1. Why you chose to be an educator?
I have always enjoyed learning and then doing math, I was good at it, and I was fortunate to have great math teachers. To spend an entire career sharing that enjoyment with new students every year always seemed like the ideal job, and that has turned out to be exactly the case for me.
2. What inspires you?
While it doesn’t happen in every class every day (for me or for any teacher), there are some classes some days when everything clicks: the material is particularly interesting, accessible, and still challenging; I am well-prepared, on top of my game, and in control; and my students are well-prepared, receptive, and fully engaged. When that happens, I know it and my students know it.
3. What you would like to see from The Krystal Foundation.
I am pleased with exactly what I see so far: a new initiative to fund educational efforts that are perhaps unconventional and cross-disciplinary. I teach high school math, but I am fortunate that among my responsibilities are some courses outside the standard curriculum, such as Music and Math, Game Theory, Graph Theory, and Markov Chains. (I also get to teach a year-long, post-calculus Advanced Topics in Math course, an unusual offering at any high school.)