How a Calculator Watch Changed My Life

I was the kid with the calculator watch. 

Growing up in West Texas was pretty awesome. We have open roads, and we like to travel at high speeds. I’m not sure how it happened, but math became central to my life around the time I took a long road trip with my dad. 

I must have been about 11 years old, but I very vividly remember him saying “when we pass the next mile marker, hit the stopwatch!” He was setting up the important follow-up question—how fast are we traveling? I put the stopwatch on that calculator watch to good use. 

Dad always had a passion for quantifying the things he saw around him, and he made sure to share that passion with anyone around him. He was an Italian immigrant, and, at the time he worked for the European Space Agency in Brussels, Belgium. 

I was half a world away at home in El Paso, Texas, but our phone conversations were filled with exciting stories about the satellites his team tracked. Math to me was about conversations and questions: 

• What quantities are important? 
• What if we changed that quantity or added more of this or that? 
• What do you think?

My thoughts and ideas mattered to my dad. Our conversations were not a one-way street, with him always telling and me always listening. He used every conversation as a frame to get me asking questions about the world around me.

So off to school I went, on a mission to become the first on my mom’s side to graduate from university in the United States. My mother is Mexican, and my uncle always spoke of Maya and Mexica, mathematical masters with their famous calendar. 

Naturally, I majored in math. 

After earning a bachelor of science degree in mathematics with a minor in physics from the University of Texas at El Paso, I became a high school mathematics teacher teaching ninth-grade algebra and tenth-grade geometry. 

The first thing I learned after graduation is that teaching is hard. The students in my classroom weren’t wearing calculator watches. You could not have paid them to wear a calculator watch. My struggle was to make math meaningful for my students, as my dad had made math meaningful for me. 

Students have a broad range of dreams and aspirations. I wanted to help them experience math not as a barrier, but as an integral part of their dreams. So, I pushed myself to inspire my students—to help them go beyond memorizing algorithms and instead use mathematics meaningfully to understand and solve real challenges. 

I had access to an amazing community—my colleagues, who introduced me to a wide array of pedagogical approaches, curricular resources, and supports. We talked and shared and observed each other to provide feedback and improve our teaching. I became more seasoned as a teacher, and I earned a master’s degree in math along the way. I felt like I was making a difference.

In 2009, I accepted an offer to join the faculty of El Paso Community College and began teaching everything from developmental math to Calculus II, a dream of mine since I was a boy. But then, for the first time in my career, I began to feel isolated. The conversations with colleagues stopped, because our schedules didn’t allow time to share, talk, or discuss our teaching—and we were tied to our textbooks.

Yet my colleagues and I were working hard—I saw my fellow faculty members running from class to class, juggling committees, grading papers, and holding office hours. I realized that It was the system that didn’t allow us to come together—and as time passed, I felt like my teaching was slipping. How could I make math meaningful on my own?

Enter the Dana Center—a group of ordinary teachers working for teachers. In my public school teaching years, I had learned about the Dana Center, known for developing rigorous K–12 math materials, and we used their materials whenever we could. 

It happened that the Dana Center was recruiting higher education math faculty to become curriculum developers for their just-launched mathematics pathways work, and boy, did I want to be a part of that! After spending 13 years teaching high school, and 5 years teaching at the community college level, I came on board to work on the Dana Center’s higher ed curriculum work in August 2013.

My goal at the Dana Center is to serve as a collegial resource to higher education math faculty.

Our curriculum team loves to be a part of pedagogical conversations at the classroom level, and we really value learning from math professors. This is probably the best part of my job—learning about the amazing things math professors do day in and day out.

We’re here to help faculty create learning environments where students are decision makers, where they ask questions, engage with challenging mathematics, and use math to solve real-world problems in authentic contexts. 

My dad made math a part of my life. As both a teacher and a curriculum developer, it’s been my job to do the same for my students—and now, that includes students around the country using Dana Center Mathematics Pathways. Through thoughtfully designed curricula and an engaged community of educators, my hope is that we can inspire all students to at least consider wearing a calculator watch.

Editors’ note: No one has the heart to tell Frank that nowadays most people just use their phones.