Best teacher award sums up her work
Published: September 20, 2006
When Jackie Cooke’s students learn to divide, they start by drawing a half-sized “Mini-Me” to share their hairstyle and taste in clothes. When they discover angles in her West Gresham Grade School classes, they contemplate a daredevil skateboarder from the class spinning 180s and 360s.
This is the secret to triggering a child’s confidence with numbers, said Cooke, named Oregon’s 2006-07 Teacher of the Year Tuesday by Superintendent Susan Castillo. Help them relax and have fun, so they can discover an innate sense of how math works.
Tristan Heartley, 10, said math was hard until Cooke was his teacher in second and third grades, giving him extra help during recess and after class. Now, he’s in fifth grade. And math?
“It’s pretty easy,” he said.
He’s not alone. Parent Lesli Uebel said Cooke’s class, which explored math using everything from salmon eggs to poetry, was a turning point for her daughter Carly, now in eighth grade.
“Jackie sort of took away the fear of math for her and showed her she could do it,” Uebel said. “She stimulated curiosity in the kids. It wasn’t just a rote ‘Blah, blah, blah.’ She made learning fun.”
Cooke said she loved teaching as soon as she started elementary school. She’d hurry home from class and teach her little sister everything she’d learned that day. As a young parent intrigued by her three children’s developing minds, she switched her studies at Portland State University to focus on elementary education.
Now a veteran, Cooke teaches other teachers, helping them develop confidence in their math abilities so they can pass that confidence to their students. Recently, she cut back her time in the classroom to do more professional development.
“There is as much a need for a ‘numeracy’ movement in the elementary schools as there has been a focus on literacy,” she wrote in her application for the award.
Cooke’s work is the backbone of the K-5 math curriculum map for the Gresham-Barlow School District, said West Gresham Principal Debra James. She also is a consultant and a co-editor of TOMT, the professional journal of the Oregon Council of Teachers of Mathematics. Over the past 15 years, she has taught teachers at workshops throughout the state and country.
Cooke speaks passionately about studies that show U.S. students falling behind in math and science and how good elementary teachers are essential to turning that around.
The idea is backed by Intel, which wants “to bring the world’s educational systems into step with the needs of the world’s technology-based economy,” said Morgan Anderson, education relations manager at Intel Oregon. Intel sponsored Cooke’s $3,000 award, the first time the state has been able to give a cash prize.
“How many of you like math?” Anderson asked at Tuesday’s whole-school award assembly, where roughly half the students had taken a class from Cooke.
Their raised hands filled the room.
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