Ms. Ching puts the math in eMpATHy. Her lightness and kindness smooth the sharp angles of high school geometry, and she somehow makes terms like “amortization” and “zero power rule” sound singsong and melodic. She’s the Maria Von Trapp of trigonometry; instead of do-re-mi, she teaches soh-cah-toa.
Ms. Ching teaches Geometry and Algebra 2 to 9th and 10th graders. She’s constantly searching for ways to intertwine the things she sees in the world with the math she teaches. Her curriculum is fueled by all that she witnesses, whether it be the Taj Mahal or Mini-Golf (two concepts I’d love to see intertwined).
In her terms, Ms. Ching teaches “realistic financial stuff.” Students gain financial vocabulary– they discuss savings accounts, certificates of deposit, Roth IRAs, traditional 401ks, and other such jumbles of letters and numbers. Ms. Ching sows the seeds that her students will reap when they handle their own finances. She prevents blinkless stares at Turbo-tax and April 14th all-nighters. To all of Ms. Ching’s students: save your notes.
In Ms. Ching’s class, “you’re gonna learn to be a millionaire.” She tells her classes this at the beginning of the year, but I realized it independently when she explained “amortization” to me (this is specifically not when one becomes King Julien’s sidekick Mort from Madagascar).
Student’s don’t simply focus on their own finances, though. In a recent project, students identified the top ten financially neediest cities in the United States of America and designed public spaces to address their needs. After research, students decided what might benefit the city most in the long term. They then found a Zillow lot and wrote a proposal for a public space to be built to address one of the problems they found, combining the geometric concept of scale factor with the opportunity for real-world change-making.
This doesn’t mean the grade comes easy, though. As far as Ms. Ching is concerned, her students can always improve. “I don’t want my students to get a 100 in my class. If they do, the ceiling is too low!” They may be asked to find the height of a ceiling, but they’ll never reach it. They’ll instead be to be the best version of themselves, and they’ll be guided by Ms. Ching’s sing-song instruction.