The Slope of My Life

As a line changes over time so has my life recently. For various reasons that I may blog about in the future, I began looking for a new job in April of this year. I found three schools that I was very interested in and were very interested in me. They were the Sycamore School, Herron School and the International School of Indiana. I was excited about all three schools and believe each would have been a very good place to work.

While in middle school I competed in a great math program called MATHCOUNTS. As an 8th grader I was fortunate enough to finish 3rd at the state competition. This allowed me to compete for Indiana at the national competition. The coach of that team was a teacher from Terre Haute named Bob Fischer. From that trip and other experiences with MATHCOUNTS I have a tremendous amount of respect for him as a coach. This is relevant because the job at Sycamore gave me the opportunity to assist him in coaching their MATHCOUNTS team. While at Franklin I found out I really enjoyed coaching academic teams, so the opportunity to work with someone with his experience and record was very appealing to me.

Thus, with this in mind, as well as other considerations I have accepted a position at Sycamore School in Indianapolis. There are some huge changes for me as this will be a middle school position (though I will be teaching Geometry and Algebra 2) and it is a private school. My other two jobs have been at public high schools. As well Sycamore is considered a "gifted and talented" school. This will also be a big change for me because I have always taught regular/low level classes. This is the change I am most comfortable with because I have always desired to teach high level classes.

I decided this year to break my summer into two parts. The first part was reliving my glory years on the golf course by preparing for and then competing in the Indiana State Amateur Tournament. It went very well as I made the cut(top 60 out of about 500 that attempt to qualify), made a hole-in-one and finished 51st. Unfortunately, I played very poorly in the 4th round or I would have finished even higher. The second part of my summer is going to be focused on creating online math resources. This past semester I worked on creating Squidoo pages on Algebra 1 topics(See top right corner). I am going to continue that work, but I am also creating a website more geared for teachers. I will post more on that tomorrow.