Thank you for checking out For the Love of Math!

I started For the Love of Math because I have developed a passion for supporting students to experience the joy and creativity in mathematics. I saw that many students who struggle in math have limited options for support outside of school, and most of the time those supports are focused strictly on grades and curriculum that might not feel authentic or interesting to students. I started For the Love of Math to provide an more enjoyable and engaging alternative to traditional tutoring by bringing students and their families together.

The Longer Story…

After graduating from Occidental College in 2013, I moved to Nashville, TN, where I taught high school math for two years. During this time, I found myself overwhelmingly unprepared for the complexities of teaching mathematics. This motivated me to look into graduate programs across the country that would allow me to delve deeper into the research of learning mathematics as well as hone in on my skills as an educator. I landed in Oakland, CA, and began my graduate coursework in Fall of 2016 at UC Berkeley.

While in graduate school, I supplemented my income by tutoring students of all ages in San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley. This allowed me to see the diversity of math curriculums used as well as practice my skills as an educator who wanted to push students to think critically. I worked with students who struggled in math as well as students who were bored in their math classes and felt unchallenged. I still tutor with some of the incredible families who I began working with in 2016.

In my graduate coursework, I was a part of the Embodied Design Research Laboratory, where I explored how we use our bodies in learning math. I was particularly interested in how students engage in collaborative problem-solving, specifically when students have contradicting or diverging mathematical perspectives. In my research, I analyzed small group work by looking closely at student gestures and speech. This research illuminated just how much is going on when groups collaborate, and supported me in developing a detail-oriented observational approach with students that I continue to use as a classroom teacher.

After graduating from UC Berkeley in 2018, I taught at Mission High School in San Francisco where I taught Algebra 1, Algebra 2, and Precalculus from 2018-2020. I then went on to teach at MetWest High School from 2020-2022. In my two years at MetWest, I taught Algebra 1, Geometry, Algebra 2, Statistics, and Precalculus and served as department lead. In Fall of 2022, I began my first year of middle school teaching (which I love!) at Roosevelt Middle School.

Over the course of my career I have been involved in a variety of professional projects that have enhanced my skills as a mathematics teacher. In 2016, I wrote mathematics curriculum for the Santa Monica Department of Transportation. In 2019, I was a teacher representative at the Embodied Mathematical Imagination and Cognition Conference at UW Madison. I’ve also received training from the Othering and Belonging Institute on how to incorporate the intersection of racism and housing into mathematics curriculum, the Right Question Institute, and CMC-Asilomar. From 2017-2020 I was a Trellis Teacher Fellow, where I received personalized feedback on instruction and learned to better instruct students in collaborative group work activities. As a math teacher in San Francisco Unified, I received training in complex instruction and was a Teacher Facilitator in complex instruction for my math department.