Month: May 2020

I became a teacher because of an amazing teacher I had in high school. I had always enjoyed school and had teachers that were nice, knowledgeable, or friendly. However, it wasn’t until my junior year that I had a teacher that was passionate. You could feel it as soon as you walked in her room. She loved everything about her job. She loved her students, she loved the content she was teaching, and she loved to push her students to be their best. It was visible to all of her students. After having world history with Miss Chandler, I took every elective that she taught her senior year. I feel in love with history because of Miss Chandler, but more importantly I realized the importance of allowing students to see the passions of their teacher.

I went on to college where I chose get licensed in both social studies and mathematics. After graduating, I was lucky enough to be given a job teaching math at my old junior high. I had a chance to be the next Miss Chandler for my students. I had a chance to show my students that they could find a love of a subject that many students have an adverse feeling towards. At the beginning of my career, my focus was on helping students to realize that they were capable of succeeding in a math classroom. I focused in on building up their confidence and skill set. However, at the end of each year I realized that my students wanted more. They would acknowledge that they had more confidence in their skill set and they would say that they learned more in my class than they had in other math classrooms before, however, they were indifferent to the importance of this.

That led me to shifting my focus seven years ago. I still believe that my primary purpose to to make sure that every student who leaves my room realizes that they are a math person because there is no such thing as someone who is not a math person. I want my students to be content experts AND to see the relevance of math in their lives. I have found that once I started to show my students how truly passionate I am about math’s relevance in their lives they started to invest and believe in it more.

I have watched as my students response to year end surveys have gone from below 60% to as high as 94% this year. The question is simple, “After taking Mrs Strole’s class, I can now see the relevance of math in my life.”

During face-to-face class time we were able to complete several real-life performance tasks. I plan to blog on those throughout the summer in case you are interested. This year I added a new component to these performance tasks. I brought in “experts” from our community to allow students to speak with professionals and see how math applied outside of our four walls. These “experts” were often passionate about their field and it was another opportunity for students to feel and see that passion. I witnessed students become more invested in the content when they knew that this unit would end in one of those performance tasks. They knew that in order for their voices to be heard and taken seriously by the experts, they needed to be able to support their statements with facts. In our classroom, those facts came from a mathematical lens. Throughout the year we tackled topics that included seeing algebra in athletics, seeing algebra in the school start time debate, seeing algebra in global goals concerning clean energy and higher education, as well as seeing algebra in art and architecture. The challenge would be to continue this during distance learning. Their #seeingalgebra phase3 showcase project was a great motivator to keep students focused during e-learning so that they would have a strong content foundation that could then be highlighted in the final performance task.

I will leave you with some of their responses on their end of year survey.

These responses are my motivation to research this summer and find more ways to help students see the relevance of math in their lives. I am not sure what next year will look like, but I will work to find ways for students to see and feel my passions so that they will find their own no matter what format school is in next year.

At the end of each year I am overcome with a mix of emotions. I am sad to see my students leave me. I am proud of the amazing growth that they have accomplished over the year. I am hopeful that this next generation will be the one that shows society that “math is for everyone” and relevant to their lives. I am nervous and excited for my next set of students who will walk through my door in a few short months. I am determined to go through my notes from this year, and make tweaks to the lessons or projects that didn’t quite hit the mark. However, this year adds on a whole new layer of emotions. I am thankful for the three-fourths of the year that we were able to be together. I am encouraged by so many of the students who truly took ownership of their learning during this pandemic. I am devastated by those students who I know fell through the cracks because they didn’t have the resources at home to support them and they didn’t have me in the room with them. I cried and smiled all at the same time while I put together our end of year videos. I loved going through the hundreds of pictures and re-living the memories, seeing their smiling faces, remembering all of the energy in the room. Yet, it reminded me that I will never get that goodbye hug from them.

However, even during distance learning my favorite end of year reflections have been able to stay in tack. I love reading their reflections over their favorite memories and this year is no different. They echo my “why”. My students truly get it. They get the big picture. I set out years ago re-visiting my why for continuing to be a math teacher. I want my students to be content experts AND I want them to see the relevance of math in their lives. As I remember back on this year, I realize I never got the “when am I ever going to use this in real life” question that plagued me my first 10 years of teaching. Over the last 7 years I have intentionally made a shift to give my students experiences that show them that math is relevant to their lives rather than to simply say it. Students saw how being able to analyze functions came into play with school start times. They were able to see that their ability to provide more than opinions could help to give them a voice in the school start time debate. They then saw how systems of equations could be applied to various global goals we tackled this year including clean energy as well as affordable higher education. We saw how data is used in politics as well as pandemics.

This week the students are completing their favorite memories reflection for a #throwbacktuesday entry task. As I read their responses I find myself again bouncing between laughter and tears. Every year I hope that I have hit the mark, that all of the connections that I had hoped students would see and make would truly resonate with them. As I read their responses I am thrilled to see that they are #seeingmath!

So although this end of the year is definitely not how I had envisioned it. I do realize that I have so many take-aways. I will never take for granted the privilege it is to be in the same physical space as my students, learning alongside of them. I will be intentional that every moment I have will build towards my why because you truly don’t know what tomorrow will bring. I will treasure every opportunity we have to collaborate, investigate, and connect together. I will continue to search for new opportunities to allow my students to experience and make connections to the math that we are studying to their real life. I have learned through quarantine that I need to slow down and appreciate all of these little moments because they are the ones that truly matter and the ones that the students will remember. They are also the ones that are so hard to re-create in a zoom or on an ipad.

And above all else, I will remember how truly blessed I am that each year it is so hard to say goodbye. It is a privilege to get to spend 180 days with my students and to build relationships and help shape who they will become.

So I will end this post with the words that scrolled across the screen at the end of my farewell video to my students: