About Me

Hi! My name is Sarah Ladner Apollo and I am a super math nerd. It is not coincidence that I'm eating some delicious dessert in what appears to be the best, most recent picture of myself I can find. My love for sweets and math teaching happily collided when, as a student teacher, I learned that math classes all over the world celebrate Pi Day. How I avoided this tradition as a math student devastates me to this day, but I'm making up for it as a teacher. When new students tradition into my school (this happens a lot, I'll explain in a bit) and I ask current students to introduce them to math classes, they usually aren't helpful. They include roughly three pieces of information: Sarah is a nerd (yep, they call me Sarah), she's pretty nice, and have you heard about Pi Day yet? Hence the name, teaches and eats pi. My fridge will look like this in a few months:

I'm a born and bred New England-er, having lived in the region my entire life. Growing up in rural Maine I developed an aptitude for math and an interest in teaching it to what seemed to always be a wary audience. Also a habit of dropping my "r"'s at the end of my words. I studied math at Middlebury College in Vermont, where I had the privilege of studying abroad for a semester in Paris, which proved to me that there really is life outside of small towns. I gave southern New England a try after I graduated, moving to Boston for grad school and I haven't left yet. My Boston/Maine accent isn't atrocious yet, but talk to me in twenty years.

Immediately after finishing grad school I was hired to a job for which I hadn't applied. As a brand new teacher my application was noticed by the hiring team at Brookline High School, but was ultimately passed on to the director of the associated therapeutic special education program connected with the school. He didn't seem alarmed that I (at the time) had neither the special education credentials nor particularly the experience working with students struggling with mental illness, and I got the job! I am now in my sixth year of teaching at that school in Brookline, MA, which actually is just outside of Boston. It's been a fun ride - I've earned a special ed license along the way, discovered I have a penchant for writing grants to help develop new experiences for my students, and will teach my first computer science elective in the next semester.

It has also been a challenging ride at times, as when I first began I had to figure out how to adapt curriculum for small classes whose population is always changing and on any given day a new student might arrive having missed the entire previous year of school. Our school exists for students whose emotional disabilities prevents them from finding success on the larger traditional campus of BHS. As such, students enter our program during the year when they start to struggle in their other classes. This also means that class sizes are very small, varying during my teaching from 1 student to 9 students at a time. I've had days where due to illness/hospitalization/legal matters I have a student I haven't seen for weeks and nobody else, and I've had days where my three students feel like I'm teaching an entire zoo-ful of Eeyores.

Ultimately, I wouldn't teach anyplace else. My love for teaching math stems from a desire to help students who typically see math as an unbearable challenge develop fluency in their reasoning and appreciate a need for logic and order in solving problems. As the only math teacher in our school, I teach Integrated Algebra and Geometry, Algebra 2, Algebra 2 Advanced + Trig, and Statistics. While I sometimes wish I had more opportunities to develop lessons and projects with other math teachers, the freedom of our program allows me to incorporate all sorts of fun projects and explorations into my classes on a whim. We do scavenger hunts all over the school, we've created abstract bean bag toss games and played them to learn about expected value, and my students can make Desmos art with the best of them. A couple of years ago I challenged a student who was struggling to work harder and seek help when needed in exchange for any realistic reward he chose. He succeeded, and I dressed up as Santa Claus on Valentine's Day.