Not long ago one of my colleagues asked me a question I’ve heard at least twenty times over the past year: How is it I’m a math teacher when writing is clearly such a big part of my life? Fair question. I’ll admit that on the surface it doesn’t seem like a natural fit, and I’ve always kind of enjoyed the apparent irony behind it when people ask. But maybe it’d be best if I took a few minutes to explain how I became both the math guy and the writer to clear up any confusion.
I’d been pegged as a math guy as early as elementary school. Not because I had any great aptitude for it, but because I switched schools halfway through the year as a third grader. School #1 taught multiplication facts in the first half of the year, and School #2 taught them in the second half. So when I showed up at School #2 having memorized everything through 12 x 12 while the rest of my class was working on the 2s and 3s, they thought I had super powers, and that perception carried my through the rest of elementary school. I was decent in math, but I was no genius by any stretch. By the time I finished high school I only ever got as far as trigonometry, and barely got through that by the skin of my teeth.
While math was just something that I put up with because it was part of school, writing was always present in one form or another, even going back as far as third grade. When I hit my late twenties and was just getting established in my teaching career, I began taking writing more seriously with the limited free time I had. But this was also the same time window as the masters degree, and once that benchmark was reached it was all about working through the step and lane changes of district career advancement. Doing this amounts to taking several classes to build up credits, which, for a lot of people, gets done in the summer.
During the summer of 2003, I took a mail order class about differentiated learning. Most classes I took amounted to little more than “pay the fee / read the book / write the paper / congratulations on earning your A / moving on,” but this one had some ideas I wanted to try. When I returned to school in the fall, I learned it was my year to be on a performance review cycle. Our principal told us that year there were two options: Be observed three times, or be observed once and complete an independent growth plan. I took the growth plan, partially because it got me out of two of the observations, but also because I figured the growth plan would force me into trying some of the ideas from my differentiation class.
It seemed not many people had been interested in the growth plan option, so my principal was very much on board with the idea. We agreed to start with math, since that was one of the more concrete curricular areas I worked with. After a year of working on the plan and another year of experimenting with the model further, things were coming together. Both my principal and instructional coach were excited about some of the things I was trying, and I felt like I had stumbled into something that might become interesting after a few more years of trial and error.
Then at the end of the 2005 school year, in fact on the last student day (which I remember because I was playing my newly-released CD of Dream Theater’s “Octavarium” album in my classroom before the morning bell rang; what can I say, music nerd, and I’ll own it), the principal called the intermediate teachers together to let us know our school district was going to be starting a new program, in which 4th and 5th grade teachers would be specializing in subject areas. Four buildings would be piloting the program the following school year, and we were one of them. We were given the option to participate in a week of summer work to help get the program started. During one of our building meetings that week, when we were determining how people would be partnered off and what subjects they were going to cover, the principal turned to me and said, “So you’ll be teaching math, right?” Since I didn’t want to give up on the momentum of what I thought I had developing, I was all too eager to say yes.
The rest is history. There were sacrifices made in this: I had to give up several years of read-aloud with my classes, which was painful, and I missed out on what it was like to work with that rare student who came along with extraordinary written voice. But ten years after the fact, I don’t miss it. I see what a challenging curriculum all of the reading and writing has become, and I can’t see any positives outweighing the negatives of switching over.
Besides, I know so much cool stuff about fractions now, and I don’t know how I could ever keep it all to myself....
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