. This experience made me respect every kind of job more and learn math better. I hope I can get more opportunities in the future.

Review of the Article And Apply to Myself

After reading the article “Who Are You And What Are You Doing Here?” written by Mark Edmundson in class, I learn some ideas about my future study in the college and I find that I made a wise choice about my major from his experience and examples. I am sophomore and math major now. My major was business management in the first year. That was my parents’ will that they want me to be a successful businessman in the future. Every year there are many Chinese students come to America and choose to learn business major. I do not like to follow the big trend and become normal. After finishing my first semester study, I decided to change my major because I would like to learn something challenging.

Like Edmundson said in the article, we need to fight to get a real educationI love solving problems and discover new things so I choose maths as my new major. To me, it is a new area but a more funny one. Comparing with the business class, there is more practice than theoretical knowledge. In the article, it mentions that the imagination is an important part in study. In mathematics, imagination plays an significant role and without it, there are fewer theorems than we know now. Moreover, Edmundson states that the end for students is a good job. There are so many famous professors in the maths area so I hope one day I can get a chance to reach that achievement. Rome was not built in a day. I will work hard on maths and other classes so I can realize my goal step by step.