The poet Katie Ford wrote, ‘Love isn’t mathematics? Oh yes it is.’ The math educator is faced with a beautiful and important problem: finding within mathematics’s logical stringency a set of experiences to create, for students, an authentic intellectual need — fuel for the kind of genuine curiosity that makes for lifelong mathematics learners, and perhaps even people who might say they love math. This is by far the hardest thing I have ever tried to do, and the most worthwhile.”
Tom’s Story
Teaching Discipline
Mathematics
Why Mathematics
“There’s a great quote from Georg Cantor that often gets translated as, ‘The essence of mathematics lies in its freedom.’ Mathematics ties the creative liberties of the arts to the precision and descriptive power of the sciences, with a detour through the ontological playground of philosophy. I got into teaching math because I never wanted to forget how the ground floor of all mathematical inquiry is a kind of play among and between ideas, something that can be easily forgotten or overlooked in the rarefied setting of secondary math education.”
Professional Experience
Before starting his public school teaching career, Tom was a founding teacher at the Breakthrough Greater Boston site, and also taught at Brown Summer High School and as part of the Poincaré Institute for Mathematics Education at Tufts University.
Tom taught high school math for seven years in Massachusetts and Virginia. He was a general education mathematics teacher, a special education math co-teacher, and taught AP Research and Statistics. He also directed the math summer enrichment program. In addition to teaching, Tom advised the literary magazine and the philosophy club, as well as coaching the math team.
Since 2022 Tom has worked for Amplify Education, first as an Activity Specialist using the Desmos Activity Builder, its Computation Layer, and the Desmos Graphing Calculator to create interactive lessons. Most recently Tom has been a Curriculum Developer for Amplify Desmos Math, working on Teacher Editions and other materials for ADM Algebra 1 and Algebra 2, as well as being a Unit Coherence Lead. If you would like to learn more about Amplify Desmos Math or chat further about anything Desmos-related, Tom would love to hear from you!
Hobbies
Tom enjoys reading and writing poetry. He has also been learning and using ASL since 2017.
Academic Background
- Tufts University (Master of Arts in Teaching: Secondary Mathematics)
- Tufts University (Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Philosophy)