This is the story of how UConn junior Briana Hennessy missed a trip to Mexico, instead became immersed in math justification research, and went to Tanzania this summer and got to teach math.
Hennessy, now a rising senior in the Neag School of Education, says the change in plans worked out for the best. “I was going to do a community service project but not related to teaching, so it was much better that I got to go to Tanzania and teach. It ended up being great that I didn’t go to Mexico.”
Last year’s planned Mexico trip was ditched because of a U.S. State Department travel warning. So, with her summer up in the air, Hennessy emailed Neag assistant professor of math education Megan Staples, “Will you please give me something to do.” Staples put her to work transcribing videotapes of teachers showing students how to justify and prove their algebraic conclusions. “But pretty quickly I was working on coding and other parts of the project,” Hennessy recounts.
That work led to more research on the JAGUAR project – Justification and Argumentation, a Growing Understanding of Algebraic Reasoning – with Jill Newton, an assistant professor of mathematics education at Purdue University. Hennessy skypes with Newton and another undergraduate student at Purdue, and painstakingly codes and analyzes how a dozen teachers in Connecticut and Oregon are doing with their outlined tasks to train middle school students how to justify an algebraic property.
Newton, the Purdue professor, says Hennessy and the other student make a significant contribution in their three-way debates about how to code and analyze what they see on the tapes: “Both of them will stand their ground. Never ever do they say, ‘You are the professor, you are the winner.’” She says they have superior technology skills, and research their arguments beforehand.
She got to know Hennessy better on a trip to Tanzania in May.
When Hennessy witnessed a Rwandan genocide trial proceeding held in Tanzania, Newton says, she wanted to dig deeper and understand the complexity of the situation. “To her it’s not that simple. Not black and white. People think, well, one tribe killed people in another tribe. But she wanted to look at the historical context. She’s very curious about why things are the way they are.”
Hennessy says her trip to Africa gave her a better understanding. “It’s very easy to hear stories about Africa and to get a vision of Africa. … The best way to learn about Africa is to go there.”
During her teaching experience there, Hennessy had a blackboard, chalk, and a book, but the students didn’t. They also came into secondary school, where classes are by law taught in English, after speaking Swahili in primary school. She says she adjusted by writing everything she said on the board, so students had two versions of the instruction. And she broke them into small groups, making sure each cluster had a competent English speaker to relay questions to her.
“It wasn’t optimum,” she says, “because I would like every student to be able to ask me questions, but given the time crunch and what I had to work with, it was probably the best thing I could do.”
Hennessy eagerly completed all the coursework for a math methods class in Africa, for which she would receive no college credit. “She’s always going to go above and beyond,” says Newton.
This summer Hennessy continued the research work with Staples with support from the Summer Undergraduate Research Fund. Staples says Hennessy, “is genuinely excited about new experiences and is willing to take risks and explore. She really takes advantage of opportunities that come her way, and she creates new opportunities. It’s been such a pleasure to work with her.”
Under the Neag School’s Integrated Bachelor’s/Master’s Degree Program, Hennessy, who has wanted to be a math teacher since age 14, is working on getting a bachelor’s degree in education and a bachelor’s in mathematics in 2012, and her master’s in education in 2013. She works as a math tutor at UConn’s Q Center, and is the student representative on the General Education Oversight Committee.
Hennessy has that quality the best teachers have: a straightforward delivery. She speaks simply, explains the distributive property in one line. It’s more than a nice quality; it’s a real talent. Her blog is simply called Math Teacher in Tanzania.
“She seems able to sort out the unimportant and bring clarity to that which really matters,” Newton says. “When she talks, people listen and it’s worth listening to.”
