I sat uncomfortably in my chair, my stomach in knots and my feet tapping the floor metronomically. My pre-test ritual had always been silence, but my classmates had different ideas in mind: some fumbled for their pencils, others shuffled through their flashcards. Some copied my stoic \u201cThe Thinker\u201d approach. Our teacher, Laurie Bass, said she\u2019d be back in a minute with the tests, our first of high school, but time moved slowly and I was growing more and more anxious by the second. Finally, she returned, somehow accompanied by the cozy scent of pumpkins. Yes, she was carrying the tests. But more importantly, she sported a fresh batch of pumpkin bread that she had made just for us. As we began the test, she placed a square and a napkin on the corner of each of our desks. It was delicious. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Laurie Bass has brought rigorous mathematics with a side of sweetness to Fieldston students for 43 years. Though Thursday, June 16, may have been her last as a teacher, it was far from her last as a mathematician. I asked her to ruminate on her life, her career, her love of math and her plans for the future. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I began the interview with a basic icebreaker: \u201cwho are you?\u201d Without hesitation, she answered, \u201cMy whole life I knew I was going to be a math teacher.\u201d She continued, \u201c[this] makes me an anomaly in this world, having decided this in third grade. That’s what I wanted to do. And then to go and do it and then to do it most of my life in the same place. All these things make me a dinosaur because people change their major five times, and when they get out of school, they change their career many times\u2026But this is always what I wanted to do, and I’ve been able to do it, which has been a great pleasure to me. A great pleasure\u2026[math was] always just a fact of my life. I love doing problems. I love the logic of math. I love the patterns. I love sharing my love of those things. I love getting kids excited about those things.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI love being able to take something that a textbook makes static, but make it come alive\u201d\u2013\u2013that is perhaps Bass\u2019 mantra as a mathematician. Ironically, she spent twenty years as an author of geometry textbooks at Prentice Hall (now called Savvas). She considered it an opportunity to make geometry more accessible to a national community of students. Even there, Bass found a way to add nuance and creativity to a notoriously dimensionless genre of literature; for a summer, she worked on incorporating fun applications with the newly invented TI Nspire into her textbooks. She would call her partner in California every day at 9:00 AM ET (her colleague was an early riser) to describe to her the activity she had mapped out and what its objective was. Her partner would then translate that into TI commands. \u201cI was just always looking for ways to make it come alive for kids,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
She was indeed, and she still is. As she was with the TI Nspire, Bass has always been interested in technology in the classroom. \u201cI brought Geometer\u2019s Sketchpad to the school 30 some years ago, and I\u2019ve been a big proponent of that ever since. I use other programs in my geometry class. We just used one called Poly, and it allows you to look at all sorts of three dimensional figures, rotate them, and see what they look like. There’s another program I didn’t get to use this year called KaleidoTile (which is freeware) which allows you to look at three dimensional shapes, shave off the edges, lop off the vertices, see what happens to the shape\u2026just really wonderful visualization tools.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
For many years at Fieldston, Bass worked on getting grants. She worked to get laptops and Smart Boards into the hands of math teachers (before this became standard issue) and Polydrons, Zome tools, and other tangible manipulatives into the classroom. These \u201ctoys\u201d fill Bass\u2019 office like a treasure trove, each in containers bearing the bruises of years of use. In fact, the day I interviewed her, Bass had used the polydrons for the first time since the onset of the pandemic in her freshman geometry class. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
That same day, she had done an activity with her precalculus class she called \u201cSmelling Parkinson\u2019s\u201d. It’s about a woman with a great sense of smell who smelled something funny in her husband. And when he was subsequently diagnosed with Parkinson’s, they went to a meeting for Parkinson’s sufferers and their families, and she was bowled over by the smell. She went to the researchers and she said, \u2018you could tell people are going to get Parkinson\u2019s because you could smell it. I could smell it. I smelled this in my husband seven years ago.\u2019 So they gave her twelve T-shirts, six ones worn by people who had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and six [worn by people who had not]. And they gave them to her in separate plastic bags and said, see if you can identify these. And she got eleven right. And for the 12th one they said \u201cno, this person doesn’t have Parkinson’s. You’re wrong.\u2019\u201d Bass\u2019 face lit up as she approached the punchline. \u201cAnd that person was subsequently diagnosed with Parkinson’s. She knew before the researchers knew, before the guy knew. She knew first.