Sarah Hagan has a passion for math, and the pi-shaped pendant to prove it The 25-year-old teaches at Drumright High School in Oklahoma. The faded oil town is easy to miss. Fewer than 3,000 people live there, and the highway humps right around it. There are no stoplights, no movie theater and no bowling alley anymore. Just a clutch of small houses and hearty businesses such as a funeral home.
That makes it hard enough to attract good teachers, says Judd Matthes, Hagan’s principal. But it gets worse. “We don’t pay a lot in Oklahoma for beginning teachers,” he says, laughing. Matthes wonders why a National Merit Scholar who had gotten a full ride to the top-notch university would want to start her teaching life in a place like that.
Hagan, now in her third year at Drumright High, hadn’t planned on working in such a poor, rural district and was shocked when she arrived. “The first time I saw my classroom,” she says, “it was the most depressing thing I’d ever seen. There was no dry-erase board or bulletin boards.”
And the floorboards squealed. They still do, but the rest of her room is now an unrecognizable riot of color. Decorations hang wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling. A poster of Albert Einstein. Paper pompoms. This is the first key to understanding Sarah Hagan: She’s a visual person.
Hagan is also remarkably self-assured. When she arrived, the school had ordered new math textbooks, but Hagan had already decided – as a student-teacher – that she wasn’t going to use textbooks. “I don’t want to be stifled by that. I mean, I teach a lot of things in a totally different order than a textbook would,” she says. She simply left the new books in their boxes. Instead, in a standard lesson, she uses everything in the classroom but a textbook: a flower pot, a garbage can, a roll of tape, loose spaghetti. It's all part of Hagan’s do-it-yourself approach to teaching and learning.
As for the textbooks they make, her students begin with blank composition notebooks. Each day, Hagan hands out a lesson she has written herself or open-sourced from other teachers. It’s usually printed on colored paper and requires some kind of hands-on work: drawing, coloring, cutting. Students then glue the results into their notebooks. Eventually, the books look like dog-eared, bulging relics from an Indiana Jones movie. Hagan argues that if students are allowed to be creative, they’re more likely to remember what they've learned.
That afternoon, in Algebra II, Hagan comes up with a creative way to get her students to memorize the quadratic formula. She sings it.
“She really tricks us into learning,” says sophomore Jake Williams. “There’s so much fun involved in the classroom that we actually understand it and grasp it.”
“You do puzzles and all kinds of stuff,” says senior Krissy Hitch. “So it doesn’t even really seem like you’re learning. But then, when you take the test, you realize: “Wait, when did I even learn all this stuff?”
Making it fun matters. Algebra is high-stakes. A student who can’t pass the state test can’t graduate.
Her colleagues worry that the young math teacher could burn out. Hagan admits – sometimes – the work wears her down: “Yeah, there’re days when I complain. And the people I complain to think I’m insane because I haven’t left this place. But these kids deserve better.”
And so she stays, at least for now. Even in her scant free time, Sarah Hagan doesn’t really leave the classroom. She writes a blog about teaching called “Math Equals Love.” |