Hi Everyone, my name is Tori your boulder math club tutor! I graduated with honors from Clemson University with a double Bachelors in Mathematics and Education and a minor in Spanish. I then qualified to teach secondary mathematics soon after. I taught both middle and high school math before taking time at home with my three young kids. My Denver Public Schools (DPS) 7th graders had the highest growth on PARCC at our school year over year and my Denver Schools of Science and Technology (DSST) 10th graders showed the highest growth in the district on the PSAT10. I achieved the highest teacher rating DPS LEAP had to offer: Distinguished.

As a math teacher, I was constantly asked “when am I going to use this?” to which I would always reply “It’s not the answer, it’s how you get there that matters. Problem solving will always be valuable in life” Which isn’t wrong but I did see a lack of real life applicability in what we were teaching our students. We are surrounded by math, whether that be the binary code in our iPhones, to the Fibonacci Sequence in a snail's shell, to stock market ratios. Our world revolves (get it?) around math, you just have to look for the signs.

My passion lies with students who have a love for mathematics. The students who are already in the honors classes but still a bit bored with the material. My goal when teaching was to always have something that challenged them. Much to my surprise, they would work on these challenges outside of school and come back the next day asking for more! We soon began meeting during lunch and after school to work on riddles, writing proofs, Rubiks cube races and coding our Lego bot Yoda which became our class pet. It was fascinating to see these brilliant young minds work together to crack problems I was working on in college. That’s when boulder math club started to shape in my mind. A place where these talented students could nerd out together.

Here at boulder math club, 6th and 7th graders will come together to learn about every day math, work on riddles that force them to think abstractly, and work as a team in doing so. It won’t be easy but it will be fun!