\u201d For her probability unit, her class simulated this scenario.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This was just one of many activities that Bass adopted from a math conference. One of the highlights of her tenure at Fieldston is that the school encouraged her to attend these conferences. \u201cI went to a lot of conferences. A lot of conferences. And that made a huge difference, because in every conference, I would bring back activities and topics and points of view that just either electrified my teaching or the things I was learning.\u201d Another favorite activity she learned from a conference was to model the spread of a rumor with her students. \u201cThe data has never failed me\u201d\u2013it is always a logistic curve. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Bass could go on for hours about the fascinating applications of math. It is her belief that if \u201cyou\u2019re bored by geometry and you\u2019re bored by algebra,\u2026It doesn\u2019t mean math isn\u2019t for you. It just means you haven\u2019t found the right branch of math.\u201d For Bass, of course, every branch of math is the right branch. In her time at Fieldston, she has taught just about every class offered for middle through high schoolers\u2013everything except senior calculus BC, to be exact. Yet, she has always created opportunities for students to pursue areas of math that aren\u2019t listed in the course catalog. She used to teach Unified Math and hosted an Alternative Learning Program (ALP) called the Third Dimension, allowing students to explore mathematical shapes in the fourth, fifth, and sixth dimensions, as well as in fractals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In spite of her deep love of mathematics, math was one amongst many of Bass\u2019 favorite aspects of her Fieldston experience. It was the connections\u2013with colleagues and students alike\u2013that truly made her time here. \u201cI have a great department, which is supportive and collaborative; I get to learn from them every day.\u201d she said. \u201cAnd I\u2019ve loved the academic freedom I\u2019ve had here\u2026I don’t have to deal with a state board that says that this is what you have to do in these days.\u201d Indeed, whenever Bass stumbled upon something remarkable in one of her many books or math conferences and proposed it as a lesson to her department chair, the reply was unfailingly a yes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
She is not without her critiques, though. Like a true progressive educator, Bass wishes Fieldston students would worry less about the prestige of their college and more about knowledge. Her \u201cparting message\u201d for Fieldston: \u201cI wish students felt less crazed that if they don\u2019t get an A, all is lost\u2026when students come to me and say, \u2018how can I get a better grade?\u2019 I don’t have an answer for that. It’s about learning the math. It’s about getting the math. If you concentrate on the learning, everything else will fall into place because in life later, what’s going to matter is that you know how to be a learner and that you’re you.\u201d This hyper stressed mentality, she says, is \u201cvery much against the spirit of inquiry that we\u2019re all trying to have here.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Though Laurie Bass may be bidding farewell to Fieldston, she is hardly saying goodbye to the world of math and academia. In her retirement, she plans to attend activities remotely and in person at MoMath (the Museum of Math, in NYC), and to continue solving challenging math problems with Mr. Wearn and Mr. Chu (if you\u2019ve ever walked by her office, it\u2019s possible you\u2019ve seen a whiteboard entirely covered with numbers and Greek letters). \u201cRight now, I read half books. I have to return them to the library because I can’t finish them because I have too much work.\u201d In her retirement, she is excited to now have the time to read full books! She will also now be able to pursue her other hobbies in more depth: traveling, going to theater, singing, walking, cooking, sewing and spending time with her husband and two grown daughters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I sat uncomfortably in my chair, my stomach in knots and my feet tapping the floor metronomically. My pre-test ritual had always been silence, but my classmates had different ideas in mind: some fumbled for their pencils, others shuffled through their flashcards. Some copied my stoic \u201cThe Thinker\u201d approach. Our teacher, Laurie Bass, said she\u2019d be back in a minute with the tests, our first of high school, but time moved slowly and I was<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":288,"featured_media":6671,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[347,318],"tags":[],"coauthors":[410],"class_list":["post-6672","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-community","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/Screen-Shot-2022-06-23-at-5.44.52-PM.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/288"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6672"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6672\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6675,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6672\/revisions\/6675"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6672"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=6672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}