My first memory of loving math dates back to kindergarten. One day on our daily drive to school, I asked my mom to give me addition problems to solve. I distinctly remember lining up the numbers in my head so that I could add the digits easier, exclaiming to my mom, “I’m visualizing it!” The enthusiasm I felt for math on that kindergarten morning continued for the rest of my primary and secondary education. 

I would like to say that my love for math came from some deep fascination with numbers, but in truth I think I just liked following a strict set of rules that would undoubtedly lead me to the right answer. In college, I struggled with math for the first time in large part because of the abstract nature of it. There was no longer one clear outcome I could achieve, and my brilliant but socially awkward math professors did not seem to care about actually teaching me. They just showed up to present the material to me in deadpan lectures, and then I was supposed to figure out what it all meant on my own. This went against everything I believed that teaching should be, and was especially hard to accept since I was simultaneously having amazing dialogical learning experiences in my Spanish, sociology, and education classes.

To try to counter this negative math narrative that was emerging in my life, the summer after my sophomore year I decided to apply for an internship through Clark to work in some capacity with youth and math in Worcester. I ended up being placed with the Bruce Wells Upward Bound Program, a college readiness program that works with first-generation and low-income high school students. I worked for five weeks as a teaching assistant in a math classroom as part of their summer programming. Developing relationships with the high school students in the program and helping them with their math work made me rediscover my love of math and made me decide that I wanted to be a math teacher.

Exploring math with high school students that summer also made me realize that math needs to be more than just regurgitating information and plugging in numbers to formulas, like it was for me growing up. In order to engage students and to get them acting like mathematicians, math needs to be relevant to students’ lives and centered around problem-solving and real-world contexts. These are beliefs I carried into my classroom during my MAT year and continue to develop.