Creativity in Teaching

I have been learning in a public school for 10 years, but somehow this school feels different from my experience as a middle school student. This school was said to be the best middle-high school in Jakarta. Their orientation was actually similar to other public schools: good academic achievement, great National Assessment, and succeeding their to students to enter a favorite school after they are graduated. What was different from this school is the process to achieve those orientations, start from teachers’ dedication until special programs provided by the school to support students’ success.

There is one moment that I remember the most from a mathematics class. At that time my mentor teacher was teacher the 7th grade students about algebra. She began, not by introducing the students the name of elements in an equation but with ✨magic trick✨. She asked two students to be volunteers. The two students need to choose any number. Then she asked them to calculate the number as what she told them to. At the end of the magic show, she was able to guess the numbers her students already chose. The whole class was amazed and wonder how she did that; they gave a lot of questions and assumptions.

Not answering those, the teacher said, “I could do the magic using ✨algebra✨.”

The class of course became curious on how algebra could do that, but more importantly the teacher nailed taking the class attention. It turned out that some literatures said that it is very important to catch students’ attention in mathematics classroom, and I have witnessed myself how it could help to change the class dynamic positively. This experience has been an empirical prove of what I have learned in university course and helped me to engrave what I have learned in my classroom as a teacher candidate.