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Introducing myself: greetings from the Moxie state
I’m Paul Lamson-LaPlume though by a choice of mine 15 years ago I am most often called L².
I teach at Yarmouth High School in Yarmouth, Maine.
Though I started my teaching career in high school math, I am now split between computer science and math. Honestly, I was considering making a push to be a full-time computer science teacher because I was getting increasingly frustrated with the math teaching scene. Then I discovered the MMM podcast and I am starting to put enough pieces together that I don’t want to abandon my math role now that I have hope that I can become the teacher I have wanted to be for over a decade … and spread what I learn to the rest of my relatively small department.
I teach whatever math course needs a teacher which means I have taught almost every math course offered to sophomores, juniors, and seniors at my school (we have a separate freshman team that I currently have zero interest in).
One of the coolest stories related to my teaching journey is that I was encouraged to pursue teaching by Dr. Amar Bose. Yes, that Bose – the one who started the speaker company. I was working as a summer intern and arranged a private meeting with him (to the envy of many of the engineers who had been working there for years and still hadn’t met him in person!) where he shared that he still enjoyed teaching classes at MIT.
I joined the Academy because I know I need support to continue my journey down this path of transformation. I have been eating up the podcast and exploring the resources presented. So far I have seen some successes and no shortage of challenges with many more to come, especially since I ultimately want to transform the way that my district (or at least middle and high schools) explores math with students. There is way too much of a traditional feel to it at present.
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2 Replies
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Welcome Paul! What a priority for you right now? What are you interested in improving the most?
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My priority is to have my students buy in to wanting deeper, challenging problems versus their current desire of being spoonfed math procedures.
I await ideas coming as I get deeper in the Academy but a current frustration is that my students seem to want to be given procedures, practice problems, quizzes, and tests.
