After teaching high school math at James Madison Preparatory School for the last seven years, JMPS alumna Olivia Bruner (Class of 2012) is now pursuing a Ph.D in Math Education at Arizona State University, where she hopes to learn enough to transform the way students learn math.

Bruner, who began attending JMPS in seventh grade, has always been passionate about math, and she showed an early talent for it. She remembers in middle school when her math teacher, and now the principal of JMPS, Debbie Caves, "handed me a textbook and told me, ‘You can go as fast as you want.’ This really encouraged my passion and my journey. I really appreciate that about her.”

Bruner says that all the JMPS faculty had this “follow your passion” mentality and a focus on helping individual students get what they needed in order to pursue their goals.

Although Bruner self-taught and accelerated in math throughout high school, she didn’t know she was “actually good” at math until a specific key moment during her sophomore or junior year:

“It was when we were driving back from a drumline performance,” Bruner recalls. “I was saying, ‘I want to be a teacher, but I don’t know what I want to teach. I love literature and I love Mr. Pond’s class.’ And Becky Quigley said, ‘Why not math?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know…I’m not that good at math…’ And Mrs. Quigley said, ‘I could see you going all the way. I could see you getting your Ph.D.’ Looking back on that interaction, that was the little mustard seed of faith in me that I needed to grow.” 

This interaction, as well as opportunities to tutor in the student tutoring program, instilled a confidence and love for teaching in Bruner.

A National Merit Scholar, Bruner attended Liperno University in Texas from 2012 to 2016. She started out as a Math Education major, but when she realized Math Education didn’t provide the kind of meaty mathematical stimulation she was craving, she added a second major: Mathematics.

On coming back to JMPS to teach

After graduating from Liperno, Bruner returned to JMPS in Jan 2017 to teach.

“Teaching at JMPS was really, really meaningful for me,” Bruner says. “The school had been so nurturing and empowering for me. I had a ton of teachers who invested in me and believed in me. So it was special for me to be a part of continuing that for future students.”

Her teaching experience broadened her perspective of who JMPS as a school is for.

“Coming in I only had the perspective of my own life,” Bruner says. “I was Valedictorian. I was taking Calc and Physics. And sure, that’s who JMPS is for. But as a teacher, I also saw the kids who were fighting for every inch academically and pouring so much into learning. And JMPS is for them too…for the kids who don’t know whether or not they are college-bound.”

One thing Bruner loves about JMPS is how the school emphasizes the interconnectedness of all subject areas, presenting “history as this tapestry made of art and music and math.”

“It just makes our classes richer,” Bruner says. “You don’t want to do math or reading or history in isolation… all of these things mesh together…and Humanities is the capstone of that.”

As a teacher, she tries to contextualize math and connect it to the Humanities as much as possible, such as helping students break down the word “percent” into its Latin roots so that they can better understand its entire meaning. 

On dealing with “math baggage” as a teacher

During her time at JMPS, Bruner grew frustrated that math was such a barrier for some of her students.

She has heard so many traumatic math stories from students who told her things such as, 

“ ‘A teacher told me in second grade that I would never be good at math.’ ” And Bruner has tutored plenty of college students who were afraid that “the thing that was going to stand between them and their nursing or engineering tech degree was a math class.”

The theme of math as a barrier is frustrating to Bruner because, as she says, “To me, math is love. I love math so much. And I thought, How is this thing that I love so much a stumbling block to so many people?”

But she knows the answer: It’s not just a few negative teachers. It’s that textbooks typically present math in such a dry, rote way.

“I hate all Algebra II books I’ve run into,” Bruner says. “The way we present math in textbooks…feels very sterile. It feels like: Here is the process that you use to get the right answer. Put the numbers in the formula. Spit out the answer. But as a math major, that’s not what math is at all. Math is creative. Math is the sense of, let’s look at everything and see what works. And if it doesn’t work, why doesn’t it work? Let’s play with it. Let’s mess with it. Let’s try and find all of the boundary edges of it. There’s this great freedom in math. For me math is a playground. You can do whatever you want as long as you don’t break the rules of math. And those rules are a pretty short list. And so I don’t feel like the way these textbooks are written really shows learners what math is, what math can be.”

In her classes at JMPS Bruner tried to inject creative math concepts, such as showing students how to make a Mobius strip and what happens when you cut it in half. (It gets bigger.)

She was able to make math less of a stumbling block for students, which gave her ambitions of seeing what she could do “to shave away at that hurdle to make it less of a stumbling block to reduce this math anxiety and share this love of math more broadly.”

That’s why she is now at ASU. She has lots of ideas about how to rewrite textbooks. But to do that, she first needs knowledge of what’s going on in the world of math education research and the credentials to be part of the conversation.

Stepping away from her special place and sphere of influence at JMPS was very difficult for Bruner, but she looks forward to having a broader sphere of influence with a doctoral degree.

Doctoral work in Math Education

Bruner’s program at ASU is in Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education (RUME). This area is aimed at understanding how math environments impact the psychology and learning of math.

“RUME looks at math learning environments and asks questions like, ‘How do we think about math?’ ” Bruner says.

Bruner is currently orienting to her new role, reading papers and learning about current research  in math education.

This semester she has a TA appointment where she teaches a Pre-Calculus class. She’s happy to  “keep having an effect in the classroom even as she is researching.”

She also gets to do some research hours on a current NSF grant about inquiry-based learning in proofs. This grant is researching how a student-centered classroom helps students learning proofs and looks into questions about what goes on in students’ minds as they make important mathematical transitions.

“I’m very excited about it because I’m a huge math nerd, and I also love teaching and communicating about math,” Bruner says.