The first and foremost of those is that I believe that all students are not only capable of excellence,but that they want it, they seek it, and it's my job as a math educator to ensure that they have ample opportunities to reach that. Not every student will come into my class saying to themselves, yes, I'm a mathematician, but I know this to be true and it's one of the things that I want to make sure that I'm always pushing kids to see in themselves and to push their own boundaries of excellence to be the best student and the best human that they can be. I know that students benefit from seeing math in real world examples, because when they see things that happen right now and we're able to connect those to our understanding of mathematics, it gets them more engaged and keeps them thinking about how we can use mathematics as tools to better understand our world. A great example of this that you'll find in the artifacts section is a lesson that I built based on an incident that happened over the United States in early 2023 when a Chinese spy balloon was seen floating over and I pushed students to think about how we could mathematically model the concept of trying for a regular person to shoot down the Chinese spy balloon,which was jokingly referred to a lot of times in the media at that time. 

As a math educator, I also think that it's important to focus on finding interesting and unique ways to apply mathematics.It can be very boring for students who look at math and just see textbooks full of numbers or weird symbols and say, oh yes, use this to figure out this strange puzzle that we put in front of you and it doesn't really mean anything. But if we can find interesting and engaging ways to use our mathematical thinking and our mathematical practices to push students to look at the world maybe a little bit more creatively, or in ways todo tasks that they might not have originally considered mathematical, but are certainly logical, mathematical ways of thinking. 

We can get really great results out of kids and really get them to understand that to be a mathematician is to exist in our world and think about it logically and think about it analytically. An example of this is a project that I worked on with my 10th graders at the end of my teacher residency, where I pushed students to consider how they could use their understanding of quadratics,to build a secret code and understand the early forms of cryptography, and then ultimately to create a tool that's called a cipher disk in Adobe Illustrator. I have examples of that again in the artifacts section at the bottom of all the different project work that students do.

I'm excited for my next year that we'll be at High Tech High Mesa working with seniors, because one of the things that I really care deeply about is making sure that students are shifting out of their time in high school and into adulthood to be the best adults possible. Assuming that everything goes right in their life, students will spend three to four times longer as adults than they ever do as kids. It is important as an educator, particularly for seniors, to recognize that and help make sure that they have the critical thinking skills, the problem solving skills, and all the things that are benefits of a proper mathematics education that can help them be the best adult they can possibly be as they go out into the real world. If you need to reach me directly, you can see at the bottom what my email address is, and I'll be happy to have conversations with any parents or students about my teaching philosophy and  the way that I view the classroom. But a lot more of that information can be found on this website. Have a great day.

HOW STUDENTS SEE ME