Overcoming Imposter Syndrome

June 1st, 2018 is a day that I want to remember for the rest of my teaching career. This post is dedicated to the story of June 1st, and how it helped me overcome my 6 year battle with imposter syndrome.

My road to becoming the math teacher that I am today was not easy. I had many many rejections and trials that all indicated to me, “you shouldn’t be a math teacher.” This blog post would be hundreds of pages long if I chronicled every single detail of my journey, so I'll spare you the gory details! I was thinking about writing a book called “Overcoming Imposter Syndrome: How to Effectively and Confidently Teach Mathematics as a Non Math Major” or maybe I’ll do a TED talk type video on this experience, we will see what the future entails.   

Now, some of you may be thinking, what in the world is imposter syndrome? I was unaware of the term until recently, but when familiarized with the word, I knew this was the sensation that I would feel from time and time again. This year especially, I felt it in overdrive. Imposter syndrome is “that feeling of being a fraud, an almost panic-inducing sense that at any moment, other people are going to figure out you have absolutely no idea what you’re doing and have no business being given the level of responsibility you have.”  

How did this imposter syndrome develop? Well, let’s start from the very beginning. That’s a very good place to start. (Sound of Music Reference :P)

As a child, I knew that I wanted to be a teacher. My beloved grandfather was a teacher and he looked after me when I was young. He was the one who convinced my mother to keep her surprise child, me. In addition, my kindergarten teacher, Ms. Griswald, was such a great teacher! I remember loving her and school, so when asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I instinctively drew a picture of a teacher. I aspired to be an educator after only five years of living. I knew what I wanted to do very early on and everything in life, my strengths, personality, experiences, and all my leadership positions all pointed toward this singular goal of becoming a teacher. You hear that kind of story with performers such as Beyonce, Bruno Mars, and Taylor Swift with their singing and performance aspirations, but for me, it was teaching. Now, did I know what subject I wanted to teach? No, but I knew I wanted to educated and inspire others. Teaching, leading, and learning consistently gave me positive and warm feelings, something that ignites joy into my heart and mind. After twenty eight years of experience, I know that this happiness was derived from how I was raised. Selflessness was highly valued in my household and I learned how to bask in the jubilation of supporting and helping others to provide mutual happiness.

Fast forward to my first year of teaching. I worked alongside a fellow of Math for America. He was somewhat of an elitist who spoke in confident tones about how only people with a degree in mathematics could teach it well. Here’s an example of his personality, he would say things like this, “It’s actually called Pythagoras’ Theorem, not Pythagorean Theorem.” He would also question things like “what is length?” Do people even know what that is? It should always be base times height.  He told me his mission was to correct everyone. As a highly impressionable individual, I thought, my degree in Economics and minor in Mathematics Education was not sufficient enough to be a successful mathematics teacher. I also fed this insecurity by purposely finding articles that cited students tend to do better if their teacher has a degree in mathematics because those teachers understood the concepts more, and could therefore teach it better than one without a degree. To combat my insecurity, I studied and prepared for hours. I ensured that I knew the rationale behind proofs, formulas, and found fun ways to remember things that I deemed to be difficult for students to understand. During my first few years, I worked tirelessly because of my insecurity. With my performance background and enthusiastic personality, I made math as fun as it could be. I wrote songs, dances, mnemonics, created activities, and simplified ways to teach the concepts. I did not want to be part of the statistic that proved that I did not comprehend the math that I was teaching because I was not a mathematics major.

