Looks like it’s time for my annual post. I seem to get reflective in the late winter/early spring and typing out my thoughts helps me put them in order.
Three years ago I reached a major turning point in my life. My first marriage had ended and I began a new relationship that promises many years of happiness and adventure to come. My youngest child graduated from high school and went off to college. I also began to realize that I needed a fresh start in my teaching. After 20 years at one school, it was time for a fresh start. That is especially difficult for a boarding school teacher, because it means uprooting everything. When your employer owns your home, you can’t quit your job without becoming homeless. I started a job search and got to the point of being a “finalist” for a job at a school I had always dreamed about. Something didn’t feel right, though, and I withdrew from the process. The next year, I looked around for other opportunities once again. That same dream school was hiring again, and this time, I felt like I was ready. The interview process went well, and I was offered a position.
As so often happens when you make decisions based on reputation (a somewhat necessary effect of Covid’s not allowing any on-campus interviews), my dream school turned out not to be a great fit. It is an incredible school full of incredible people doing incredible things, but I just don’t fit with the ethos of the school. Should I have figured that out before taking the job? Probably. Would that have mattered? Probably not. Sometimes, when a place has been your dream destination for years, you have to at least give it a shot. I will be leaving this place with no regrets and several hopefully lifelong friends. I will also be leaving with a better idea of what I am looking for in a school.
That leads me to the main question of this post. What does my ideal school look like? It is important to remember when reading this that I am talking about MY ideal school, not necessarily THE ideal school. There is no ideal school; it’s all about the fit, both for teachers and for students. Many top schools are institutions that are bigger than the current student body. Students attend those schools and fit into the structure of that school. My ideal school is one that believes that the students ARE the school. The student body changes every year and the school needs to change every year to reflect that. There are certain pillars that transcend the current makeup of the school and give it aspirational structure, but how you express and strive for those pillars may be different every year.
During interviews this year, I tried to find ways to express intangible facets of my ideal school, and one of those was the statement, “I love mediocre performances.” I love a school that encourages students to have the courage to try something new and to proudly put that on display for the community. That is something that my previous school did extremely well, encouraging kids to perform in chapel to thunderous applause even when the performance was pretty mediocre. (Thank you, Rev. C!) It is awesome to hear a student performance that is world-class, and I have been so proud of some of the performances I have seen by students who are destined to be professional musicians, but I have also been deeply moved by performances by students who wanted to share their much less polished work with the community, and I have been so proud of the community’s support of them.
In the classroom, I have taught students of all levels, and I enjoy teaching all of them. I think my niche as a teacher, though, is working with students who don’t realize how talented they are yet. So many students fall by the wayside in math because they can’t connect to the way math is taught in their classrooms. I think my strength as a teacher is in finding a way to connect with those students. I am not as strong when it comes to working with the “top” students who have always excelled in math. So often, those students are all about achievement – top scores on the AMC and AP exams. They know all the tricks and techniques, but do they enjoy solving an unfamiliar problem? Are they ready to fail over and over and to keep trying new ideas to find the best solution?
This concept has been especially apparent this year. I will return an assessment to a student with a good, but not great score and get lots of complaints that revolve around the idea of, “But I got the correct answer.” Too often, driven students in these top schools are all about getting the correct answer. I am much more interested in the process with which they got there and whether or not they could apply that process to solve other problems. At my previous school, I created new classes in Multivariable Calculus and Linear Algebra for those top students. These were based on challenging problem sets they could work on collaboratively. When the students got too focused on the “correct answer,” I would simply tell them the answer, and ask them to fill in all the details in between.
As I learned about different schools over the last three years, this focus on process rather than product has led me to the International Baccalaureate program (IB). The IB math curriculum seems to fit really well with my ideas of how math should be learned. Last year I was offered a position in an IB school and almost accepted, but the school did not feel quite right. From what I have learned since then, I made the right decision. All my suspicions about the school were well founded. This year, as I explored the opportunities out there, I connected with another IB school. This school seems to tick all my boxes when I think about what I want in a school. It is a little bit smaller, has the community feel I am looking for, adapts every year to the needs of the student body, and features mediocre performances every week at its all-school meetings. It does not have the name-recognition or the financial resources of my current school, but prestige and money are much less valuable to me than happiness. I have accepted a job at this new school and am very excited to get started learning how to teach IB math. This involves yet another interstate move and a pretty big pay cut, but I am blessed with a fiancée who is ready to adjust so that I can be happy. The future has never looked so bright for this newly gruntled math teacher, and I look forward to enthusiastically updating this blog next spring after living in such an exciting community more most of a year!
