By Mr. Newman
For new math teacher Latryce Cole, the highlight of her summer was–by design–doing nothing.
“I wanted to take the summer off to decompress and get ready for my new experience,” she told me on the Friday afternoon of faculty pre-planning days. We were sitting in room 310, which she shares with Ms. Greenberg and where she would soon be embarking on that “new experience” of teaching math at The Lovett School. Above us hung inflatable dice from the 2021 prom (a nod to probability) and a constellation of three-dimensional metal stars (their official geometric designation: augmented icosahedrons).
So what was the most “nothing” thing Dr. Cole did?
“Gosh, I guess I watched a lot of television,” she said. “That was it. Get up, have breakfast, and watch some reruns of Murder She Wrote.” Dr. Cole is a big fan of “cozy mysteries,” whether they come in the form of the Angela Lansbury starring mystery show that ran from 1984-1996, or a book like Two Parts Sugar, One Part Murder, about a woman who discovers a dead body on the floor of the bakery she inherited.
While Dr. Cole was planning to wind down from a week of meetings by squeezing in a little more of that “nothing” (starting off by streaming Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire), the T-shirt she was wearing was a reminder of all the something on the horizon. “I should be lesson planning” was emblazoned on the front.
Fortunately, she loves teaching math, which she has been doing for twenty years now. When I asked her “Why math?” she seemed to glow.
“I love it. I absolutely love it. I’ve always loved it,” she said. It was her favorite subject in high school. When she went off to college as an undergrad, she ended up working as a peer tutor and “just got so much joy in helping others.”
While she has taught a wide range of levels and subjects in math, she will be teaching all geometry classes this year. She believes geometry is one of the most practical of the math subjects.
“I think about the athletes that I’m going to see as students and talking about the geometry of their sport,” she said. “I think of the artists that I’m going to see, the visual artists and the geometry of creating visual imagery.” She understands there are some “nuts and bolts” they need to cover. “We have to talk about those theorems,” she said. But at the heart of things is developing “the ability to engage in logic and reasoning and explaining why things are the way that they are.” She noted this can be challenging for students, who may be bumping into that expectation for the first time.
While she finds math beautiful she recognizes that not all of her students do, or will, even after all of her efforts to convince them. But her teaching philosophy is that students will rise to the occasion if they know you care about them. “As long as my students know that I care about them as individuals, as human beings, they’re willing to dig into the hard problems,” she said. They’ll be more likely to show up early, come for extra help or stay late, or “even come out of their shell to ask a question in the middle of class.”
It was a caring professor at Spelman College, where she earned her undergraduate degree in 1999, who encouraged her to be a teacher.
Her favorite mathematical concept? The idea of infinity. “I could start counting today and I could count until my last breath and I will still not have reached the end,” she said. “So there’s always more to discover. There’s always more out there.”
Since she’ll be teaching geometry, I wondered if she had a favorite shape, like the hexagon for example.
“Gosh, no,” she said. But she did then say that she loves the Pythagorean Theorem, in part because the scarecrow recites it incorrectly in the movie The Wizard of Oz (which is sadly ironic given that he recites it to prove he has a brain). As a kid, the mistake went over her head, of course. But once she became a teacher who had to teach her students this very ancient concept, she experienced that scene quite differently: “I was like, wait, can we rewind? Can we rewind that please?”
Dr. Cole is bringing her legitimately functioning brain to us from the Atlanta Girls School, a place she loved. She anticipates facing a period of adjustment in moving from block scheduling and single-gender classes to hour-long co-ed classes, but she is confident that her work will continue to be about nurturing a spirit of collaboration and putting her students first. While she would like for her students to fall in love with math, she’ll settle for them finishing the school year “with a slightly better appreciation of mathematics.”
Of course, Dr. Cole was a teenager once, and she knows from experience that there are lots of things on students’ minds besides math.
She recalled her own “first-day jitters” and picking out her “first-day outfit.” While she paid attention to being fashionable at the time, she said that “as an adult, it’s all about comfort.”
I asked her what she thought she’d wear on the first day of school.
“I have a couple of dresses that I’m thinking about,” she said. Her biggest concern was what she would wear on her feet since she anticipated having to do a lot of walking on campus.
Clearly, the summer of nothing was nearly over, and she had a lot more to figure out than which cozy mystery to read next or whether to pair her scrambled eggs with cubed potatoes or Tater Tots.
“The shoe dilemma is heavy on my mind right now,” she said.