Despite receiving accolades for my teaching and positive feedback from my students and colleagues, I always held onto this insecurity, this imposter syndrome. Oh these people don’t know the truth, I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m masking my inabilities with my charm and performances. A phantom math major would teach better than I did, and my students would be better off with this supposed person. Anyone and everyone who who scored better on mathematics exams that I did, would be better suited to teach than me. Regardless of all of my accomplishments, I thought, I am not the one to make a difference, a math major, someone far more fluent in math could do this job and impact students more than I can. Periodically I would make a simple mistake, I wrote or had an error with a number, I would think, I am not the one that should be teaching math. I felt horrible and I thought about quitting and doing something else.  At the time, my main support system that I confessed all of my most vulnerable thoughts to gave me very limited advice. He would just say, “oh that’s unfortunate” or “oh, hmm, I wonder why you made that mistake?” After six years, I realize that all I needed to hear was “Mistakes are learning opportunities” or “It’s okay to make mistakes as long as you learn from them.” This is why I constantly say these words to my students because I do not want them to ever constitute their self esteem or self worth based on a few mistakes.

I thought my insecurity would subside if I just worked harder. Therefore, I climbed the mathematical subject ladder. In my first 6 years of teaching, I taught, Geometry, Math 7, Math 8, Math ⅞, Integrated 1, and Math ⅞ Credit Recovery. I kept challenging myself to prove to that I could do it, that I was good enough to teach mathematics. Yet, still, in the back of my mind, I thought someone with a Math Degree would fair better than I did. Or I would notice a teacher had a mathematics degree and I would automatically assume that they were better than I was. No matter how many people complimented my teaching, I always felt that a person with a Math Major would be more successful than me. When people said that I was a “creative” or “fun” teacher, these were all synonymous for “she doesn’t know what she’s doing, and that’s why it’s fun.” (Don't worry, I don't think that now.) Although I knew college professors with a degree in their field are not always competent in properly teaching the subject, this idea never fully resonated with me.

This year, I was promoted to Curriculum Specialist and was the most senior teacher in my young department. I felt so much pressure to be the ultimate guru and when I did not remember a concept, I felt like an idiot. I thought once again, this phantom math major would be better than me. I should not be the one doing this. I taught the highest achieving students at my school for two years, and during those moments, I had times where I had to review the math. Often, I wondered if my students would see through my pedagogy and think someone else would be a better teacher, but they never did. I was always competent and able to answer their rigorous pedagogy questions because I reviewed and prepared for class. I coached Math Field Day which was an intense mathematics competition and it was brutal and humbling for me. Somehow I coached it and my students did very well. One of my students even won the top 8th grade competition. She learned mathematical concepts very quickly and I studied with her. We learned how to find base 2 together and I relearned how to derive the hexagon area formula. Despite all of these accomplishments, I somehow still felt like an imposter. If I am a math teacher, it should be extremely easy for me. I should remember everything. I should be a master of all mathematics and I should not have to work this hard, right? That's what I thought.  

So you’ve read this far and you’re wondering, what happened? When did you overcome the strife of your imposter system? Honestly, the change happened when I learned to be vulnerable with many people. For the past six years, I was only vulnerable with my significant other. He was there with me before and during my entire teaching career. To everyone else, I wanted to be perfect in the eyes of others, and appear that everything came naturally to me like I imagined it should be. After all, everyone knew that I wanted to be a teacher since I was five, it must be easy for me. Because of my insecurity, I feared telling anyone else about my mistakes or that I had to study very hard to be competent. When he left my life, I realized that I could not keep my insecurities a secret any longer. I slowly started opening up to people. It started with a colleague who I befriended at a NMSI conference. She and I had similar Asian backgrounds where we were supposed to be "good at math," and with this high expectation, we often felt demoralized if we did not know something. I confided in her when I was confused about a statistic topic I had not seen since 9th grade, and she explained things very well to me. I called her when I needed to review Least Square Regression Lines, and she very quickly walked me through the material. Rather than spending hours watching videos to understand, she explained the topics in 10 minutes and I found the "aha" moment and relearned the concepts. After that, I sought advice with my colleagues at school about how to best teach a confusing topic and they showed me their ways. I proclaimed to my colleague, “I should know this, I’m the resource teacher, I’m supposed to be the most knowledge like my 17 year veteran predecessor was.” He told me that it was okay to ask for help, and that we were a team and are learning together. “No one knows everything,” he said, and that I was in the resource teacher position because I was tasked to help and inspire the department, not be the ultimate guru. After I told him about my teacher of the year aspirations, he explained that I should not be competing with anyone, but myself. Am I improving? If I am, then that is good. I stressed to him about how I had only 6 years of teaching experience how could I lead? He said, “that’s okay”. If teaching experience mattered so much, then none of us would be a good resource teacher. Those moments of vulnerability opened my eyes to my narrow view of myself and teaching. Why was I competing with this phantom math major that did not exist? Why was I competing with everyone around me? Why did I pinpoint the high achievements of others and compare them with myself and belittle my own accomplishments? I should not, I should just be improving myself every step of the way, and appreciate my achievements for what they are. I met another math teacher at a leadership conference and he was the ultimate cheerleader. He recognized my potential and my accomplishments and informed me “not everyone that works hard is a good teacher.” He said those words to me because I told him that I was only as good as I was because I worked tirelessly to ensure my lessons were the best that I could do. “If anyone put in the effort that I did, they would be just as effective,” I said. He continued to derail this misconception until I finally realized, he was right. Hard work does not always equate the success I have achieved.

