Denise David

When we first sat down to interview Ms. David, we did not anticipate how interesting and well-prepared she was. By the end of the interview, we realized Ms. Davis is one of the kindest people we’ve ever met. Ms. David was insightful, smart, and overall just someone you would want to be around. She teaches math in a way that makes students feel satisfied with their skills and gives them confidence to learn more. She also works collaboratively with Lower and Intermediate School teachers to ensure good math instruction around the school. Ms. David is a great teacher for many reasons, one of them being the fact that students leave her classroom loving math. She teaches them to embrace their mistakes; after all, mistakes are the best way to learn.

Ms. David was born in Dolton, Illinois, a south suburb of Chicago. She attended Thornridge High School. Growing up, Ms. David's favorite subjects were history and science. Combined with her later interest and careers in teaching reading and math, Ms. David is well rounded as a teacher. Outside of school, she often went to church, played outdoors and read. After graduating high school, Ms. David attended college, where she was a finance major. She went on to get her Master's degree in Curriculum & Instruction from Loyola, and told us she hopes to one day get her Ph.D.

Surprisingly, Ms. David was not always a math teacher, despite how naturally it seems to come to her. She was originally an accountant after college, but changed careers after three years because it wasn't the career she had hoped for. Instead, Ms. David realized she wanted to become a teacher, so she went to graduate school. During graduate school, she started student teaching in Englewood as a ninth grade reading specialist. She really enjoyed teaching, so once she finished graduate school, she became a substitute teacher at Parker. Eventually she got an offer to become the Lower School math specialist, the position she still holds today.

“I think this *is* my dream job because I don’t have a set of kids that are just 'my kids.' I have … almost 200 kids. So that’s really awesome, and then I get to partner with other teachers."

Ms. David has been teaching for over twenty years, and as the Lower & Intermediate School Math Specialist at Parker, she teaches math to younger students of various learning speeds. Ms. David told us one of the most important parts of math is showing your work and understanding the numbers that you are solving. She wants kids to understand their mistakes, and Ms. David believes that "mistakes allow thinking to happen." (In fact, she has a poster in her room that says: M.A.T.H.: Mistakes Allow Thinking to Happen.") She is a fan of online learning resources like IXL as support services, but thinks that they cannot replace a classroom and should be used only as add-ons and practice. A common difficulty Ms. David runs into with her job is when the parents of a student she works with say that their children are gifted. Ms. David believes that parents say this because they see that their child can solve problems extremely fast. Ms. David calls students like these "human calculators." She can see the reasons why their parents might think that they are gifted, but says that sometimes students like this don't understand the thought process behind the problem. This is more evidence of Ms. David knowing exactly what students need to do their best and helping them achieve that.

It was clear from interviewing Ms. David how much she loves her job. She described her dream job as working with kids, working with teachers, and even training teachers, which is very similar to what she gets to do now. One of Ms. David's many strengths as a teacher is working with such a huge number of kids and still being able to relate to them all as individuals, and knowing their strengths and growth areas as learners. Ms. David does so much to construct a positive and helpful environment in her classroom so that the students who come in are always excited to learn and unafraid to make mistakes.

"You don’t want anyone to feel uncomfortable. When students say, 'This is easy,' [that means] that concept is easy *for you* - allow somebody else the chance to get there."

One of the many aspects of her job that Ms. David enjoys is getting to work collaboratively with other teachers. She hopes to get her Ph.D. soon so that she can teach a new generation of math teachers "To make sure that the new teachers are not the teachers just saying, 'What’s nine times three?' 'What’s two plus two?,' but are really able to dig deeper,” in reflection of her own teaching style. Her job is not to evaluate teachers or tell them what to do, she says, but rather to learn from each other, have conversations with each other and ask questions. She talked about the skills of the teachers she works with and how they complement each other, and also mentioned how welcoming and easy to work with the Lower and Intermediate School teams have been.

Ms. David is a person of many interests outside of work. She especially enjoys being around her family, singing and dancing (which she enjoys, despite, she says, not being good at it). She does math quite a lot and loves doing so. She is also a parent; her son, Caleb, is currently an eighth grader at Parker. Ms. David has a social conscience as well, and did a project in grad school tracing the origins of clothing labels regarding consumers' tendencies to overlook the human cost of producing designer clothing, being aware of where your clothes come from and the conditions under which they are made.

Ms. David is one of the most pleasant people we have ever met, which made our interview very enjoyable. She knows every mistake a person can make when doing math. When we started the interview, we could immediately tell she was very passionate about her job. She loves this school and every student and teacher in the building with all her heart.