Ever since she began teaching math at the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science eight years ago, Lauren Zarandona has been applying for the national Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching.
She’s applied four times. She’s been a state finalist three times.
A week and a half ago, she learned she’s finally won the award.
“I was excited because I finally did it,” Zarandona said. “This has been an eight-year process for me.”
The award recognizes outstanding math and science teachers for their teaching both in and out of the classroom. Another MSMS teacher nominated Zarandona during her first year of teaching at MSMS. Now, Zarandona will travel to Washington, D.C., from Sept. 7-9 to attend an awards ceremony and receive a $10,000 prize.
Zarandona has taught math classes at MSMS for eight years. She teaches many of the standard classes — algebra II, a precalculus class and her favorite class, advanced placement statistics. She also teaches courses like number sense, in which students compete in math contests; math lab, in which she works with students in small groups to cover specific concepts they’ll need for precalculus that they didn’t cover in previous math classes, and logic and game theory.
“That’s actually really fun as well,” she said. “Kids look forward to it. It’s a pretty popular class.”
Zarandona likes showing students that math can be fun, and it can be applicable to real life. Statistics is a much more practical math than many people realize, she said. She also loves teaching logic and game theory where students do puzzles and games, writing arguments about why a certain method works to solve a certain problem.
“The kids who really get a lot out of both stats and that class normally are kids who go into economics or (political science) or history because those are the maths they had to use for those classes,” Zarandona said.
Often students hear from teachers and other adults in their lives that math is hard, said Wade Leonard, coordinator of alumni and public relations at MSMS. Zarandona reverses that idea for many students she teaches, he said.
“It’s neat when you can capture the imagination of students who don’t consider themselves ‘math people,'” Zarandona said. “I don’t think there’s such thing as a math person, but a lot of people do. They will immediately find out I’m a math teacher and (say), ‘Oh, well, I’m not a math person.’ I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean, but I do know that for those kids, stats and logic and game theory and those other courses can be a way for them to see that maybe they’re better at math than they realized.”
But it’s not just MSMS students who benefit from Zarandona’s teaching. Zarandona has gone into other classrooms in the Golden Triangle, brought in math centers and taught math classes for the day. Last year, she helped organize MSMS Math Superstars, a math competition which included about 50 elementary students, grades 3-5, from the Golden Triangle.
“They had practiced at their home schools, and the top four from each grade level came,” she said. “It was so neat because there were kids from different socio-economic backgrounds, different racial and ethnic backgrounds, and they all got to come in together and see that anyone can do math. It doesn’t look like one thing. It doesn’t have to be from one school. And we had winners from every school.”
Zarandona is well-deserving of the national award, said Kelly Brown, director for MSMS academic affairs. Brown called Zarandona “the best of the best.”
“She is the perfect person to meet those students wherever they are and help them go where they want next,” Brown said.
You can help your community
Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 34 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.