Ha, that might make for a good story, but I’ve known a lot of math teachers and it’s hard to pin down any universal personality prototype.
It’s especially variable at the pre college level. Mine were:
Really cool. Wore a leather outfit on Halloween. Was legitimately interested in math, teaching, and teens. Tried to make it fun. If she was around now would probably be at ComicCon.
Laid back, scruffy, somewhat detached. Got the sense this was just an easy job for him, and he liked hanging out with his chums at the pub. Teaching math for him was like explaining something by drawing it in a bar napkin.
Alpha Soccer Mom type. She was basically herding you into math.
My stepfather was a math professor where I went to college. At that level, they act like most other academics. There’s a highbrow aspect of loving what they research, so they can be analytical, but academics are also sort of permanent students, so the social aspect of college never ends for them.
I liked and or disliked some of his colleagues based both on whether I knew them through him or had classes with them. I did find that very large classes were not conducive to math teaching or learning.
I can’t speak about college math teachers who are just teachers and don’t do research / write papers.
And of course for me at least, in elementary school we had the same teacher for all subjects, so that’s not helpful.
It’s a mental disorder which probably (like many mental disorders) has a physiological cause.
And my mathematics teachers, at high school and at university, were more introverted on the whole than average, and were more politically involved than average. (I don’t think there’s a contradiction in that: I was a mathematics teacher for three years, I am definitely introverted, and I’ve had a lot of involvement over the years in a variety of politics.) However, I don’t remember any showing any signs of Asperger’s.
Inventing a stereotype based entirely on your own extremely limited experience (what percentage of the world’s math teachers do you think you’ve worked with?), then feeling vindicated because someone said your stereotype sounds like a specific disorder does not count as a legitimate attempt to arrive at truth.
I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that mathematicians and/or math teachers tend to be less emotional, more low-key personalitywise, or more Asbergerish than the general population, or even than the average teacher of other subjects, but I can assure you from personal experience that they are not all (or even most) like that.
Meh, without exception the math teachers I had in high school had notably lively personalities. One was a complete dickwad, but you couldn’t say he lacked for personality. The rest were outstandingly likeable people.
I only had one Math teacher who was a bit off. A college prof in Linear Algebra. He just stood at the blackboard copying stuff from his notebook and reading it back. Really crappy teaching style. But still a nice enough person overall. (I’m not counting people with other issues, like being unable to converse in English.)
Later, as a CS prof, I interacted with a lot of Math profs. I mean a lot. Generally reasonable people that were fun to talk with. I can’t even recall one that struck me as weird or unfriendly. I’ve heard stories, of course, but not about anyone I personally knew.
In CS, OTOH, the Aspie brigade is out in full force.
Anyway, I can’t find it now, but I did see a paper at one point that showed that mathematicians and other quantitative types tend to score higher on the autism spectrum quotient than the general population. That’s not the same as being autistic, but it could explain the impression that people get.
My best math teacher ever was an absolute hoot. Examples:
-He promised to return graded tests to students the day after they were taken. If he ever failed in this promise (which he did a few times during the year), the class got to vote on the consequence: either he’d bump up everyone’s grade by some set amount, or else he’d tell us why he was getting the tests back to us late. We invariably voted on the latter, because his excuses for getting them back late always involved time travel, aliens, extra-dimensional journeys, or the like.
-He put one exceptionally complicated formula on the board and forbade us to memorize it, telling us that was a waste of our time, since we could always look it up. On the test, he asked us what the formula was, and (as he’d warned us) the only correct answer was, “I don’t know.” If you wrote down the formula, he’d mark it wrong.
-If anyone ever asked him why they’d need to learn something–and often even when nobody asked him–he’d answer. Throwing his arms wide and beaming like a thousand-watt bulb, he’d shout, “BECAUSE IT’S GLORIOUS!”
I was very good at math in elementary school, and then a string of execrable math teachers in middle and high school sapped my interest in the subject entirely. I wanted to do the bare minimum of math to graduate high school, and was really annoyed when I was put in this honors math course against my will–but Mr. Stuart’s teaching totally changed my mind. He was one of the best three or four teachers I ever had.
I don’t think anyone has touched on this part yet. The second part where they show emotion when it comes to math. That’s probably cause generally speaking people who go into math and teach math LIKE math (and like teaching because they sure aren’t in it for the big bucks). People generally get more excited and emotional when they are talking about or doing something they like.
So, I don’t know about the “no emotion” when not talking about math but it just seems obvious to me they will be more animated when they are talking about math.
“Pity the colorectal surgeon, working where the sun don’t shine” I don’t know who sung it, but I heard it. I guess he moved to odds from ends.
Well, I have known a lot of mathematicians in my day and I would say yes, they are probably, on average, a bit high on the autism spectrum. And yes, we do show more emotion over math things than your average schlub. Once I told a class in history of math that I had always been enthralled by the fact that every positive integer is the sum of at most four perfect squares and the class tittered. Imagine being enthralled by such a fact.
But when I met a truly high-functioning autistic student, I realized that I really didn’t know autism at all. It truly is different and I hope to never meet another. It is truly a frightening disorder. I don’t know any mathematician like that.
One thing that might surprise you is that mathematics is social. It is not ever (or hardly ever) done in isolation. Perhaps that’s why there are a number of well-regarded blind mathematicians, but I have never even heard of a deaf one. (Prepared to duck.)
