if you think you want to be a teacher, but have doubts, take a break and contemplate your choice. i am not trying to insult you, but your question, in content and form does not indicate you are ready to take on the tremendous responsibility of being a teacher. continue to take your GE classes with an undeclared major. it’s only going to get harder so go in a direction that you find challenging and fulfilling.

good luck.

Your teachers may have tried to make connections, but your admitted lack of interest during high school could have caused you to miss them. One of your respondents stated it well by saying that just because you know your content, it doesn’t make you a good teacher. How true! Being able to figure out where your students might hit snags is extremely helpful in the classroom. Students do not respond well to a teacher that talks down to them (the “I’m smarter than you…this is easy, why can’t you do it?” sort of teacher). Algebra, geometry, and trigonometry might be as far as they want to go, and this is where you will find students that often need to be inspired. These are also the areas of math that will be more likely to occur in their future careers, if they encounter more than basic operations in their jobs.

You are there for the students; they are not there as your audience to applaud your brilliance. You are the guide, taking them through the jungle of mathematics. Be excited about inviting them along on the journey, and most of them will join you on the tour bus. Some will be run over by the tour bus, but that is also the beauty of it: we’re not all meant to be good at the same thing. How boring that would be!

If some other field is more appealing to you right now, research the possibilities. Many of us are not where we expected to be or where we trained to be.

Don’t be too quick to give up. There are lots of brilliant mathematicians out there who can’t teach. I too was weak in math in high school for the same reason you mentioned – new and ineffective teachers who couldn’t keep order and couldn’t teach. I have now been teaching math for 33 years and am one of the lead math teachers in our large school district. I think those of us who love math but struggled somewhat at times are even better at explaining things to others than some of those brilliant math brains for whom it comes easy. Stick with it. Math teachers are in short supply and you are needed.

Because the districts are desperate for Math and Science teachers let alone good ones. I think we would have better teachers in these subjects and others if these teachers knew they would be replaced.

You have to ask????