Introduction
I have been teaching at Central Jr. and Sr. High School, a school that goes from 7-12 grade, for two years. I was lucky enough to have taught ninth grade and then eighth grade the following year. Many would not think of this as beneficial to their career, but being able to understand what kind of support students need the most when they get to high school allows me to attack these issues when they are in the eighth grade. There was not much difference between eighth graders and ninth graders in the way that they thought about math. Many of them believed math was something they would never understand. That pessimism came from their elementary and middle school experiences. When teaching students who have gone through a great deal of trauma in their lives and who feel as if they have no way of amounting to anything, you must find ways to engage them or hear them out, as a first step towards clarifying misconceptions they might have had when they were younger. My students have a great deal of potential, but because they have not had anyone to motivate them and give them a voice of their own in math, they end up struggling through the subject and ending up even farther behind.
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