I am a high school math teacher.

I think it's time I come to terms with this statement.  What an interesting group of people I am joining.  When I think back on all of the math teachers I have had I really don't see myself in that group.  Recent circumstances are making me question that view. 

I fully view myself as a teacher, and take great pride in that identity.  But math teachers...they're just so, well, let me give you some examples from my past.  Take one of my high school math teachers with a hair cut that looked like a wide cone - some sort of physical representation of the subject she was teaching.  "Now to calculate the volume of my head..."  Or the other one who would blast WLTE - light FM - before class started.  As if being forced to learn math at 7:20 in the morning wasn't bad enough that my teacher felt so inclined to add a little Celine Dion.  Or my calc professor in college, teaching in the former sanctuary of a church the U of M converted into a lecture hall, that would cough extremely loudly, every ten minutes, into the microphone poorly punctuating his lecture and scaring me every time or another math professor that linked every sentence with a southern drawling "...thaaaat is..." making the number of sentences in any lecture equal to one or the one that used the word "notion" at least ten times per class.  I will stop here, but believe me, I have more.  Do I want to join that group of people and assume that identity?

It is something that I have been consciously aware of since switching majors my freshman year.  I started my college career in the Institute of Technology at the University of MN with the goal of becoming a civil engineer.  My classes were filled with your typical high flying math nerds (hfmn).  Good people, but one afternoon I came to the realization that maybe the math joke I was laughing at may not be how I want to spend the rest of my life...standing around a water cooler with the "guys" (ie hfmn) going over our really cool math pick up lines like "I wish I were your derivative so I could lie tangent to your curves" that to date has worked on zero potential dates (full disclosure - this is actually the name of a Facebook group with almost 100,000 members of which I am a member, but more on my hfmn credentials below).  And so I switched majors, began taking education classes, and became immersed in the world of elementary education which happens to be , by the way, about as anti-math as you can get.  The math classes required to teach elementary school rarely tackled content more challenging that adding fractions with unlike denominators and my math nerdiness slipped into what I thought would be the past.  Accepting this job in Alaska, teaching high school math, has opened the door to this particular skeleton in my closet.  Only recently did I realize that the skeleton was out and about.  Denial can be such a powerful thing.

I mean, everyone, from time to time, goes onto Amazon and buys three books from the 70s on number theory with such inviting titles like An Adventurer's Guide to Number Theory.  I do, after all, identify with adventurers, so why shouldn't I have this book?  And everyone, from time to time, gets completely baffled by the look of boredom on their students' faces after going through a thrilling lesson on divisibility rules and how amazing it is that such things like divisibility rules exist at all in a system (i.e. numbers) invented by humans. Physics and nature follow a set of perfectly beautiful rules of their own, but math , unlike the latter two, is a human construct.  And who doesn't get excited about the math education blog in the NY Times or a podcast by some guy calling himself mathpunk (thanks Ben). Everyone does these things, from time to time.  Right?

Yeah, probably not.  Just a select few.  People like those high flying math nerds I escaped in engineering school.  And people like high school math teachers.  Whatever.  It could be worse.  I have to decided to pick up where I left off on my trip down the math nerdiness road.  I will continue to find things that only a minority of people find interesting or funny.  But hopefully I will also find things that are universally interesting.  Things that make teaching math fun for me and interesting for my students.  Things that turn my students into hfmn.  Because you know what?  It's not that bad.  And if I ever need to, it packs away nicely into any closet.