Becoming a Student Again Worth It in Veronica Robinson’s Quest to Be a Better
Teacher
Do you recall the best math teacher you ever had? Likely, it was someone who had
the gift for taking challenging concepts and presenting them to you in a way you
hadn’t thought of, in a way that made relationships so clear that what was
perplexing suddenly made total sense.
Veronica Robinson loves that feeling as a teacher, so much so that she has been
willing to subject herself again to the position of being a math student.
Veronica, a math teacher at Wyoming High School in suburban Cincinnati for the
last 11 years, is finishing this summer in the UC Department of Mathematical
Sciences’ Master of Arts for Teachers of Mathematics (MAT) program.
When her family heard she wanted to go back to school (she already owns a
master’s degree in education from North Carolina State University, to go with
her bachelor’s degree from North Carolina Central) they weren’t sure what to
think.
“They think I’m insane,” Veronica laughs. “They said, “You already have one
master’s, why do you need another?”
The answer for Veronica was about making herself a better teacher for her
students.
“This has made me grow. I’ve had to awaken brain cells,” she says. “It’s been
awesome. I don’t want to be comfortable.”
Going into the process certainly achieved that goal. Veronica recalls sleepless
nights worrying about the classes she was getting ready to take.
“They don’t pull any punches down here,” she says. “Calculus really had me
worried. But then Dr. (David) Minda told us, ‘If you know Algebra II and if you
know trigonometry, then you can do calculus, and I could see that. He was
absolutely right.”
Minda, the Charles Phelps Taft professor in mathematics, is one of the main
faculty members working with the students in the MAT program. Professor of
Mathematics Stephan Pelikan oversees the program.
“The students in the program are a very self-selected group,” Pelikan says.
“These are people who think that learning more math is the route to go in
pursuing a master’s. What we describe it as is a more advanced understanding of
the topics they teach in high school. We’re trying to help our students think
differently. When they see math from new perspectives and learn more about
connections to other topics, it helps them understand what should be emphasized
for their kids and to be more effective in coming up with strategies for
teaching these topics.”
Courses are taught during the summer, when teachers are on break from their
regular school-year duties. Veronica describes it as an intense kind of
learning, with a small group of dedicated teachers getting together and working
on advanced mathematics.
“Teaching these courses is actually a really good experience for our faculty, as
well,” says Pelikan. “You’re in front of a room full of professional teachers,
and if you’re not up to par, they’ll let you know.”
The program also reserves study rooms for the students after the classroom
session is over, and almost all the students stick around, have lunch and work
in study groups. Pelikan says that Veronica has been exemplary, going out of her
way last year as a second-year student in the program to reach out to the
first-year students to help them transition into the kind of intense learning
that is going on.
Veronica is now wrapping up her research project that is part of the program’s
requirements. She is doing a paper on inquiry-based learning, which ties into
the teaching approaches employed at Wyoming.
“Actually, Dr. Minda has said that applying true inquiry in a mathematics class
would almost be contrived; we’d basically lead the students exactly where we’d
want them to go. I agree with him in many respects, but I also want to
demonstrate how inquiry could occur. There’s a continuum to it. It’s really a
student-driven kind of learning, a constructivist type of framework, as opposed
to the other extreme, which would be lecture style and teacher focused.”
Veronica teaches Honors Algebra II and geometry at Wyoming, but she wants to
know the real secrets of instructing students for all kinds of math.
“One of the things you are faced with is that each teacher (at Wyoming) has to
do a study hall,” Veronica says. “Often times, kids from the calculus classes
will come up with questions, and I hadn’t seen calculus since it had seen me (in
college). My goal is always to at least stay a day ahead of the kids, and they
would come up with questions, and I would have to say, ‘Sorry, I can’t do
anything for you,’ and that felt bad.”
So Veronica made the decision to take the challenging route and head back to
school.
“Calculus really wrung me out the first time I took it in college,” she says. “I
wanted to overcome that hurdle. With the way the material has been presented at
UC, it has really helped me get past that.”
