Math teacher develops gerrymandering curriculum in the Bronx

Veteran math teacher Kate Belin has won numerous accolades for her work with students and her mentorship of teachers, including most recently the 2021 Math for America (MƒA) Muller Award for Professional Influence in Education.

Belin (who uses they/she pronouns) has not only spent her entire 17-year teaching career at the Bronx’s Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School, but they also have taught at City College of New York, Bard College, and the Bard Prison Initiative.

In addition, she is a national teacher trainer for the Algebra Project and is working to amplify teacher voices.

Belin has developed a curriculum that includes a course on the ever-relevant topic of gerrymandering — diving into how boundaries of electoral districts are drawn to favor certain political interests — that is used at Fannie Lou and other New York City “consortium” schools. Those schools, which Chancellor David Banks has repeatedly said he’d like to replicate, focus more on hands-on learning and performance-based assessments than Regents exams.

To graduate, students at consortium schools only have to pass the English Regents while having other projects or portfolios to complete to show their mastery of skills.

“Without a doubt, my greatest professional impact comes from the work I do with my students at Fannie Lou,” Belin said.

“But I do have an agenda. I want to see a national shift in how we teach math, what math is, and who has access to it. Everyone should have access to high-quality math instruction. And math should be understood as something that is relevant, intuitive, all around us, and not as something that is accessible only to some.”