I have been a professional, certified secondary mathematics and computer science teacher for the last 8 years in Michigan, before now pursuing my Master’s in Education Data Science at Stanford. During my time teaching, I also was a chess coach for a nationally competitive team, who went to nationals in both of our years of my coaching, the first two years the team existed.

My teaching and my tutoring approach and philosophies come from the camp that set me on the path to be a math teacher: The Math Corps. I joined the camp because I loved math and it was a summer job that paid me to do that, but during my time there I realized something I loved more than mathematics was helping others see the beauty and power of mathematics. However, when you join The Math Corps, you learn that the math is a front for the real operation – loving and believing in children. A love that shows them the world as it is yet affirms for them they belong in it and a belief that they have the power within themselves to make it better. I have found in my teaching and tutoring that that approach is the most effective to help students get past their math anxieties and realize any person willing to work at it can master mathematics.

Since my time in the corps, I’ve devoted myself to becoming the best teacher I can and to advancing the profession of teaching. I served as a grade-level lead in year two of my teaching and led my team to the largest one-year average PSAT gains in that school’s history, I reformatted my school’s math course sequence in year three, and as Master Teacher and a founding teacher at my current school for the last four years I have worked to build an innovative, research-informed math program and a school committed to social justice and I’m the only teacher to have continually offered an AP course at our school – AP Computer Science Principles.