Sabino Teacher Earns Top Laurel
Posted on: Saturday, 17 May 2008, 09:00 CDT
By RHONDA BODFIELD
NATIONAL HONOR FOR TUCSONAN
Presidential award recognizes skill of calculus instruction
There is something profoundly humbling about watching Dave Kukla's calculus class at Sabino High School.
The 43-year-old teacher in a ponytail and a button-down shirt wants to know whether students can use the intermediate value theorem to solve a question with a bunch of letters and brackets in it. He asks why a derivative would fail to exist. He would like an answer on how students know when "F is concave up" and where inflection points may occur.
And the funny thing is that students aren't diving under their desks for cover. They're answering. Even when they can't, they don't blush to the hair follicles, stumbling around for an answer, but reason it out.
Even if classroom observers have no clue about what they're saying, there's something heartening in the fact that someone knows this stuff and is passing it along to generations who presumably will keep America competitive.
Kukla was in Washington, D.C., last week picking up the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching - a long title for what boils down to the highest recognition a teacher can get in this country for outstanding teaching. The only other Arizonan to receive the award this year was another Tucsonan: Grazyna Anna Zreda, a science teacher at Tanque Verde High.
The two each got a one-week paid trip to D.C., a photo shoot with Vice President Dick Cheney and a $10,000 award, which comes in handy given that Kukla could leave public education for the private sector and instantly double what he makes.
In part because of Kukla's efforts, Sabino's math department of nine teachers is also up for another prestigious award.
Sabino is one of only three high schools nationally that are finalists for an award lauding excellence in mathematics through the Intel Foundation. The winner, to be announced in June, will get $7,500 in cash and up to $150,000 in professional development, curriculum materials and computer equipment.
Sabino carries an "excelling" label and its math department is among the highest-scoring in the state, with 92 percent of 10th- graders passing the AIMS math test the first time they take it.
Granted, the school is in an affluent area, which tends to have a strong correlation with success. But those demographics are changing. About one-third of the student body next year will be from outside the feeder neighborhoods, compliments of open enrollment.
"What we have can easily be replicated at other schools," said department chairwoman Catherine Yslas. Teachers volunteer for a morning tutoring program. They encourage community involvement, working with Raytheon engineers who volunteer twice a week to run a study group. The teachers have standardized the curriculum so while they don't teach everything in lock step, they do agree on what they'll teach and set benchmarks to get there.
Principal Valerie Payne, who distributed party favors Tuesday morning to celebrate Kukla's award and the pending Intel decision, said the department is the most cohesive on campus, even talking math over lunch.
Payne calls Kukla "dedicated and engaging."
Ann Modica, co-director for the Center for Recruitment and Retention of Mathematics Teachers and the person who nominated Kukla for the award, calls him "very dynamic."
Students call Kukla "tight" - a phrase that doesn't mean "cheap" in today's teen parlance.
What's the magic? For one thing, Kukla is funny, although he has a strong aversion to math humor and anything with "pi" in the punch line. He uses phrases like "wicked cool." He strongly believes in the Socratic method, asking questions instead of feeding answers.
His classroom looks like a colorful art experiment, given that it displays student-created, beach-ball-sized Archimedean polyhedra (shapes using polygons as building blocks. If you don't know what those are, that's what Google images are for).
Maybe "ploy" isn't quite the right word, but he does use creative ways to get kids to use math. In the fall, students create (and then play) their own math games, working in 50 problems from concepts they learned in the first half of the school year.
In the spring, they have a story project in which math problems drive the narrative. Let's say, for example, that someone creates an outlandish scenario about penguins escaping from confinement. The penguins may have to determine how many Popsicle sticks it will take to build an effective ramp that's so long, given a wall height of so many feet.
Kukla said he still has "a surreal sense of disbelief" that he won the national award, a feat that required he submit videotapes of his teaching, as well as a 20-page paper and 10 pages of supplemental materials, from sample student projects to testing data supporting what he does in the class.
"I don't think I'm all that amazing. I just work really hard to help my kids with their challenges," he said.
That's why he's in by 6:30 a.m. During his lunch hour, there were 14 students at any given time in his room. They e-mail him after school with questions.
Meanwhile, he speaks to college students exploring careers in math, mentors new math teachers to help them master skills like making group work actually work, and webcasts his lessons.
His wife jokes with him that he has "chump" engraved on his forehead, but Kukla said he teaches because it's what fulfills him.
He does it, he said, because math is challenging for the teachers and can be brutal for the students if they don't have "a compassionate, creative soul" guiding them. He should know. He bombed high school calculus twice, in large part because he was afraid to ask questions and seek help.
"That experience really informs my teaching," he said. "This is hard for a lot of kids and many of them don't feel particularly confident in this arena, so I work really hard to create an environment for learning in which kids feel safe to say they don't know the answer."
AWARD FACTS
Congress created the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching in 1983. The award, which rotates each year between teachers for grades K-6 and teachers for grades 7- 12, is given to math and science teachers in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
* Contact reporter Rhonda Bodfield at 573-4118 or at rbodfield@azstarnet.com.
Originally published by RHONDA BODFIELD, ARIZONA DAILY STAR.
(c) 2008 Arizona Daily Star. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.
Source: Arizona Daily Star
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