It was quiet when I visited Adamson Middle School with Tonya Clarke just a few days before the start of winter break.
Clarke, the coordinator of K鈥�12 mathematics for Clayton County public schools in Jonesboro, Ga., is responsible for guiding the math instruction methods for the entire county.
She leads the team of math instructional coaches, who work hands-on with teachers.
During the school year, Clarke and her squad of coaches visit and observe classrooms to gain a better understanding of how teachers are conveying certain principles to students鈥攁nd to think through which tricks might unlock a student鈥檚 understanding of them.
When we walked into Ms. J. Christopher鈥檚 8th grade math room, the teacher walked from table to table in a red Santa hat as students huddled around worksheets trying to determine if the graphs printed on them represented a function or not. She had just delivered the lesson that she was now hoping her students would implement and, unsurprisingly, they were hitting some road bumps.
As Christopher worked with one group, Clarke visited another table and quietly made a suggestion about the way students could think about the problem they were wrestling with, pointing at different portions of the graph and speaking with a stern warmth that invoked confidence in the students.
Photographing students in a classroom can be challenging. Think back to your own middle school days: When an unknown individual walked into your room (equipped with a camera no less), it was a bit of an event. As a documentary photographer, that鈥檚 the last thing I want. It can so intensely disrupt the nature of what I鈥檓 trying to document that it becomes a dishonest portrayal.
Typically, this manifests in students throwing up deuces at the camera every time I raise it to my eye or in the form of a performed rigidity so tense that I imagine the teacher has threatened the students鈥� recess time if they cut up in front of me. Fortunately, this classroom was calm and comfy, and I was greeted with only a couple poses towards my lens, which I returned with the snap of the camera shutter and a smile.
As Clarke spoke with the students, I noticed she was wearing a T-shirt with a superhero on it鈥攁 black woman with space buns in her hair, a black bodysuit and a red cape billowing behind her. I later learned this was one of her favorite superheroes from Midnight Comics, a character named Shameka Day, alias The Grey, an experimental physicist who has created and can control a black hole.
After we left the classroom, I made some portraits of Clarke in the halls of the building. Schools typically offer long halls lined with the repetitive shapes of colorful lockers that, when photographed from the center, lead your eye, from all four corners of a photo, to a centered vanishing point. This makes for an interesting and striking place to place a portrait subject.
I made sure that we hung around in the hallway long enough for classes to change over鈥攖hat exhilarating moment when students briefly get to let out the pent up energy they鈥檝e built up in their rooms. I made an effort to make a portrait of Clarke as students were sort of swarming by in the hallway, using a low shutter speed so my flash would capture her with clarity while rendering the students鈥� movements around her as energetic blurs. The resulting photo shows Clarke with an unexpectedly well-ordered, single-file line of students walking past her鈥攎any giving us looks of: 鈥淲hat are y鈥檃ll doing?鈥�
It鈥檚 fitting that Clarke finds inspiration in The Grey, a character whose powers stem from hard work and intellect. She sees math as not just a means of getting a job and making a living, but also of unlocking our understanding of the world and ourselves.
Imagine a student overcoming the hurdle of identifying functions in a graph. If one day their brains are able to find meaning in a series of lines laid upon another grid of lines that days before appeared inscrutable, what else can the squishy thing rattling around behind their eyes do?
This is the kind of epiphany that Clarke works for. It鈥檚 not what you can learn鈥攊t鈥檚 that you can learn and that there is infinite possibility in that act. She acknowledges that these 鈥渁ha鈥� moments don鈥檛 always come in the classroom.
To this end, she and her team were responsible for ideating and implementing a 鈥渕ath walk鈥� in Clayton County International Park where pedestrians can find large math-y installations painted on the ground: a colorful grid of dots, the intersecting circles of a Venn diagram, or a dashed timeline in rainbow colors. There are no instructions, but the paintings are as familiar as the shapes that they鈥檝e learned about in the classroom and presented in a way that invites play and curiosity.
To test it out, Clarke and her colleagues invented a rock-throwing game along the dashed timeline鈥攚ho could get their rock closest to the last person鈥檚? Could they hopscotch their way down to it and back? As they laughed and playfully contested the rules they鈥檇 just made up, it was clear the installation had passed the test. They couldn鈥檛 wait to come back to the park with their students.
鈥� Dustin Chambers for 澳门跑狗论坛
