News and Events : News 05-06

New NMH Teacher Wins
Presidential Award

By JANET BOND, Recorder Staff

GILL—Math is probably the best tool we have for saying something about the natural world that is true and verifiably so.

So says local teacher Mark Yates, one of 100 teachers nationwide to be awarded the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching this year.

Yates is currently finishing his first year at Northfield Mount Hermon School, which released the news of his award. He said he actually won the award for work he’d done at the McCallie School in Chattanooga, Tenn.

It took three nominations and three tries to win the award before Yates was successful. The committee charged with nominating 100 teachers looks at videotapes of the class, as well as answers to as many as five pages of questions.

Yates said the video was a critical factor for the committee which looked to see the whether the students were engaged.

In his last attempt, Yates worked with toys that engage:

"I built a Ferris wheel out of an erector set, hung a weight on a string and asked how high will it be three seconds after I let go?

"I had a student jumping rope and a pendulum."

His students had to invent a periodic function, that if graphed, would determine where the object is at any point in time in the future.

The class, pre-calculus, is one of two Yates teaches—the other being geometry.

"Euclid’s geometry of 2,000 years ago is the same geometry I taught yesterday," he said asserting the truth of the picture mathematics presents.

"In philosophy, the best two people say completely different things. There’s no way to pick the high truth. The great thing about math is it’s (the proofs) so powerful we’re not going to be arguing about who is right."

"English literature debates the truth of it. History debates opinions. In math it doesn’t work that way … you don’t have to shout, you just point at your work."

Yates said the video tapes were, in part, work toward his professional development goal—to video tape him teaching his class and write a paper about it. It was an effort to hold a mirror to his performance as a teacher.

"(The students) are not nearly as wowed by me as I am by my picture of who I am in my head," he said.

You can reach Janet Bond at: jbond@recorder.com or (413) 772-0261 Ext.263.

Top of Page