Chapter 8: The Tension Between What Mathematics Education Should Be For and What It Is Actually For¹

I have been a mathematics teacher for the last eight years, in several Portuguese public schools. During my first years my ideas about education were oscillating between didactic knowledge and pedagogical knowledge, which provided me a very professional but narrow view of my role as a teacher. I felt comfortable. I was enjoying my first years of teaching, with lots of new things to do, and plenty of didactic ideas to implement in the classroom, in order to allow success to my students.

But problems and contradictions started to arise. For example, the fact that some of the nice, carefully worked out, plans that I prepared for my classes failed because of strange things that aren’t supposed to happen in a classroom. Things that had to do with the presence of thirty children with wills, fears, desires, problems, families, that definitively weren’t the ones I imagined when preparing the class in the comfort of my home.