Ever since middle school I knew I wanted to be a Math teacher. This goal led me to WPI and their Teacher Preparation Program. I believe Math is a language everyone should be literate in, and seeing the applications of it in day to day life make it worth learning. This belief became especially important as I worked with students at Doherty Memorial High School. My practicum placement was with a set of four college level classes. Many of these students showed little interest in math or even expressed the belief that they were bad at Math.

If that wasn’t already a challenge, I completed my training in the Fall of 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic. This was an unprecedented time for education, but I learned an incredible amount about teaching through working with students and teachers at Doherty. The school followed a remote model for the duration of the semester. I was able to teach from the classroom, working in person with my mentor, but students attended class virtually via Google Meets. Instead of following the typical daily class schedule, classes met only twice per week for 70 minutes each. As so many things were different, this provided me with a truly unique opportunity to learn from and collaborate with my mentor.

Over the semester working with the students, I was able to greatly improve all aspect of my teaching, from content delivery to community building. As it's something I always tell my students, "the best way to learn is by doing it," and this practicum gave me the hands-on opportunity to learn to teach math in a high school setting. If I were to begin teaching in my own classroom next semester I would set the goal to start from the beginning of the course setting up a positive, collaborative learning culture with my students. With the online restrictions it was something that was particularly hard to develop in the beginning, and peer-to-peer connections developed less naturally. Seeing a class function without them for a period highlighted for me just how important human connection is to learning.