My name is Nathanael Burchell. I have decided to be a mathematics teacher with the reservation that I am not willing to be only another mediocre math teacher. If mediocrity was my goal, I would choose a less challenging profession with better prospects of wealth. I greatly value education, and have been very blessed to experience a wide variety of systems. I was home-schooled for six years, attended a public high school in a small town in Wisconsin, and graduated from the University of Minnesota, after spending my junior year studying in Lancaster, England. Each of my educational settings has contributed to who I am as a person and as a mathematics teacher.

As a math teacher, I have a great desire to see the light of realization dawn on a student’s face. I believe math is about perfection and clarity, yet most students treat it as a difficult and confusing subject. I also believe that the importance of math in today’s world far exceeds its role in technology. Math is important because it witnesses order in chaos.

I want to take a stand and affect the education of students. Too many mediocre math teachers have left many students with the view that math is a convoluted study of esoteric methods that have nothing to do with the rest of “real life”. This outlook leads to a severing distinction between “my education” and “my life”. Education has become a professional pursuit, a series of hoops to jump through to a passing grade, and then to a diploma, and then to a degree, and finally to a job. I desperately want to find out how to reconnect education and life in myself and in my students. Life should be full of learning, and education should not be classes and grades only.

Mathematics is intimately connected with poetry, chemistry, biology, art, music, and history. To ignore these connections is to deprive ourselves of beauty and understanding. I want my classroom to speak of these connections, and I want students to find them in my class. A typical lesson in my room will probably involve a relevant news clipping or a brief biography of a mathematician. Mathematics has a very rich and dramatic history that is usually neglected because of two reasons: math teachers do not have time, and history teachers are not interested. However, I believe that the biographical perspective gives students a chronological concept of mathematics, as well as a social understanding. Both of these add to the subject being learned.

This website is intended to describe me as a person and as a mathematics teacher. Hopefully my philosophy is visible throughout. Enjoy.

The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author.
The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by the University of Minnesota.