New Haven Independent

If you haven’t simplified a radical recently, Climis’s math classroom at Common Ground High School on Wednesday morning would have been the place to be. The seven-year veteran was recently honored as one of just 31 teachers in the nation to receive a $2,500 Math Hero Award from the Raytheon Company for excellence in mathematics teaching.

The country is desperate to know what great math teaching consists of. Climis, who teaches and often team-teaches geometry, architecture, and biodiversity studies at the small environment-themed charter high school in West Rock, had more than a few thoughts on the matter. Her secret formula involves intensive one-on-one attention and a knack for applying the complex idea of mathematics to real life.

“First,” she said, “we establish a relationship of trust and respect with the kids.” That happens through the culture of the 143-student school, a place intimate enough for the 12 full-time staff to get to know all the students. There are no teacher offices and no teacher lunch room, nowhere to hide. “We eat lunch with the kids, talk to them all the time. When they know you’re there for them, they’re open to learning, and that enables them to stick with it.”

Mikel Brooks, a future herpetologist, comes all the way from Waterbury to attend Common Ground. He said Climis tries to spend as much time with him as she can, especially since his mind sometimes tends to wander.

If that’s not enough, Climis will meet the kids after class, in the study hall after school Tuesdays and Thursdays. And if that is not enough either, then, “Listen up, everyone. You have my cell phone number, please call me.”

One of the keys to her success, it appears, is practicing this axiom in every class: Don’t let the kids leave with a homework assignment, ever, until each and every one of them knows how to do the work.

“If they don’t get it in class, they go home, and they get frustrated. Not understanding the homework and doing it has only two results: you practice something wrong, or you blow it off.”

Climis and the math staff doubled the number of Common Ground kids scoring at proficiency or higher between 2007 and 2008 on the tenth grade CAPT test.

Tenth-grader Monifa Jones revealed another key to the growing math prowess of these kids: the applied nature of the learning. “I know,” she said, as she showed a drawn-to-scale floor plan of the school, “that after we listen to, you know, the lesson or theorem for 20 minutes, that we’re going to get up and do something active with the math.”

After Climis went over aspects of the Pythagorean theorem, related to finding diagonal lengths in a figure very much like a closet, the kids worked on their architecture projects, part of the geometry curriculum.

The architecture lesson, team-taught with Climis by social studies teacher Jeremy Stone, involved groups of the kids such as Maurice Smalls and Joseph Stoudmire, Jr. picking a pre-industrial piece of architecture such as a cave, adobe structure, or hut. “The kids,” said Stone, a veteran teacher in his first at Common Ground, “will analyze the physical needs of the structure and then evaluate how that meets the needs of the people who will live in it. For example, if a cave has a certain volume of air that needs to be heated, and there are six people in the cave family, and each stick or log of firewood provides a certain amount of heat, how many sticks will be required to survive a winter?”

Maurice, who wants to be a mechanical engineer, is doing the designing of his structure. Joseph, who wants to be an accountant and finds shapes more challenging than numbers, will do the calculations.

“Our kids,” said Climis, “always know that they are learning things that adults do in the real world, and they relate to that. And you better believe when our kids buy a cell phone, they know that’s an equation with two variables: the cost and how much time you spend talking!”

She said that while many Common Ground students come to high school unprepared in math, “We meet them where they are and then move with them, making them stronger.”

And although Climis is modest about it, another key to her teaching is simply that she is deeply in love with her subject. “Sometimes it mystifies my students,” she says, “that I like it so much. But I love the way math … just flows and is so logical. It’s like this great river of numbers flowing by and through us.”

Many of the school’s suburban kids (about 20 percent of the student body) have algebra in eighth grade. New Haven kids often require a pre-algebra course and other math support. Right now on the bucolic West Rock campus the courses go through algebra two, with the strongest kids being sent to local colleges for advanced classes. Within a year or two, Climis said, they will be introducing pre-calculus and trigonometry.

What is Climis going to use the $2,500 for (as well as a matching $2,500 for the school)? “Texas Instruments makes these data sensors,” she said, “which pick up motion, sound, and temperature. They easily plug into the kids calculators. I think if we buy eight more, the kids will be able to work in groups,”

That would be for the class she teaches in the spring, on biodiversity — which, of course involves a lot of statistics.