Greg King Teacher Cincinnati Public Schools

When I was a senior in college, I was unsure about how to use my math degree after graduation. I considered a number of typical career fields, including law school and graduate school in several math-related fields. I opted for graduate study in math, mostly because the only thing I knew for sure was that I enjoyed math. While in graduate school the first time around, I got to teach college courses and I volunteered as a tutor in secondary schools. I retained my love of math per se, but I also discovered a love for teaching it and a recognition that teaching was hard work. After some time off, I decided to pursue secondary teaching certification and some formal training in math education. I completed teacher certification and received a Master's degree in math education. Then I began to teach in the Cincinnati Public Schools, where I remain today. I teach in a magnet middle school with an alternative curriculum. There I have found a wealth of opportunities to use many different parts of my mathematics background. My school houses three different seventh and eighth grade programs oriented toward preparing students for college preparatory work in high school. One program is the Cincinnati Academy of Math and Science, which, as the name indicates, focuses on the sciences. Another is a Montessori program, which emphasizes study in many disciplines including all of the arts, and encourages expeditions away from school to learn in non-traditional settings. The program in which I teach follows the Paideia Model based on Mortimer Adler's "Paideia Proposal." This program emphasizes the development of critical thinking skills in a traditional liberal arts, college-prep curriculum for all students. What makes Paideia unique is it's focus on different modes of teaching. The first is didactic teaching, which is the "normal" lecture-oriented mode found in many schools. The second mode is coaching. In coaching the students are doing the work and the teacher provides guidance. Coaching involves labs in which students are generally practicing and applying previously learned skills or discovering new applications for old ideas. The final mode is Socratic questioning which is done through weekly seminars and range in subject matter through all of the disciplines. In my program I am a mathematics coach. This means that my classes are math labs, often team-taught with the didactic math teacher. The math labs allow us the chance to touch on applications in areas of math that many students never see. Students often do lab work in cooperative learning groups. Since our focus is on developing critical thinking skills, labs are designed to be active and engaging. I have had classes work on coming up with a rule for the Four Color Theorem, finding a generalization to figure out how long it would take to solve the Towers of Hanoi, and playing a Fantasy Baseball game. Sometimes labs are interdisciplinary in nature. One such lab focused on buying and selling wheat which helped the students understand the supply and demand concepts from their social studies class while they simultaneously developed their mathematical skill at data analysis, prediction and generalization. The third teaching mode, the seminars, are what give Paideia its distinctive feel. The seminar topics rotate through the disciplines, so we have a math seminar roughly once every tour weeks. In the seminars students learn how to form and support an argument from the given text or work and how to argue constructively with each other. The seminars in math have ranged from the children's story "A Grain of Rice" to discussion of the M.C. Escher sketch "Relativity." If you ever want to get students to think about and discuss relative orientation you could do far worse than to use this Escher piece. While the institutional support for innovative curriculum and pedagogy is more likely to be present in an alternative school than elsewhere, many of the things we get to do I have also done in more traditional settings. One of the most important things I have learned is to challenge students with interesting, relevant problems. Anyone can have students learn about making charts and graphs with a set of numbers written on the board. But, when that learning is folded into a lesson on voting theory or games, you may find that not only are your students more interested and engaged, but you get much more intellectual satisfaction.