I Met Dan Chazan

Here's a little story about how I met one of those scholar people whose books you read, whose work you study, and whose courses you would take if they only were at your University.
For me, the aspiring math educator, there aren't too many people out there for me to look up to, however there were a surprising number at Michigan State. Math ed has been huge at MSU for so long in fact that other Universities were offering big money to faculty members to leave MSU for their institutions. So I was able to meet a few professors, who were able to introduce me a few more professors, who worked with some others, until I knew or had met just about everybody. Except for one.
This one guy, Dan Chazan, wrote a book that I used in my first paper exploring Math Ed. He worked out this deal where he could teach at Holt High School as part of his University appointment. He used this opportunity to completely overhaul this high school's math program and motivate the teachers to work much harder than most people you'll see in Rural Michigan. I really came to appreciate this as I came to work at Holt during my senior. This was too late, as he was already headed down to the University of Maryland as a new Teacher Education Faculty Member...

So I roll into Harvard's Library a week ago to find about 5 people discussing this one piece of paper. This group of people and I have been working to make improvements to our program since this summer. My earlier blogs about the misguided "urban focus" of the program describe the feelings that most of us have had. Since then we have had discussions with leadership of the program, and then created a standard that could be added to programs standards to clarify this focus.
We had been working on the final document of this standard, which will probably go to the faculty board, when one member of our group recieved the piece of paper that was currently under discussion. The Dean of the school had questions about our program as well and was going about it her own way, by selecting a group of students to participate in a discussion about this topic. The Dean's office had sent the invitation to only one member of our groups, a female who attended an ivy league institution. Apparently the other people who received the emails were not fairly critical of the program, nor were they representative of the variety of economic and racial backgrounds of the people in the program. So I decided that I was going to solve this. I acted like I had been invited and sent an email to the Dean's office R.S.V.P.-ing for the event...

A group of the other selectee's were waiting around outside, everybody went to an ivy-league school, or a big name private school, or was in teach for america. A few people outside were still dead set on telling these people the straight up truth about this program. Other people were ready to say why the program was a good thing to prevent the very real program of the Teacher Education Program being cut from here all together.
The Dean's staff member, who was giving me a weird look earlier, asked us to scatter around small table in the room. We were later joined at the table by teacher education consultants who were to interview us. It was here where I realized that the person interviewing me was the guy from MSU that left for Maryland, Dan Chazan. I introduced myself as Carl from Michigan State and mentioned that I had taught at Holt High School and I appreciate his work. He looked pretty glad to see someone from MSU, as glad as I was no doubt. We went throught he interview process about the program very quickly as it only lasted for about half an hour.

We talked for a minute about Math Ed, Michigan State, and the way Holt High School looked when I left. I went off for the rest of the day feeling like maybe I can make a little more difference in the world. It's always cool seeing your heroes in person, realizing their people. I think I made some kind of impact in him as well. A person who talked to him that day was saying how he was more complimentary of MSU than he was of his own school. Maybe you don't realize the impact you can make somewhere until you leave, or you put some years on you. Maybe he didn't realize what he did until I told him.