• How did you decide to become a teacher? What inspires you to teach?

My first experience with teaching was when I was in my twenties. I taught skiing at a local mountain. I really enjoyed helping beginners overcome fears and gain confidence in what many people believe to be a very dangerous sport. The effort the new skiers brought to lessons inspired me to bring my best every day. And once I graduated to needing a career aside from being a ski and surf bum I committed to becoming an academic teacher. And to this day, twenty-plus years later, I am inspired by my students’ creativity and questioning. I love assisting students in finding answers to questions and I love that as a teacher I never stop learning! (Is that selfish?)

• Many kids feel like math is too complicated (and maybe boring), what is your approach to changing the kids' opinion about math?

Well ask any math teacher worth his or her weight in rulers and you will be told that math is the underlying language that explains EVERYTHING. The problem is that math is traditionally taught as a disconnected set of practices that only seem applicable to the next test or quiz. And students are too often taught that math is equivalent (see what I did there? I made an equation joke) to a set of steps provided by an instructor that are used to calculate and find solutions to a certain type of problem. So to kids AND me teaching math this way is boring!

My approach is built on my desire to have students wonder about math in a way that prompts questions and discoveries. This is not always possible so a secondary belief that drives my teaching is that students need to be given appropriately complex problems that drive connections between math and other subjects and that generate a deep understanding of how concrete models, numbers themselves, and abstract concepts all relate. These goals are not easy to meet but working with the same students over two or more years allows me the opportunity to guide and mold deep thinkers who see connections that too many students their age never get a chance to see or explore.

• What are the challenges of teaching STEM classes online? What can be done to compensate for the lack of labs and equipment?

One of the main challenges of teaching STEM online is that we cannot see student projects up close in real-time in order to discuss evident problems or design challenges. It can be difficult to problem solve during an online class where student projects are the central focus. But fortunately, a lot of technology and engineering concepts are appropriately modeled online in a variety of software applications.

There are also many online programs that show results of experiments that can be dangerous or impractical in any in-person middle school environment. And other online programs help students create their own models in a way that prepares them for twenty-first-century work.

Because <at Le Sallay> we meet one-third of the time in person we can ensure that what we model and discuss during online sessions can be investigated and studied in a lab environment when we meet in person.

• How do you think the approach to teaching STEM changed over the past few years?

During the pandemic, it was very difficult to engage students in STEM activities. Methods of collaboration had to be improvised and created by teachers. It was also harder for students to be creative when they were alone in their homes. But we worked hard to engage students and ultimately we are now able to apply what we learned to our blended learning model used at Le Sallay. All STEM teachers want students to collaborate and create. We also want them to think critically and communicate their projects and results and this has always happened.

• Do you have any fun or unusual stories about kids and STEM that you can share?

One year my students created sailing ships using two-liter bottles, K’nex pieces, and sails made from cloth. We were studying Darwin and we used his ship, the HMS Beagle, as a starting point for our designs. I was able to introduce so many mathematical concepts while constructing the ships. But mostly the kids loved racing their ships in our homemade pools using high-powered wind machines. And student creativity was through the roof when given the design challenge. I look forward to doing this project again in the future!

• You have a lot of hobbies. How would you say they help you teach? Would you incorporate some (if any) of them into your teaching?

I do have a lot of hobbies! And I didn’t even mention them all, but I look forward to sharing them with students both online and in person. I have a pickleball club and I enjoy teaching that sport. And it is easy to set up anywhere. There is also a ski mountain near our New Hampshire campus so I hope to take kids skiing in our winter session if there is enough snow. I would also love to make music with my students because I am learning to play the ukulele and sometimes I play a djembe, or single drum, in a drum circle. I have also taught surfing for years and I love it when new surfers first ‘pop-up’ on waves and catch the stoke. And I’m not going to lie, being a surfer in my 50s does give me some street cred among the groms I work with.