Janet Bryson, President
I’m Janet Bryson and I am excited to be president of LACTMA. I remember fondly, as a high school math teacher in the 80′s, doing my first presentation to colleagues at a LACTMA conference. Since then I’ve taught almost every high school math course from General Math through AP Calc BC, spent a year as a visiting high school lecturer at UCLA, and a year teaching Math in Mali, West Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer. Currently, I’m the Secondary Math Coach with middle and high school teachers for South Pasadena Unified School District. I love collaborating with teachers, new and experienced, to sharpen our skills together. Current technology makes it even easier for all of us to share our expertise and passion with each other–working smarter, not harder.
My vision for LACTMA is an organization that celebrates the impact of successful learning experiences, that offers resources and encouragement when students don’t learn, that stimulates and challenges its members to learn and refine their practice, and that provides a place of community for LA’s math educators. We have so much to offer one another and our students as we continue to learn and grow together.
Our challenges are great and the stakes are very high; and yet, never before have we had the knowledge on how the brain learns, what instructional practices have the greatest impact, or the technological tools we have now. Ken Blanchard states “None of us is as smart as all of us.” My vision is LACTMA as a way for all of us to benefit from our shared “smarts.”
At the recent NCSM conference in San Diego, Mike Schmoker inspired many of us with a challenge for unprecedented results, not through amazing new technology or expensive programs, but through a focus on good curricula, best practices that engage every student in higher order thinking, and using the results received to refine what we do so every child really does learn. Exploring mathematics is stimulating, fun, elegant even. Exploring math and how to make it all that and accessible for our students with colleagues and friends makes it more stimulating, fun, elegant, accessible, and efficient! Let’s build on LACTMA’s strong foundation of supporting teachers to create a venue for teachers to learn, to explore, to grow, to brainstorm, to create, and to enjoy being math teachers together.