In 2007, Kyle was hired for the first time as a math and science teacher, and it was so clear to him that teaching was his calling that he never looked back. Since, he has taught at a private school for kids with learning differences, a public middle school, and a school for adjudicated youth where a district supervisor told him that he had never given a higher evaluation to another math teacher. In 2014, Kyle got a job at the world-famous High Tech High in southern San Diego, and his classroom changed forever.
Through great coaching by his director and collaboration with the best math team ever, Kyle’s classroom became a place where students led every discussion, dove into complex mathematical ideas, built mathematical projects, and argued about geometry, trigonometry and calculus. They also walked into class with a smile every day. Kyle was nominated twice by his students to be their graduation speaker, lauded for teaching them financial savvy, and once broke up a fight by dancing and embarrassing himself so much that the students laughed and walked away. As part of his work at High Tech High Kyle became an instructional coach in the math department where he led a team of veteran teachers to visit the best math classrooms in the San Diego area and push their practice into techniques that got students to identify as mathematicians.
Kyle has experience teaching students remotely in a one-on-one environment and building curricula to suit individual needs. In one case, Kyle works with an 8th grader who lives on a boat in Southeast Asia. Kyle collaborates with this student and his family to develop an education that fits their needs. Together, this 8th grader and Kyle study investigative 8th grade math and discuss classical mechanics every week. As part of a large and ongoing project, his student is photographing the ocean floor and creating a virtual reality game based on his photographs. He and Kyle dive into the math behind this process of creating 3D spaces from 2D pictures with the goal that when this amazing young man finally pitches his virtual reality game to venture capitalists, he can explain the math behind it. In this current role, the student’s Dad wrote, “Hi Kyle, just a quick note to say thank you and how much we are loving the work you and [our student] are doing! I wished I could have learned math this way and from you!”
Getting kids to love math, get really good at math, and see it’s connection to the world is always Kyle’s goal.
