Math's Best Friend

“I think the most important thing is being excited about what you teach.”

By Cheryl Allen
Posted 11/1/22

“Math class is tough,” she says.  “Want to go shopping?”

Teen Talk Barbie may not have been very bright, but she was widely expected to marry Ken and raise beautiful …

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Math's Best Friend

“I think the most important thing is being excited about what you teach.”

Posted

“Math class is tough,” she says.  “Want to go shopping?”

Teen Talk Barbie may not have been very bright, but she was widely expected to marry Ken and raise beautiful children.  For math-loving girls like Deidra Baker, American culture saw a different future.

“In 1984 I met with [my guidance counselor] as a sophomore, and she said, ‘What do you want to do?’ And I said, ‘I want to be a high school math teacher.’ She’s like, ‘You’ll never get married and have kids because men don’t like smart women.’  I was like, ‘Okay, I guess I won’t get married,’” Baker recounts. 

Fortunately for 30 years-worth of math students who benefited from her teaching, Baker was undeterred from meeting her career goals.  She didn’t just become a high school math teacher; she became a dedicated one.  An enthusiastic one.  An award-winning one.

On Oct. 15, Baker was awarded the 2022 Friend of Math award at the Iowa Council of Teachers of Mathematics annual conference in recognition of the work she has done to help math education across the state. 

“It was pretty exciting,” Baker says about receiving the award.  “It was nice to be honored for the work that I’ve been doing.  This is my 30th year of teaching, and I’ve been involved with the Iowa Council for 26 years.”

Her resume is impressive.  The University of Iowa graduate has taught math at City High School (14 years) and Keota Junior/Senior High School (8 years); she currently teaches at Mid-Prairie High School (8 years). 

For the Iowa Council of Teachers of Mathematics (ICTM), she has been journal editor, Great Prairie AEA representative, and president.  She also chairs the Marilyn Zweng Memorial Trust Committee.  Zweng was Baker’s advisor at UI, and she donated $250,000 to ICTM upon passing away in 2019.  Baker accepted Zweng’s ICTM 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award on her behalf at the conference.

“Deidra is well-known throughout Iowa as a leader in math education,” the ICTM wrote in a summary of her accomplishments.  She has served on many councils and committees, and has been involved in many projects, both interdisciplinary and focused on students transitioning into the workforce. 

Her previous awards include the 2012 Yager Educational Accomplishment Honor, and she was a state finalist for the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching in 2011. 

Baker met her first love at an early age. 

“I had a third-grade math teacher who was just fantastic.  I was like, Oh, that’s really fun.  And then I got to high school and I had a really great high school math teacher, and I thought, that is what I want to do,” she says.

Although not everyone encouraged Baker on what was then a nontraditional career path for women, she found enough mentors and supporters to tip the balance in her favor.  She uses that experience to fuel others forward. 

“I really want to encourage everyone. Women, minorities,” she says.  “Do what you want to do.  If this is your dream, do your dream, whether you think you’ll be the only one doing it or not.”

Baker believes that for students to have that ability to pursue their dreams, learning math is essential. 

“I think it’s huge because math has been a gatekeeper for a long time.  There are a lot of professions that make you take weed-out classes, to sort out who can do math and who can’t, whether or not you actually need math to do the job.  So, I think it’s really important that kids have access to a good quality math education, that they get as much math as they can in high school so that all the doors are open for whatever they want to do.”

“Some of the work that I’ve done is looking at, how can we make math accessible?  How can we make math equitable?  How can we make sure that kids have access to quality math teachers?  How can we make sure that kids get the math they need?”

She notes a recent movement in colleges that has shifted focus away from calculus toward statistics as a requirement for graduation.

“Kids need to have an idea of how data works and how you can use data, and why data is important.  That’s all math: thinking logically and making good decisions,” Baker says.  “Maybe it isn’t all formulas or finding the slope.  Maybe it’s just a good thinking process. The scientific method goes with math, goes with writing a good, cohesive paragraph.  If you can think logically, you can write well, you can do science.  It all goes together.”

What is the secret to being a great math teacher, to making math accessible to students?

“I think the most important thing is being excited about what you teach, and then finding ways to apply what you’re learning to what the kids need to know and what they’re interested in,” she says. “Like, right now in geometry, we’re talking about trigonometry, the study of right triangles.  So, that’s slope, that’s landscaping, that’s grading, that’s construction, that’s quilting, that’s welding, that’s building things.  There are right triangles everywhere.  It all kind of goes together.  So, just kind of helping kids make connections.  Like, ‘I’m never going to use this.’  Oh, you probably actually used it today, you just didn’t know.”

As it turns out, becoming a great math teacher didn’t actually prevent Baker from getting married or having kids.  She and her husband have been married 31 years; they have a daughter in medical school and a son studying to be an industrial tech teacher. 

And you’ll never guess where this smart woman met the man she would marry.

“We met in math class.”