Karen Laffey Math Teacher
Red Bank Regional High School
Little Silver, NJ
Math class ... fun and engaging? It is if you’re in Karen Laffey’s classroom at Red Bank Regional High School. From designing and building their own mini-golf course to writing Calculus challenge problems worthy of the AP Exam, Karen’s students don’t just master the curricular content ... they enjoy doing it!
One reason Karen’s students are enjoying their work is because Karen, herself, truly loves what she does. "I worked in the corporate world for 17 years when the subsidiary I worked in was sold off," she explains. “I was given a year's salary to allow me time to consider my career path. I had once truly enjoyed the corporate job, but no longer. The last few years on the job had become frustrating and routine. I worked with a friend who is a career counselor. We discussed many different things on the path to discovering what job I would enjoy doing. Teaching definitely came out on top. I gave it a try at a middle school as a maternity leave sub. I enjoyed teaching, but middle school didn't seem like the right fit. I was told of a job offering at Red Bank Regional High School and was hired. I was nervous the first few weeks, but soon fell in love. Teaching is so much more than shoving facts into a kid's brain. I love the high schoolers - they are energetic and fun. I love math and I want others to enjoy it and not be afraid of numbers and variables. Teaching gives me so many opportunities to show teenagers how math can be fun and be useful for things other than balancing a checkbook and calculating the tip."
Karen’s first problem-based learning unit was designed for her Geometry classes. She had a felt need, as their teacher, to try something new: "The first chapter of geometry is, well, dull. It is vocabulary, it's notation, it's memorization. I didn't like starting off the year with yet another boring math class to offer the students. I needed a way to tie all of the ideas, words and notation together to make it more understandable. In addition, the students had a rough time learning to use the protractor. Spending a class period using a protractor to measure pre-drawn angles on a worksheet was boring. Out of this, the idea of creating a mini-golf course was born. The students need to create 2 greens, each of which has acute, obtuse, right, and straight angles. They need to measure them. The 'perfect shot' must be drawn in - here, the idea of congruent angles is used (the angle the ball hits the side of the course is the same as the angle it bounces out at). The edges of the green are all line segments, the ball is like a point, and the green is like a plane. So many ideas can be brought together at once. The mini-golf course works well because most students think of playing mini-golf as fun. Creating a course, being the designer, lets the students be so creative and imaginative. I put few restrictions on the project other than a level playing surface so that we stick to plane geometry - but the students have found a way around that using tubes and ramps! I love the innovations they come up with to 'bend' the rules while meeting all of the requirements. It's an example of their problem solving skills at work!" Click HERE to view Karen’s task and rubric.
In order to make her problem-based units work, Karen needs her students to schedule their time and take responsibility for their own learning. How does she teach them to do so? "I yell at them and say 'get to work you lazy beasts, do you want to work at McDonald's making fries your whole life?’,' Karen jokes. "OK, not really. I do use a sense of humor and respect. Every student is respected for what they can do and if a student answers a question wrong, I try to find something that is correct in their answer and use that to steer them to a completely correct answer. By making math seem more friendly right at the start of the year, students are more willing to give it a try and not give up. They have hope that there will be more fun in the future."
In addition to teaching geometry, Karen teaches Advanced Placement Calculus, and her goal this year is to bring some of the strategies she’s employed in her geometry classes into her other classes. Karen describes the work she is doing with IDE consultant Andie DiMarco: "In AP Calc, Andie and I are working on a scheme that encourages students to design their own problems to solve using the content they are learning. The students will be responsible for presenting the problem to the class to solve and complete. The students will also be responsible for presenting the solution. The purpose of this is to help the students to use and see how to apply their knowledge to other problems, not just the few in the text. These students enjoy solving puzzles and riddles - by having them design the problems, we can take their interest to the next level - design."
Math class ... fun and engaging? It is if you’re in Karen Laffey’s classroom at Red Bank Regional High School. From designing and building their own mini-golf course to writing Calculus challenge problems worthy of the AP Exam, Karen’s students don’t just master the curricular content ... they enjoy doing it!
b. I enjoyed teaching, but middle school didn't seem like the right fit. I was told of a job offering at Red Bank Regional High School and was hired. I was nervous the first few weeks, but soon fell in love. Teaching is so much more than shoving facts into a kid's brain. I love the high schoolers - they are energetic and fun. I love math and I want others to enjoy it and not be afraid of numbers and variables. Teaching gives me so many opportunities to show teenagers how math can be fun and be useful for things other than balancing a checkbook and calculating the tip."
Karen’s first problem-based learning unit was designed for her Geometry classes. She had a felt need, as their teacher, to try something new: "The first chapter of geometry is, well, dull. It is vocabulary, it's notation, it's memorization. I didn't like starting off the year with yet another boring math class to offer the students. I needed a way to tie all of the ideas, words and notation together to make it more understandable. In addition, the students had a rough time learning to use the protractor. Spending a class period using a protractor to measure pre-drawn angles on a worksheet was boring. Out of this, the idea of creating a mini-golf course was born. The students need to create 2 greens, each of which has acute, obtuse, right, and straight angles. They need to measure them. The 'perfect shot' must be drawn in - here, the idea of congruent angles is used (the angle the ball hits the side of the course is the same as the angle it bounces out at). The edges of 
the green are all line segments, the ball is like a point, and the green is like a plane. So many ideas can be brought together at once. The mini-golf course works well because most students think of playing mini-golf as fun. Creating a course, being the designer, lets the students be so creative and imaginative. I put few restrictions on the project other than a level playing surface so that we stick to plane geometry - but the students have found a way around that using tubes and ramps! I love the innovations they come up with to 'bend' the rules while meeting all of the requirements. It's an example of their problem solving skills at work!" 
Karen needs her students to schedule their time and take responsibility for their own learning. How does she teach them to do so? "I yell at them and say 'get to work you lazy beasts, do you want to work at McDonald's making fries your whole life?’,' Karen jokes. "OK, not really. I do use a sense of humor and respect. Every student is respected for what they can do and if a student answers a question wrong, I try to find something that is correct in their answer and use that to steer them to a completely correct answer. By making math seem more friendly right at the start of the year, students are more willing to give it a try and not give up. They have hope that there will be more fun in the future."
In addition to teaching geometry, Karen teaches Advanced Placement Calculus, and her goal this year is to bring some of the strategies she’s employed in her geometry classes into her other classes. Karen describes the work she is doing with IDE consultant