Karen Sokolow

I started my teaching career tutoring, running small classes and teaching in China.  I started teaching when I was 17 and I would live there during the summers and teach English conversation, pronunciation, and then I morphed into teaching American and Western culture for those who wanted to travel. I loved teaching them the tools to teach language, which is by definition, alive. Communication is creative, responsive and spontaneous. This kind of teaching has helped me in my work here.

At a certain point in my career, I worked for a tutoring company where not many people were willing to teach math. I love math because it is orderly, logical, expansive, and encompassing. I gained my own appreciation of math through studying philosophy, religion, ideas of art, and what is beauty - philosophical ideas. I approach math from a very expansive point of view. One of the things I love about our school is that we approach every subject and every student in this creative, responsive, and expansive way. Math is math. When you start to think of math in a creative way and ask what areas involve this logical process such as aesthetics for example, you can tap into student interests.  

I love this idea that I can talk about ferns and the Fibonacci spiral, go out onto campus, find a fern in the woods, and then graph it. A student generated idea followed up by me responding to the student idea is my favorite part about teaching in that way. To me that is what MI/DI is. MI is the creative portion and DI is the responsive portion. What I’m teaching is algebra, geometry, spatial understanding. We are creative human beings. We want to create things, but we all see the world differently. My job is to respond and to connect to that, and that to me is the DI piece and that is what that means. That is what is so cool about teaching math here.

I really like rock climbing because it fits in with me personally. I was never good at team sports, and I’m not even a little bit competitive. Rock climbing is a great mixture of physical activity which I love, but without the pressure of the competition. The only person you are competing against is yourself. It’s personal competition against yourself to better yourself but it’s also a personal competition against fear and mistrust. Height is scary. Climbing along a half inch wide cord thirty feet up in a tree is scary, and we ask our students to try it anyway. There are some kids who are all for it but watching the ones who aren’t sure take that extra step, build up trust in their fellow students, who are quite literally holding them up in the air, is neat to see. Furthermore, watching it translate into the classroom is amazing. They push themselves harder and I can also push them harder because I know they can persevere as I’ve seen them do it somewhere else.  For our students with anxiety, conquering that in one place means they can conquer it somewhere else. Buy in from the student in their own abilities and trusting your fellow students when you are a teenager is not easiest thing in a world. I watch kids become closer.

I love the incidental teaching - the parts where we get off topic and explore the world.  The fact that we have the time and curiosity from the students makes me really excited.  It gives us a chance to talk to the entire human being of the student because we have these small class sizes. The small class sizes and relationships we are encouraged to develop with the students, also the open atmosphere of the classroom and to think creatively as a teaching style helps us to truly help form future citizens of the world. You don’t have to be just a math student or just an art student I really appreciate that about this place.