Why elementary education?
I always knew I wanted to work with children. When I was growing up I thought I wanted to be a pediatrician. I think kids are fascinating, funny, entertaining, smart. I love being around them and learning from them. Also, I’d always been interested in mathematics, and I wanted to figure out why most people in this country are math-phobic. It seemed to me the problem begins at the elementary school level. A lot of elementary education teachers learned math solely by rules and formulas – and they then teach math this way, which isn’t productive for many students. By middle school and high school kids can be really lost. I focused on elementary education because I wanted to understand what goes on when kids are first introduced to math. What did you do between the time you received your masters in 1994 and the time you entered the doctoral program at Stanford last fall? I was a classroom teacher at PS 116, an elementary school on east 33rd Street in Manhattan. I taught kindergarten throug
