JACKSON CENTER — It’s not a career change that you hear teachers making everyday, but Susie Harris went for it anyway.
Harris was a public school music instructor for about 18 years, having taught the rudiments of 4/4 time to hundreds of students, first at Jackson Center, then at Piqua City Schools for five years, then back to Jackson Center in 2006, where she remains to this day.
As very often happens at small schools, two years ago Jackson Center had a teacher crunch and needed someone to step in and teach a couple of math classes. Enter Harris, who had the mathematics credentials to go with her musical background. She agreed to take the spot, and since then has given up clarinets and snare drums for compasses and slide rules.
“Math has always been intriguing to me,” Harris said in her classroom shortly after school let out for the day earlier this week. “And I’ve always been a continuous learner. After I taught a couple of math classes, I said ‘I really want to do this.’ So the transition (from music to math) wasn’t that difficult for me.”
Since being put on the first team in the math department, Harris got her certifications in order and is now qualified to teach everything from pre-algebra to calculus to both middle and high school students.
Harris embraced the fact that she had no background in teaching students to solve for “x”. She had no mathematical teaching template to follow – she had been telling the trombones to keep it down for the better part of two decades – so she felt free to improvise. With the help of the Ohio Council of Math Teachers, she designed a syllabus and wrote lessons plans based on what she felt was best for the students and not necessarily according to tradition.
Working with the OCMT and the College of Education and Human Development at Bowling Green State University, a grant allowed Harris and like-minded teachers from Hardin-Houston, Lima, Findlay and other districts to get together and spitball ideas on how they could better serve the students in the classroom. They share videos of algebra and geometry classes, visit each other’s classrooms, meet often and make presentations on the best techniques to be used to reach students, continue professional development courses, and many other activities, all of which, Harris said, is to ensure top-shelf math instruction is reaching every student.
“I want the students to cross that bridge from discussion to discovery,” Harris said. She pointed out that discussion or lecturing will always be a part of teaching math – two plus two will always equal four, for instance – but that is only the first part of understanding the subject. She has made it her business to make sure that students are also taught the second part of the equation, that being discovery, or that moment when it dawns on a student that he or she has the gray matter to connect the dots without the help of an instructor or a calculator.
“That’s what I’m striving for. I want the students to reach that discovery stage,” Harris said.
The OCMT has recognized Harris for her tireless efforts over the past two years. Dr. Jonathan Bostic, an assistant professor of Mathematics Education at BGSU who works with Harris and other area math teachers on their classroom techniques, nominated Harris for the OCMT’s West Region’s Outstanding Math Teacher, an honor which was bestowed on her at a recent meeting.
“When I first met her, I could see right away that she wants what is best for the students,” Dr. Bostic said of Harris. “No one has done more to raise the quality of math instruction for their district. Jackson Center is very fortunate to have her as a teacher. And, as far as I know, she’s not done.”
She’s not. She still there at Jackson Center, teaching five different math classes to both middle- and high-schoolers, trying to get them to cross that bridge.
