Carolyn Garcia: a math cheerleader
Carolyn Garcia is an “award-winning” 7th grade math teacher at Abington Avenue School in Newark. In an interview with Chalkbeat Ms. Garcia shares the secrets of her success.
Ms. Garcia starts with acknowledging that after enrolling Montclair State University she realized that she was “trailing her peers.” She “struggled especially with writing, and was assigned a tutor.” She blames high school for her travails, also mentioning that she did not know “a lick of English” before going to school.
Faced with the pressures of higher education, she decided to “pursue teaching.” Most American universities have an affiliated college of education on the same campus as the main university. The graduation certificates of ed schools are often derisively called Mickey-Mouse diplomas for low academic standards, trivial courses and ideological fundamentalism, but there is no reason to blame Ms. Garcia for choosing an easier career path — no doubt she loved kids so much that could not imagine her life doing anything else but teaching.
Apparently, Ms. Garcia did not learn English well enough during thirteen years of elementary, middle and high school combined. With the “language barrier” being insurmountable, she wisely chose a career of a math teacher.
Now being a successful teacher, she provides “every student the opportunity to contribute to the learning process by cultivating an environment where they feel invited to display their knowledge.” In plain English this means that she tells slower kids to “watch the lesson via laptop,” while she works with brighter kids on a more complex assignment.
For Ms. Garcia, “geometry has always been a treat to teach.” For two millennia the usual method had been to start with definitions of point, line and plane, but Ms. Garcia likes to “start by instructing the class to find the volumes of pyramids, cylinders, and spheres.” It is all the more commendable, considering that geometry is a high school course, and solid geometry comes after plane geometry.
To compensate for the lack of foundations, Ms. Garcia instructs her students to fill plastic “three-dimensional shapes” with sand. The result is “a teacher’s delight: a classroom fully engaged as [the students] fill the various shapes.” To those who might blame Ms. Garcia of treating 7th grades like preschoolers, she would likely retort by saying that she “equips students with a hands-on, practical understanding of volume.”
Ms. Garcia does not limit herself to teaching in class. She also teaches cheerleading after school, proud of recruiting “the first boy cheerleader in the city of Newark.” She is delighted to have started a new trend in cheerleading, so “the other schools started to pick up on boys,” woohoo!
According to her, it was cheerleading, not her amazing math pedagogy skills or the “hands-on practical understanding of volume” activities that “made coming to school a little bit more meaningful” for many of her students.
But could it be any different? Success being a measure of itself is alienated from knowledge or skills. In fact, the only time “knowledge” is mentioned in the article is when describing kids “invited to display their knowledge.” That is, the knowledge they already possessed, not the knowledge they hoped to imbibe from their teacher.
