Why “CONNECT”?

On a rainy October Friday during my first year teaching, despite spending my day around 100 excitable scholars and caring colleagues, I felt isolated.  As a new and particularly young teacher, my desire to impress administration was preventing me from getting the help I needed. My cooperating teacher had told me the year before that one of the first things I would need to figure out as a teacher was an organizational system that I could manage.  The stack of ungraded classwork that was my passenger that evening was proof that I hadn’t found such a system yet.

This October, on a similarly rainy Friday, I once again left school frustrated with another stack of papers (they never go away).  But this time, I didn’t feel alone. Before I started driving, I had texted three different math teachers and coaches from schools around the twin cities asking to talk.  I knew I was going to get the help I needed to turn around some of the struggles I was having.

I found my network of mentors through MCTM Connect, which hosts events for early-career math teachers throughout the twin cities.  Indeed, without this community of mentors and colleagues, I don’t know if I would still be teaching. MCTM allowed me the opportunity to learn from the missteps and successes of other early-career math teachers, to get a picture of what it was like to teach in settings very different from my own, and to gain perspective as I worked to align my practice of teaching and my ideals as an educator.

Because teaching is so important and so complex, I need relationships with educators both in and outside of my building to become the best teacher I can be.  I am lucky that I have been able to find such a community in-person here in Minnesota; I’m already looking forward to the next Connect event.

Jacob Spear