2 minute read
Deborah Gordon Goodrich OPC '94
PC Profile of Deborah Gordon Goodrich OPC ’94
by Jared Scott Tesler
Advertisement
At last year’s inaugural OPCs in Education Forum, a professional networking event created by Upper School math teacher Bruce MacCullough, Deborah Gordon Goodrich learned of her fellow OPCs’ contributions to their chosen field. Some were founding and heading charter schools. Others were establishing service learning programs. Still others were empowering students to make positive changes in their schools and communities.
Deborah Gordon Goodrich
“I went home energized and encouraged to start making changes in my own classroom,” said Goodrich, a member of the mathematics department at Montclair Kimberley Academy, one of New Jersey’s largest independent day schools, where she currently teaches seventh grade Algebra IA — the first half of the Algebra I curriculum — and eighth grade Geometry.
A few weeks later, a budgeting exercise performed by Goodrich’s eighth grade advisees revealed that not all of today’s youth know the value of a dollar. Inspired to inject the issues of diversity, sustainability and cultural competence into the existing algebra curriculum, Goodrich and one of her departmental colleagues, Gary Kaufman, began crafting a series of socially conscious math word problems that would enrich their classroom activities and discussions.
The project was made possible by Montclair Kimberley Academy’s Blauvelt Professional Study Advancement Award. Intended to promote the integration of character development in the classroom, the award provides opportunities for faculty to spend time over the summer designing units of study grounded in fostering students’ moral and intellectual habits.
“I wanted to see our math classes play a larger role in our school’s mission to engage each student intellectually and personally with the world,” Goodrich explained. “Each problem is multilayered so that students apply and extend their understanding of algebraic skills and concepts and then use and think about their results as they discuss open-ended ethical questions.”
Last summer, over the course of an eight-week period, Goodrich and Kaufman developed roughly 50 word problems. Humdrum mathematical exercises that once dealt with gym memberships and phone plans have given way to topics of “enlightening, stimulating and productively messy” conversation that have included gender roles in the workplace, politics, religion, government, finance and the environment. The content includes up-to-the minute data provided by such sources as Forbes magazine and WNYC, a division of New York Public Radio. Goodrich maintains that a quality over-quantity mindset is necessary and has definitely been worth it in the long run.
“We have had many interesting conversations about the social topics that we’ve covered,” she said. “One of the things that we had to come to terms with early in the year was not getting through as many problems as we used to complete during class so that we could allow for sufficient time to foster these conversations.”
Openly sharing their work with other educators — a stipulation of the grant — initially involved Google Docs and is now being accomplished through a blog. This spring, Goodrich and Kaufman will present their project during a gathering of more than 8,000 of their peers in Boston, at the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Annual Meeting and Exposition, the nation’s premier math education event.
As the number of word problems in their repertoire continues to grow, the duo has bigger plans in store for introducing the problems to even more audiences across the country and around the world. “Ideally, we would like to create a workbook or textbook supplement for schools or publishers to purchase to use with their Algebra I curriculum,” Goodrich said. “Eventually, we plan to create something similar for the Pre-Algebra and general sixth grade math curricula.”
The daughter of longtime, now-retired Penn Charter math teacher Robert Gordon Hon. 1689, Goodrich expressed gratitude for her Penn Charter experience, which included “many talented teachers who demonstrated the power that a good teacher has to bring meaning to a concept.” They have inspired her to follow in their footsteps.
