My Experience Teaching

Barbara Lurvey
Math Teacher and Math Department Chair
North Reading High School

Like many other teachers, my interest in math and teaching began in the classroom with an inspirational teacher, Sister Mara, my 9th grade Algebra I teacher at Fontbonne Academy, an all girls catholic high school in Milton, Massachusetts.  The year was 1963. A “new math”, developed by the University of Illinois and Chicago University, was just being introduced into American schools, in response to the Russian Sputnik scare.  I loved the math and I loved Sister Mara, who challenged me every day.  I never occurred to me to not enjoy math or not strive to be really good at it.  I was also had lots of encouragement at home.  I was the daughter of an electrical engineering father who let me join him in carpentry projects in the basement and in the building of a Heath Kit amplifier at our kitchen table.  The message was that I could excel at anything I tried, even math and science.

When I went to college at Northeastern University, I majored in mathematics in the College of Liberal Arts.  I went from classes with all girls to classes where I was typically the only girl.  Again, I loved it.  The program offerings at Northeastern allowed me to enjoy what I considered to be the best of two worlds.  I was able to study mathematics and work in the business world at a cooperative education job as a scientific programmer and use my electives to take an “Education Sequence” of courses in order to become a certified 7-12 mathematics teacher.  I met my future husband in one of my math classes and he followed this dual path too.

When I graduated college, I taught mathematics at Wayland high school for one year.  Pregnancy and the Vietnam War caused me to leave the classroom as a fulltime teacher.  I remained actively teaching, however, as a tutor and substitute teacher for the next six years.  When I returned to the workplace, I decided to return to industry to work for my former coop boss at Coulter Biomedical Research in Concord, MA.  Since he already knew me and my work, I was allowed to work part-time and have any “off” time to devote exclusively to my children.  My work was very interesting,  programming one of the early personal computers to drive microscope and slide cassettes in order to automatically perform blood cell classification and analysis using image processing. 

By the mid 1980s, my children were all in school and I began to work at Wang Laboratories, Inc. in Lowell, MA.  I worked in the areas of computer graphics and imaging as they related to office document management.  It was a perfect union of my love of math and software engineering that lasted for the next fourteen years.  One aspect of my work at Wang that I especially enjoyed was my active participation in the national ANSI and international ISO committees that develop computer graphic and imaging standards.  I held multiple officer positions and was the editor of one standard.  I am particularly proud of helping to form a new image processing working group in 1987 along with Dr. George Grinstein, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

By 2000, I was working at Keyfile Corporation in Nashua, NH, as the Vice-President of Engineering and Product Management.  My children had all graduated from college by then and the dot.com phenomenon was affecting all software companies.  I decided to rethink what I was doing with my life and return to my roots in teaching.

I stepped back into teaching by substitute teaching and loved it.  In a matter of two months, I was working full time at North Reading High School, teaching Geometry and Calculus.  I knew right away that my many different work experiences were making a huge difference in how I taught math.  Today, I can’t possibly introduce a new concept without talking about its relationship and use in the real world.  My students appreciate this and I really enjoy making these connections.  I tell my students that math does not exist for its own sake.  It is rather a language that allows us to model important aspects of the world around us.  Those interested in accounting, sciences, engineering, etc. all use math to describe real world situations and solve real world problems.  I use various kinds of puzzles in addition to the math concepts and methods in order to encourage my students to become critical thinkers and problem solvers in any situation or context. 

I love what I do.  Nothing can compare to the joy and confidence on the face of a student who previously disliked math and was so sure that they could never “do” math.   For the last four years, I have been active in the S.T.E.M. Pipeline Initiative as both a S.T.E.M. Fellow and Leader.  My own career path is a perfect fit.  As a classroom teacher and math department chair, it natural for me to be a cheerleader for S.T.E.M. studies and careers.  To me, Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics are inalterably linked together.  I am very proud of the fact that two of my students have applied and been accepted for the new Technology, Engineering and Math-Science Academy, where they take college-level courses on the University of Massachusetts Lowell campus each day and then return to North Reading High School for the rest of each day.