Thomas Nikundiwe, Teacher/LG2G Advisory Board Member
"In eighth grade," says Thomas Nikundiwe of the Algebra Project and the LG2G Advisory Board, "my Social Studies teacher made everyone teach a lesson. I worked so hard at preparing my lesson. But then when I did it, it was just horrible. I said then that I would never become a teacher."
It seems like an unlikely first step for someone who now sees himself as a lifelong educator and who will, in fact, continue his graduate studies this fall at the Harvard School of Education. Yet, as Thomas himself would suggest, not everyone follows the same path and not everyone sees Algebra and Math in exactly the same way.
After spending four years as a Math teacher in the Baltimore public schools, Thomas served in Africa in the Peace Corps. It was when he returned to Baltimore that he began his life-changing work with the Algebra Project. "The Algebra Project," Thomas says, "was started by Bob Moses. His feeling is that math is the civil rights issue of this era. Math is a gatekeeper to higher education, which is the key to economic stability, and you have to have economic stability to have political participation." Moses created the Algebra Project, explains Thomas, to help rural and urban African-American kids become exposed to and improve their skills in that "gatekeeper" - math.
The Algebra Project's work, says Thomas, is built around student empowerment. This summer, he trained 10 high school students to become Algebra Project teachers. Those 10 students will train another 30 students who will train another 90 students. And all of them will work after school (for $10/hour) helping other African-American kids learn Algebra. "It's really a student-run program," says Thomas. "They do all the significant work."
And now, after teaching in a variety of different settings, Thomas, once an unlikely teacher, has a very different view of his profession: "I used to have a totally different idea of what teaching is. I used to think that the best teacher was just the person who did the best job of explaining the problems. Now I see that it's really about taking students where they are and trying to move them to where they need to go. You have to always keep the students at the center of it."
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