Flashback

Whenever a rare break in my schedule presents itself, I roam. On the heels of the amazing 225^th bash last weekend, I have actually found a few gaps in my schedule this week. Along with our department chairs and division directors, I am part of a shared google document, so that we can record feedback collaboratively on the kinds of classes we see in our travels. It is great to see themes emerge from multiple viewpoints around pedagogy and class culture on this document. These kinds of “drive-by” visits are among my favorites aspects of being a Head of School; I never know what is around the corner. The English Department knows I have a particular penchant for popping in during racy conversations about sexual references in Shakespeare. I also enjoy swinging by faculty rooms and touching base with employees – the conversations tend to be a bit more in the PG range. Today I noticed just how many students were reading intensely on the stairwells of Fogg, reminding me that ours is a culture of academic engagement and not mere frivolous adolescent chatter. Rest assured that there was enough of that near the snack bar to make me smile as well.

For whatever reason, I walked by Zan Mehlhorn’s Math room today and saw the artful array of white board squiggles bringing me back to the world of integrals and derivatives. It was BC Calculus, and I must admit that as I approached the threshold of the classroom, my body temperature began to rise slightly. I was a pretty good Math student in high school, but I hit a bit of a wall in BC Calculus. My teacher was one of my most important mentors – not only was he my BC Calculus teacher, but he was my baseball coach as well as an amazing musician. I remember so desperately wanting to do great in his top Math class given all of our other connections. For whatever reason, I remember the particular topic of “Trig Substitution” as being the beginning of the end for me. The technique involved doing some kind of elaborate substitutions from sin, cosine, and tangent equations.

Of course I walked into that same topic today. I watched Ms. Mehlhorn playfully continue down a pathway filled with multiple substitutions – as if she were out for a stroll with her dog. There were radicals and cubes and negative exponents. Just when I thought we were arriving at an answer, a giant S appeared and we had to integrate.

“Time for the chain rule?” I said, desperately trying to remember something from the class so many years ago. The kids gave me a few approving snickers for the effort.

The students went on to ask questions that made absolutely no sense to me. Perhaps most exciting was watching as the teacher remained quiet and students helped each other collaboratively get to the answer – through multiple pathways. Even once completed, they asked about alternative possibilities to arrive at the same answer. One of the girls in the class had done an Innovation Project on “Fermat’s Last Theorem” last year, where she answered a panelist question about relevance by explaining that Math was aesthetically beautiful – like Art. Somehow I had never seen Math quite that way. As we neared resolution on the problem in question, I asked her if she thought this particular array of hieroglyphics on the board was similarly “beautiful.”

“Not so much,” she replied with a smile. “This is the more practical side of Math, actually.”

I looked back at Ms. Mehlhorn before I got ready to retreat back to my world of email and non-numerical prose, before my self-esteem imploded fully.

“The scary thing is that they actually understand this, don’t they?” I asked Ms. Mehlhorn. The kids smiled.

“Of course,” Zan replied with a smirk.

“Terrifying,” I said. “Absolutely terrifying.”

With that, the Head of School was off to his next adventure.