Walking thought the hallway with a coffee in their hand. Walking to the classroom avoiding students as they run past them. Getting into the classroom making sure that this day goes better than the next. She ensure that every student who comes through the door is met with kindness and respect. This is a typical day for Ms. Hoang, a math teacher in East Leyden.
Ms. Hoang is a math teacher who came to Leyden last year. Her goal as a teacher is to show students that math will be helpful no matter what. She is able to do this by helping students understand the importance of math, and by using her experience in real life.
Ms. Hoang knowledge she used to “struggle with math myself, I went to a tutoring center for math, so I can relate.” Not everything is pretty, and Ms. Hoang tries to show her students that struggling is okay; reaching out for help is even better because it helps us improve at what we do.
Most people don’t think math is going to help them in the long term. Ms. Hoang tries to show the “long term goal. Not necessarily everyone wants to go to college, but they want to do something after high school. You’re going to use math in your everyday life, like a high school degree is going to be helpful at the end of day, no matter what you are” She wants to emphasis the long-term success of learning math. Everyone will have to learn just like Ms. Hoang learned it!
Thinking is how we get through everyday life as humans. We have to make sure that we are able to challenge our “brains to figure things out. I always say that it helps you with your logic, and you’re going to use logic for literally everything in life.” Without math to help us use our brains, we wouldn’t be able to become our best selves that we would want to be.
Using math outside of school might seem crazy to some people. When Ms. Hoang was in college, she need to make money fast. She started to refurbish furniture, and she needed to figure out “ how much did I pay for it? How much am I gonna get back? Like, am I gonna make a profit” She is able to use math in an outside experience to show students that math is very present in life. Being an entrepreneur can be very math heavy.
Math could be used to help with a lot of different problems outside of school such as “ Money, doing your taxes, and measuring stuff.” Ms. Hoang has done all of this in real life, and most adults too. If she wasn’t able to use math with these things, they could be bigger problems.
Ms. Hoang has seen people with variety of happiness involving math in her time teaching, but seeing “ People who hate math, who are like forced by their parents to come in and then they get, like super excited when they, like finally understand things.” Having people come into classrooms and not understand, but eventually coming around in the end is what Ms. Hoang wants for her students.
Ms. Hoang is a bright and kind teacher with her future ahead of her. She shares her wisdom with all of her students and makes sure that people feel safe is a top priority . She will ”always be someone that you could go up to, not necessarily about math, but about anything.”
