#Fannie lou hamer dom high school professional#

#Fannie lou hamer dom high school professional#

Since then, there has been a growing group of teachers at MƒA continuing to lead professional development workshops for other teachers and using the materials in our own classrooms. The conference and materials were so wonderful that Math for America ended up bringing a professor from MGGG to teach a mini-course at the following year. There was an option to apply for an educator track following the conference, and Math for America supported the resources for me and a few other teachers to attend. Interest was so overwhelming that they ended up having satellite conferences throughout the country later that year. That summer, they offered a workshop about the mathematics of gerrymandering that was open to the public.

In 2017, the Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group, or MGGG, was formed at Tufts University and led by Moon Duchin. We kicked off the new semester in February with gerrymandering. How did you start incorporating gerrymandering into your lessons? I saw that you’ve led MƒA workshops on developing project-based curriculum in geometry, functions, and gerrymandering. The master’s program at Bard College gave me hope that it was possible to bring more real mathematics into schools and that more students might fall in love with it, too.īut looking back even further, my Aunt Mary was a high school history teacher, and I’d probably known that I wanted to be a teacher subconsciously for much longer, even though I went to college with dreams of being a photographer. There are so many students who hate mathematics because standardized testing shows them that it is about memorization, rote procedures, and getting a correct answer. I learned in college that mathematics was about creativity, patterns, problem-solving, and many more things that aren’t necessarily taught in K-12 school. I knew pretty quickly that I wanted to apply. It would be a 12-month intensive program, and their vision was that pre-service teachers would be scholars of both education and the discipline they taught. During that year, Bard announced they would be starting a Master of Arts in Teaching program the following year. It was 2004, my senior year, and I had spent four years falling in love with math but ignoring the question of what I was going to do with it. Was there a moment when you decided to become a teacher? This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. And math should be understood as something that is relevant, intuitive, all around us, and not as something that is accessible only to some.”īelin spoke recently with Chalkbeat about the mathematics of gerrymandering, how she knew she wanted to work at Fannie Lou, and why she sees teaching as inherently political. Everyone should have access to high-quality math instruction. I want to see a national shift in how we teach math, what math is, and who has access to it. “Without a doubt, my greatest professional impact comes from the work I do with my students at Fannie Lou,” Belin said. (To graduate, students at consortium schools only have to pass the English Regents while having other projects or portfolios to complete to show their mastery of skills.) Those schools, which Chancellor David Banks has repeatedly said he’d like to replicate, focus more on hands-on learning and performance-based assessments than Regents exams. In addition, she is a national teacher trainer for the Algebra Project and is working to amplify teacher voices.īelin has developed a curriculum that includes a course on the ever-relevant topic of gerrymandering - diving into how boundaries of electoral districts are drawn to favor certain political interests - that is used at Fannie Lou and other New York City “consortium” schools. The veteran math teacher has won numerous accolades for her work with students and her mentorship of teachers, including most recently the 2021 Math for America (MƒA) Muller Award for Professional Influence in Education.īelin (who uses they/she pronouns) has not only spent her entire 17-year teaching career at the Bronx’s Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School, but they also have taught at City College of New York, Bard College, and the Bard Prison Initiative. In certain high school educator circles in New York City and beyond, Kate Belin is a rock star. How do teachers captivate their students? Here, in a feature we call How I Teach, we ask great educators how they approach their jobs.