Joanne Jacobs Summary:
Teacher training at a well-respected university focused on social justice, cultural relevance, students’ psychology — but not how to teach math, an engineer turned math teacher tells Holly Korbey in an interview. “Yellow Heights,” as he calls himself, is the author of Unbalanced: Memoir of an Immigrant Math Teacher.
Yellow Heights was a top math student in China, he tells Korbey. In the U.S., he enjoying working with students in his son’s school math club. After working for Microsoft and then in finance, his startup failed. He enrolled in a one-year master’s in teaching program to prepare for a new career.
Classes focused on justice and equity, supporting adolescent students in their identities, “culturally sustaining pedagogy” and building healthy relationships with students, he tells Korbey. There were classes on the practical part of teaching, but they also focused on culture.
“Teaching for Learning” was “pretty ideological. It’s about cultural background, adolescent development, a little focus on students with disability and how to deal with that,” says Yellow Heights.
“Content Area Methods” wasn’t about math content. “It’s basically about respecting different identities, working in different school environments — very culturally focused.”
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