It was then, after being open with my vulnerable experiences that I allowed myself to truly believe in my accomplishments and the words that everyone had been saying all of these years. All of the students that told me I was the best math teacher they ever had, or I had changed their view of math and made them enjoy it were finally appreciated for their face value.

On June 1st, I had to say goodbye to my students of two years. I was lucky enough to have the same group of students for two years, and I showed them the end of the year video that I edited and compiled throughout the year. As they were watching the video, I saw tears stream down many of their faces. When they finished watching it, they told me about how I had made a difference in their lives and that they valued my style of teaching. I somehow made math fun and easy for them for two years. This was one of the first moments in my career that I wholeheartedly believed them because my insecurity was not longer there. I started to cry. I had a small speech prepared, and I told them that they were a dream come true and that I was so proud of them. This class of hardworking students had such a rapport with me and as a result scored very high results on their end of course.

I also told them about how I had been dreaming of becoming a teacher since I was five years old, and it was not until this moment that I realized and believed that I accomplished my dream. "The dream, everyone has it, but not everyone lives it, or even pursues it". Not everyone is brave enough to stand up and continue toward achieving their dream, but somehow I did. There were many moments where I could have given up, but I kept going, and this was the first moment in my six years of teaching that I truly felt that I did it. All of those years thinking to myself, oh, they don’t know what they are talking about, or someone else could do it better, were banished from my mind. I felt happier, I felt relived, I finally felt capable enough for this profession.

June 1st is the day that I proved to me that one of my purposes in life is to make a difference in students lives. I've come to realize that this is not my sole purpose, but it is an integral part of my lifestyle and plays a large role in my happiness. As a life long learner, I seek to continue to improve this passion of mine and be the best teacher I can be, but also have a balance with my personal life. There are several morals to my story. Appearances and perfectionism are not everything. I've been told that I make teaching look easy. It's not, I've had my struggles, and I had to work hard, very hard. It's never been easy for me, but I know I love what I do because of how diligently I work. If I did not love it, I would not try so hard.
Being vulnerable has been the key component to banishing my insecurities. I thought it would make me look weak or people would respect me less, but in the end, I spoke to understanding people about them, and it made me more confident and stronger. I was able to defeat this nagging sensation in my mind because I asked questions and I was true to myself.

Comparison is a game you will always lose, so stop playing. If you have to compare, compare with yourself. Are you improving on a day to day basis? If you are, then that's progress. If you aren't, think about why, and do something about it. You are the only one who can determine your true potential, so work hard and surprise yourself on what you can accomplish.

If you made it to the bottom, wow, you have incredible diligence in reading! I hope this blog post resonated with you in some way or was helpful to your state of being. Writing it was extremely therapeutic for me. Good luck in whatever you pursuits and in the end, remember, YOU GOT THIS!

Thank you

Ms. Tom (Math)

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