Effective Teaching

I really liked most of my high school teachers. 

And I was good at math until I hit precalc. I understood all of our lessons and homework assignments. Then when a test came around, nothing made sense. I could never figure out why the tests seemed so alien when everything else made perfect sense. 

Then just a few months ago I was talking to someone about math classes and I mentioned this. And she said,  "Well, she just wasn't a very good teacher then."

And I realized she was right. A teacher isn't supposed to make the tests so incomprehensible that you screw them up no matter how good you are in the rest of class. 

I also loved my English teachers, but I never seemed to be able to write essays to their liking, no matter how much I asked them what I was doing wrong.

And I've already mentioned what I thought about the reading selections we had in high school. Ugh. Yeah, they had some sort of message. But the messages were lost in how dark everything was. I wonder how much we actually discussed the messages or the history behind the books, because I remember very little of that. But that may be because my memories of those classes were very tainted by my loathing for most of the books XD