Hello!

August 25th, 2017 was the beginning; the day I started the teaching job that would alter the course of my career, and my life, forever. Prior to this day, I had been teaching secondary drama and English in London, England, following the completion of my teaching degree in drama education. I had never been drawn to drama before university. In fact, I had taken only one drama class in my entire grade school experience - an elective class during junior high school.

 

Suffice it to say, it did not even cross my mind to complete a Bachelor of Arts in Drama, and I set off to university, days after my 18th birthday, to begin a Bachelor of Science degree. I had always had an interest in the way the world worked and was eager to learn as much as I could during my undergraduate degree before applying to the Faculty of Education and becoming a high school biology teacher.

 

That all being said, I never considered myself to be the quintessential “left-brained” student either, and I also enjoyed the humanities and the arts, particularly music. I tried my best to remain as well rounded as possible in my first year of university, and took anything from biology, chemistry, and physics, to Spanish, music, and art history. Still, I never squeezed in a drama course, and I certainly did not enrol in a math course.

 

It was near the end of my first year in university that my mom unexpectedly passed away, and I was left questioning all of my life choices. At this time, I arbitrarily decided I would switch my major to drama, “because life is short and it seems fun”. Fast forward five years to my graduation from the University of Lethbridge with combined degrees in drama and education. I’d graduated at a time when there was a severe surplus of teachers in Alberta, and the chances of me finding a teaching job, let alone a drama teaching job, seemed highly unlikely.

 

Incidentally, my mentor teacher for my final practicum had to take a brief medical leave just after I’d graduated, and I was lucky enough to be hired in her drama teaching position for six weeks at the end of the 2014 school year. But after she returned I was back where I’d started, so I packed my bags and moved across the world to London, England, where there was most definitely not a teacher surplus.

I spent two years in the most exciting city in the world, teaching drama, English, and even science at schools across London and the Greater London Area. I worked in mainstream secondary schools, behaviour schools, and even a three month stint in a 1:1 provision where I catered to the educational and social-emotional needs of autistic students who had been excluded from their previous schools for acts of violence. I had no shortage of options when it came to teaching assignments, and I used this time to gain as much experience as I could.

 

As my youth mobility visa came to an end, I decided I wasn’t ready to head back to Canada and struggle to find a job, so I prepared to apply for a work visa. Luckily for me, though I didn’t know it at the time, my visa was rejected as my sponsor school had made an error in the information needed to process the request. At this time it was August 2016 and it seemed impossible that I would find a job for the 2016-2017 school year in Canada, but as luck would have it, a maternity leave opened up at a private school in Calgary and I was offered the job - teaching grade 5.

Never in a million years did I think I would be teaching elementary school, but beggars can’t be choosers, as they say, so I jumped in feet first and hoped against all odds it would work out. As it turned out, upper elementary was my absolute dream age to work with, and I couldn’t imagine a more fun place to spend my days. But lo and behold, as June 2017 rolled around, the maternity leave position came to an end and I was left looking for another job.

 

I cannot even remember how many jobs I applied for that year, but when I saw a posting for a grade 5 math and science teacher at the school my mom had worked at when I was a kid, I knew it was fate. I applied, and was offered the job beginning August of 2017. 

 

I was excited to start my new job, but was also very trepidatious knowing that I would be working at a school exclusively for students with varying learning disabilities (LD), many who struggled to learn math. Though some may have had difficulty with learning math, they were still capable math learners, provided they were offered appropriate, engaging, and relevant learning opportunities. It did not take me long to realize that the way I had taught math in my previous school, was not going to achieve the desired erudition with my neurodiverse friends.

 

I knew I needed to reassess my own instructional strategies, and so I got to work learning as much as I could to help make math a more meaningful and enjoyable experience for my students. I attended as many professional development sessions as I could, and was fortunate that my new school was willing to invest in my learning as well. They sent me to the Visible Learning for Math conferences, inspired by John Hattie, and I was also partnered with a graduate student from the University of Calgary who was pursuing a Master of Science. She was placed in my classroom to conduct a qualitative study on making mathematics more visual for students with specific learning disorders (SLD) including dyscalculia but also LDs in reading and writing (dyslexia and dysgraphia) and deficits in working memory, processing speed, etc.

 

Fast forward to the fall of 2019 when I finally decided it was time to take the next step in my endeavour to be a life-long learner and apply for my Master of Education degree. I had always known that going back to school would be a part of my journey, but I wanted to make sure it would be for something I was passionate about, and would also do the most to help me improve as a teacher, and help my students in the grand scheme of things. I had become so excited by math education in the previous two years that I knew it had to be along those lines. When I delved into that excitement, I realized that understanding “what” and “why” we are teaching what we are teaching was so important to me, as well as knowing “how” to do it best. It seemed clear to me that a focus on curriculum and pedagogy aligned perfectly with my aspirations.

 

During one of my summer semesters, I took a course on Universal Design for Learning which really shifted my mindset from differentiating for all situations and instead providing tools which could be accessed universally by all my students in order to make learning easier for them. It occurred to me that what works best for my struggling learners might actually work best for most, if not all, neurotypical learners as well. At the very least, it is important for students to have a choice about strategies, methods, and tools that work best for them at any given moment.

 

It wasn’t until completing this course that I decided I would pursue a project in partial fulfilment of my MEd degree, after realizing that I wanted to do something more practical than a thesis. After all, one of the main reasons I went back to school was to be more equipped to help my students get the most out of their education. Following much deliberation on what I could possibly do that would be a welcome addition to the world of math education, 4-titude Math was born.