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What she does:
- Courtney Jenkins began working for Cambridge Educational Center,
an SAT preparation tutoring company, shortly after graduating from
Franklin & Marshall College. There, she served as the
director of a teaching center in Columbia, Maryland and taught math to
students from ages 5 to 17. While working there, she started
substitute teaching at the private school that she attended from K
through 12. She has worked at Bryn Mawr School as a substitute
teacher since September, 2003. She has taught many classes in the
lower, middle and upper school levels.
- It was while substitute teaching that she heard of a middle
school teacher who needed a long term sub for maternity leave starting
in April. Courtney starting taking over her classes in April 2005
and will continue teaching until the end of this school year.
Next year, Courtney will teach four classes of 6th grade math and one
section of advanced 8th graders who are taking Elementary
Functions. She will also serve as an advisor to a
group
of 6th grade students. Advisors serve as friends,
guidance counselors, and a liason between parents and teachers. Courtney
says, "I did not need to be certified to
teach in order to take these jobs because you do not need certification
in the private schools. They loved hiring an alumnus of the
school and someone with a degree in mathematics."
Math on the Job:
- The curriculum for 6th grade includes basic operations with whole
numbers, fractions, decimals, and percents. The students also
explore proportions, basic equations, and geometry. Courtney
described a project that applies animal facts to humans: "For
example, if a beetle can eat 40 times its weight during the day, that
would mean a human would eat 400 hamburgers in a day". Another
interesting project (for the 8th grade section) involves a special
machine which translates the waves of a tuning fork into a graph on
their TI calculator. This way students can write an equation from
the graph of an actual real world wave!
- Courtney enjoys creating new math
problems, tests and games for the girls she teaches. Her
mathematics education helps her create problems and projects that
appeal to a variety of learning styles. She says, "When I explain
a problem to class, I try to explain it a few different ways, keeping
in mind the different ways to understand mathematics. Inevitably,
the students always come up with their own inventive ways to solve
problems and make connections across topics. This is what makes
teaching exciting: to see a student figure out her own way of
understanding a concept and watch her excitement at her own discovery! "
Courtney's background:
- Courtney completed a B.A. in Mathematics from Franklin &
Marshall College in May 2003 and has been accepted into the Applied
Mathematics Graduate Program at Towson University. She will be
starting classes in the fall of 2005. Beyond her academic
coursework, she finds that her experiences tutoring at the
Cambridge Educational Center and substitute teaching are crucial to her
full-time teaching job at Bryn Mawr now. Her knowledge of the
school, its schedule, its priorities and the intimate knowledge of what
its like to be a student there are also helpful assets to being a
teacher in the middle school.
- Courtney says, "Mathematics opened the door to me for this job
and--although I love
teaching and plan on doing this for at least the next few years--I know
there could be so much more out there for me in mathematics. I
have
considered working for the NSA in the future and will definitely
continue my academic education in mathematics."
Advice for students:
- "Schools love teachers who know a lot about their subject and can
teach at all levels with the same amount of comfort. If you are
unsure about teaching, try tutoring and see if that is something you
enjoy. I loved tutoring throughout college and found it was
something I had success with. Along the way, I gained experience
teaching students with learning disorders, and I gained references I
could use to supplement my resume when it came time for interviews.
- "In my opinion, you should use your undergraduate years to
stretch your mind in different subjects and figure out what you really
like. During my four years at F&M, I took classes in 11
different academic departments, while taking math classes all
along. This enabled me to have a broad liberal arts education and
keep up with the math requirements so that I was never behind in my
pursuit of a B.A. in Math. It is easier to go back to school and
get a teaching certificate than it is to go back and get a B.A. in a
particular subject.
- "As a female with a major in mathematics and a minor in computer
science, I am in the minority. Teaching at an all-girls school is a
great way to serve as a role model and mentor. I hope more than
anything else to give the girls I teach a chance to enjoy mathematics
and understand how important it is and how much fun it can be to
discover! Discovering mathematics in a physical sense is crucial
to developing a true understanding of the subject. I have made a
goal to incorporate this in my teaching everyday."