Tessalapagos

Team Tessalapagos is a family endeavor with Mom at the helm and family members using their talents in the areas of art and ideas. I have been a math teacher for 36 years, but some of those years were focused on teaching my own children at home and tutoring friends and family. My first years in the classroom were primarily at the middle school level, where I taught struggling students as well as accelerated students. I spent summers teaching students algebra and geometry, and I also filled in for a year as the television math teacher for my former district's after school homework programming on public television. I currently teach special education students math in both resource and coteaching classrooms at the high school level. I occasionally tutor college students in their preliminary math courses. I have a Bachelor's degree in secondary education with a major in math and a minor in Spanish. I also have a Master's in special education, high incidence disabilities.

My philosophy of teaching math is continually being refined through experience and reflection. I think that we often push students to learn algorithms and ideas that are abstract without taking time to formalize foundational concepts, which results in low self-image and a sense of being bad at math. I am a huge fan of visual models and solid questioning strategies, and I will typically question a student through a struggle when I can. At the same time, I recognize the value of repetition for developing procedural fluency with basic skills and observe that many students with learning disabilities face their greatest challenges in knowing how to tap into correct steps to deal with the basics. It's a dance between helping them to remember the how tos and understanding the reasoning behind those how tos. I'm not talking about drill and kill repetition where students face tons of intricate problems in a single assignment. I'm talking about repeated exposure to a common set of problems such that my students become confident enough to then face similar problems. Students typically provide feedback stating that I present things so that they understand. Ironically, many of the adults who sit in on my classes as paraprofessionals also indicate that they learn while in my class. My students are very often those who struggle with concepts that are not concrete. I am often pressured to move ahead because of the pacing required to cover it all, and yet, I find that moving too quickly deprives my strugglers of the opportunity to get a better handle on their understanding. It's always a balancing act. My resources focus on areas and design that will support students who struggle. Strugglers often need graphic organizers, slower pacing, chunking, and a lot of repetition. They often state that Algebra looks like gibberish, so I create resources with fewer problems and more space on a page. Fancy writing throws them off, so I keep my fonts simple. Self-guided and self-correcting activities are excellent as these will allow students to immediately know if they are on track or not. I'm a lifetime learner, and I'm always learning from my students! I also learn about what works and what does not so that I can refine my practice.

I graduated with distinction from Northern Arizona University when I received my MS in Special Education.

BS in Education with a Major in Math and a Minor in Spanish, University of Nevada Reno. MS in Special Education with a Focus on High Incidence-Mild to Moderate Severity, Northern Arizona University.

Mom of 8, Grandmother to 1. My youngest 3 children were born in the mission field when my family spent 4 years serving in Mexico. I was widowed a few years ago, so your purchases and support contribute to my ability to attend to further educational needs of those youngest. Although my primary resource focus is math activities and supports for strugglers, you may find some occasional Sunday School and Puppet Ministry materials as I find time to develop for TPT. I have participated in these areas and love hamming it up as a puppet personality! My creative juices trace back to my childhood days, when my best friend and I would record "Mystery Theater" episodes on a cassette recorder! I am also developing my growth mindset in the area of art. In other words, I'm not an artist...yet. I am learning to explore and improve as my youngest demonstrates her progress over many years of the same. I love the opportunity to be creative, and I am learning to use some tech tools to expand on this.