A Warm Hello Sue
Regarding the challenges of students learning Math and teachers trying to teach Math I have a personal experience I would like to share with you. Also, it forms the basis of why I want to teach and when I say teach, I feel for me, my style is more of a facilitator of learning.
I am an INFP according to the MBTI personality testing and I come from a lineage of women who are highly intuitive and perceptive. When I was in Grade 9 I found that I could answer complex math problems with a fairly high level of accuracy. However, when asked by the teacher to explain my process and write it on the board, I simply could not. My process felt random and non-linear and I was not able to translate into language how I arrived at the answer. This was my math failure and it affected me in a very big way.
I concluded that I must not be very bright and felt so embarrassed that I eventually dropped out of the academic program and enrolled in the vocational stream of students. Now, I am a bright woman and I love learning, but I could not understand my gift and no one could explain my learning style to me.
I did eventually, go on to college and take those math courses again and I was able to follow a step by step process to arriving at the answer, but I still thought I was not very bright.
Finally, in the first year of my graduate studies I learned through Myers Briggs that intuitive learners often know the answers to math problems without knowing the process for which they arrived at the answer. There it was! I finally understood the WHY of my math challenge and it was related to how I take in information and process it. What a relief!
So, this story forms a part of my TPS as I understand that far to often the learning environment only recognizes the learning styles of a percentage of students. Most of my life has been dedicated to teaching in community based learning programs.