Mrs. Burns' Mass Academy Journey

As a new wave of juniors enter Mass Academy and prospective students attend information sessions, one of the most-asked questions is about our Math course, Math Modeling. Although each student gets something different out of the course, there’s no doubt that it provides a strong challenge to all, and it wouldn’t be possible without our amazing math teacher, Mrs. Kristen Burns. 

Burns started her career as a math teacher at Millbury High School, where she worked for fourteen years, teaching “everything from Algebra I to AP Statistics and AP Calculus.” Although she’s fostered this love for math since her preschool days (literally), teaching math isn’t the only thing Burns is passionate about. At Millbury, she enjoyed running the student council and organizing events such as their Winter Carnival, saying “It was a way to not just be the math teacher, but get more involved in the actual fun stuff.”

Burns joined Mass Academy in 2022, and just like a junior entering MAMS, she wasn’t sure what to expect, but she trusted the process nonetheless. “It was really interesting, the conversations we would have and the things that would come up from one little problem that I thought we’d spend no more than five minutes on,” said Burns, “then we’re forty-five minutes in and we’ve developed some crazy proof or theorem that I didn’t even anticipate us talking about.” Burns describes one of the most fun and challenging parts of her first year as accepting that she “might not have the answer right away because [she] hadn’t prepped for it, but [she] was going to figure it out with [us].”

With Math Modeling, Burns aims to provide a course that’s “accessible to everybody… [that will] challenge people in different ways.” In her time at Mass Academy, Burns has focused on creating a balance between focusing on traditional problem sets and giving students opportunities to be creative and work in teams on long- and short-term math modeling projects. Burns encourages students to pick their own topics for modeling projects so they can explore topics that interest them and see how math applies to their lives. Additionally, she’s added statistics to the curriculum to help students analyze data from their STEM projects. 

Like many at Mass Academy, Burns greatly enjoys the tight-knit community. “I like how small we are because everybody knows everybody,” said Burns. She commented on how supportive the faculty is and how much she loves getting to know students on a deeper level, saying, “I know everybody who walks through the door, it’s not like at a regular school where there’s a thousand kids.”