To begin; to start all over again. It creates a unique feeling: a mixture of excitement and fatigue. In mid-career, it is difficult to go from being the expert to being the novice again.
Last year, at the age of 46, I taught geometry for the first time. I’ve taught Latin and Greek in schools for over 20 years, grades seven through 12 and beyond. My master’s degree is in classics and I majored in classics as an undergraduate. I began learning Latin in seventh grade and Greek in ninth grade.
On the first page of the old-fashioned Greek primer I had used as a kid was the quote, ““υρχ λγοζ” John I.1: “In the beginning was the word.” That caught my attention right away. A few chapters later, though, we came across something even more surprising, “τ το ατο σα κα λλ λοιζ στ ν σα” “things equal to the same thing are also equal to each other.” The masters Crosby and Schaeffer did me the favor of including several other sentences straight from Euclid’s Elements, the foundational work of what we know as geometry.
I didn’t read Euclid again for almost 20 years. My curiosity for Greek mathematics welled up occasionally as I came across references. Finally, I decided to spend time studying Euclid and the circuitous journey of Greek mathematics and science from Greece into the early European universities. I wrote up a one-week unit on Euclid to use in our geometry classes and collected some materials that would be good for some fun in my Greek and Latin classes.
I forgot about geometry for a long time and moved away from classics, joining the technology department and taking on a whole new challenge. One of the administrative duties I assumed was academic scheduling. In the process of scheduling the 2006–2007 academic year, I realized that we were half a teacher short in a math department that was already stretched. I offered to cover one geometry section.
That summer, I sat with my textbook in free moments and solved one problem after another, checking my work against the answer key. There were times when I found it tedious. I felt I was wasting my time, starting at such a basic level. I am a well-trained classicist, a self-taught database programmer, a competent network manager, a savvy administrator, but just a beginning geometry teacher. I found the problems difficult sometimes. I made mistakes.
Around the second week of school, I realized happily that the kids were learning the material. I was using all my old teaching techniques but I sometimes got ahead of myself. For example, I knew I wanted to do about seven minutes of demonstration, give about two minutes for questions, then assign five problems for everyone to work on in groups, and then finish with a contest to see who could get the solutions right. I had done the problems; I was prepared for class; the only problem was that I simply didn’t know geometry as well as I knew Latin and Greek. I was a beginner: enthusiasm, adventure, discovery, but no experience.
About the time that interim grades were reported, complaints started coming in. We are in an age of professionalism in independent schools. Try hiring a girls’ varsity soccer coach who last played in high school and you immediately understand this. Parents want more than just amateurs, they want pros. The teacher-counselor-coach model gets harder and harder to sustain.
I was not intimidated, but what struck me was this: how is a novice teacher expected to navigate these waters? With little or no experience, the classroom is daunting and the parents more so. My experience renewed my respect for the courage of novice teachers and for the competence, knowledge, and authority of master teachers.
My career as a mathematician is on hold for now. This year, I am filling a gap in the classics department, teaching a beginning Greek class. I have not taught beginning Greek in a long time but the class challenges me at a completely different level than geometry had the year before. It is more like the experience of a trained pianist responding to a favorite piece, changing dynamics to adapt to his mood and audience, than the experience of a nervous amateur sweating it out in an audition.
My students missed something because they didn’t have a “geometry pro” giving them their lessons, but, if they were paying attention, they gained an understanding of how to begin something. I was their “beginner pro:” learning, adapting, correcting, and growing as an adult. If we want our students to be life-long learners, we should give them examples. Pasting it into our mission statements will not do the job; we should show them.
