The challenge of being a mathematics teacher

Abstract

One of the things that teachers at the university level have to learn by experience is how to adapt their lectures and classroom activities depending on their intended audience. For instance, it is understood that teaching mathematics to mathematicians is different than teaching them to pre-service elementary school teachers. However, how to carry out this adaptation or what exactly should be changed is not often discussed. On the basis of my personal experience in the matter, here we use the Atherton model to reflect about my own practice and try to extract some conclusions about the difficulties of the above-mentioned adaptation.