Confusing & complex; mysterious & magical – that’s math!

I love math. There, I said it. It’s true. I love math. It’s complex and fascinating. It’s full of patterns and relationships. It explains why some things happen and other things don't. It helps us understand and explain the world around us. Math shows up in something as (seemingly) simple as the number of petals in a flower, or as infinite as the shape of a galaxy. It is integral to the study of architecture and engineering and music. Yes, music.

Math can be complex, challenging, and confusing. It can also be beautiful, mysterious, and magical. Math helps us to learn to think more logically and critically. For 8th Grade Math and Algebra I, I hope to help your child develop their math skills and algebraic reasoning so they, too, can learn to use math to understand and explain the world around them.

Students have to learn some rudimentary skills (add, subtract, multiply, and divide) and learn how numbers work together before they can start to learn how math can help us explain the world around them. Sometimes learning these basic lessons may seem tedious and feel like pure drudgery. Students often don’t see the relevance of these lessons or why they are important.

But if our students can work through the difficult times and learn these important math skills, they can start to use math for its real purpose, which is to help us solve some of the problems life throws at us. You see, we don't do math so we can know that x=5. Nobody really cares that x is 5, or whatever. We do math to create, design, build, and do.We do math to to help us make decisions. I want to help our students develop their math skills so they too can create, design, build, do, and make good decisions about the things they want to do in life. Let's make it a great year of math discovery.