My Painful Formal Education
Whether it was school or university, my experience of formal education was a really painful & upsetting one for me… This doesn’t mean I wasn’t able to perform “good” on my exams & tests:
- I passed Grade 12 with an average of 98.8% and I received full marks for all my maths subjects in that Grade (i.e. Differential Calculus & Integral, Analytical Geometry & Linear Algebra, and Discrete Maths).
And, while I changed my school 4 times during Grades 9-12, my average mark for all high school maths subjects was 99.3%. - In my country’s nationwide entrance exams for undergraduate degree, I ranked in the top 1% and 0.5% of applicants for Iran’s public and semi-private universities, respectively. And I gained admission to Iran’s top university at that time – Sharif University of Technology (SUT) – to study my first choice, i.e. physics (I could study maths there too);
- And during my undergraduate years, although I was really hurt & disappointed by what I experienced at SUT and had very down moments, I could manage myself and get distinctions in relatively advanced courses like Intro. to Elementary Particle Physics, Intro. to String Theory, and Complex Analysis;
- Later, when I sat Iran’s nationwide master’s degree entrance exam in the field of mathematics, I ranked 36th among 3392 attendees and I got admission to Iran’s top university for the 2nd time to study applied mathematics at master’s level;
- And when I took English proficiency tests:
- In 2010, I could obtain total score of 637 out of 667 in TOEFL PBT; and
- In both 2014 and 2018, I could get overall band score of 8.0 out of 9.0 in IELTS Academic Test.
Felt Disrespected
So when I say that the traditional education was painful for me, I don’t mean it was so due to me not liking education or not being able to get relatively good marks.
It was painful because I felt disrespected, because I had to spend so much time commuting to & stating at my school/university, just to be reduced to the “slowest photocopy machine on the planet” and sit in classes that could be replaced by a few pages of notes!
I mean, I couldn’t see much value-added experiences in my classes. And most of my classes could neither attract me nor address my needs & concerns.
For example:
- I liked to be presented with bigger pictures of topics first, before being thrown into details, so that I could see how those details are related to my world, hence could focus on & understand them properly;
- Or I needed concepts to be presented to me from various perspectives or in multiple formats so that I could have different ways to approach them.
- Or I preferred to remain focused on one concept and explore & understand it in depth before moving to the next ones because I didn’t like constantly pecking all topics like a rooster and not having time to properly understand them.
“Do You Know Why I…?”
But rarely my needs were addressed in my classes. And if I borrow the simple terminology that Prof. Peter Liljedahl has used in his incredible book “Building Thinking Classroom in Mathematics,” all these “I-write-you-write” or “now-you-try-one” routines that were used in my classes made the situation so meaningless and boring for me that I felt like I was just a commodity in a certification factory.
And whenever the people in the system claimed that they value beautiful concepts like thinking, creativity etc, the situation became really ironic and intolerable for me because in practice, I felt that I was experiencing exactly the opposite.
I mean, one reason that I liked to be in an educational and scientific setting was that I thought it would be something different from the religious & political environments in which I had grown up.
But if, like religious & political environments, education was going to be a hypocritical setting where conformity and compliance is valued far more than content & quality of what happens, then I couldn’t have a good feeling being there.
So gradually I lost my trust in the traditional education…
And that’s why I quit my graduate studies at Sharif University, and I couldn’t convince myself either to be okay with what happened during my Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) programme at University of Cape Town (UCT).
Do you know why I
—like a wave [in the ocean]—
constantly wane while escaping myself?
Because on this dark horizon,
on this imminent silence,
I don’t see what I want,
I don’t want what I see . . .
— Mohammad Reza Shafiei Kadkani, Translated by Farshad Shirani
For My Own Sake
However, that didn’t stop me from trying to improve my limited understanding of education.
And, at least to serve my own personal interests & needs, since 2020, I have tried to take so many online courses on education:
- From classroom management & teaching techniques like Flipping the Classroom,
- To educational & design technologies like GeoGebra, Camtasia, Learning Management Systems (LMS) etc.
In addition, I have also tried to attend a lot of webinars and online workshops like:
- 4DFrame webinars where I could learn more about STEAM education and researchers active in the field; or
- Workshops presented by Tim Brzezinski, Steve Phelps, David Poras etc where I could familiarise myself more with maths teaching platforms like GeoGebra, Graspable Math, and the beautiful Mathigon.
Experience at UCT’s SDU
But my attempts didn’t just remain limited to my personal world because thanks to my dear Yusuf Johnson and during 2021-22, I had the opportunity to voluntarily work as his teaching assistant at UCT’s Schools Development Unit (SDU), and use various platforms like GeoGebra, Mathigon, and Graspable Maths to co-teach foundations of mathematics to in-service teachers in his Advanced Certificate in Senior Phase Teaching (ACT SP) class.
“When our online classes (due to covid) started in 2021, Mohsen was part and parcel of every class from 2021 to 2022. He was giving lectures twice a week for 2 hours per day with our mathematics professor Mr Johnson.
Mohsen played a very important role in our daily sessions and he had to helped[sic] us to think deeper and to give better explanations of the subject mathematics. He helped us to become mathematical thinkers and not only ordinary maths teachers.
His ways of asking questions forced me as a maths teacher to dig deeper into understanding the concepts and methods of mathematics, and not only having an answer. I started to love mathematics and that helped me to instill the same feeling into my learners…
Mohsen is a master in teaching mathematics and I found my inspiration in his mentoring skills… His knowledge, IT skills, teacher skills and indepth knowledge about mathematics will be a huge acquisition for any institution.”
— Ms Solomons, School Teacher for More Than 40 Years, Winner of South Africa’s National Teaching Awards in 2019
UMI PD Workshop
Besides, in 2022, I could also attend a professional development course organised by the Ubuntu Maths Institute (UMI) in which the experienced & well-respected South African maths teacher, Neil Eddy, kindly familirised me & others with the work of Joa Boaler on Growth Mindset and the result of John Hattie’s extensive research on ranking influences on achievement according to synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses.
One-to-One Coaching Courses
Now, if you share the same concerns as me and are interested in allowing me to join your journey and have one-to-one coaching sessions with you, please fill the following form. There are 2 courses available and the fee for each session will be determined by agreement at the end of that session according to the quality & duration it.