This year, I found myself wrestling with the Eisenhower Matrix, sorting through the endless demands of teaching life. What surprised me most wasn’t what landed in the “urgent” pile—those parent emails about math enrichment, the pressure to challenge high achievers—but what I discovered sitting quietly in the “important but not urgent” space.
There it was: my real work. The work that could change everything.
Every year I teach, enrichment in math becomes the most pressing concern parents voice. The urgency is real, the pressure is constant, but the Matrix helped me see something crucial—I was responding to the noise instead of addressing what truly matters. What matters is creating a mathematical environment where every single student feels they belong.
The Vision
Here’s what I want: students moving freely throughout the classroom, mathematical conversations buzzing in every corner, and me—not standing at the front delivering content, but facilitating discovery. I want self-led learning where everyone is smiling. I want mathematical joy.
But this vision isn’t just about better pedagogy. It’s personal.
Math was never my passion as a student. I was never made to feel confident in mathematics, and I realize now that I internalized that feeling in my own teaching. I’ve been unconsciously perpetuating the very experience that made me feel small.
I want all students—both the strong and the struggling—to feel like they have a place in mathematics. I want to be the teacher I needed when I was sitting in those math classes, wondering if I belonged.
From Vision to Action
This month, I’m starting small but starting strong. We have a math workshop period with an extra facilitator—my perfect testing ground. I’m going to use this collaborative space to experiment with workshop-style lesson planning, moving from teacher-led instruction to student-driven exploration.
This isn’t just about trying new strategies. This is about breaking a cycle. This is about rewriting the mathematical story for every student who walks into my classroom.
By the time we gather for our final face-to-face, I want to walk into my math workshop and see students taking mathematical risks, choosing their own challenges, and discovering that they are capable of so much more than they imagined. I want to see confidence where there once was doubt, excitement where there once was anxiety.
Why This Matters
This work lives in that important-but-not-urgent space because it’s not about quick fixes or appeasing immediate pressures. It’s about transformation—mine and theirs. It’s about creating mathematicians, not just math students.
When I picture success, I don’t just see better test scores or satisfied parents. I see students who will carry mathematical confidence into their futures because I decided to heal my own mathematical story while writing theirs.
This is my commitment: to create a classroom where mathematical courage lives, where every student discovers they belong in the world of numbers and patterns and problem-solving. Where math becomes a place of joy, not judgment.
The Matrix taught me that the most important work often whispers while the urgent work shouts. This year, I’m listening to the whisper.
You seem to be so clear on your goal, Tina! Just reading your post, I can picture your dream come to life so clearly, so it’s only a matter of time that you will make it happen. You already started and it’s barely October! “Starting small, but strong”, indeed! You seem to approach this goal with a lot of thoughtfulness and self-awareness, and it looks like this year you have the “perfect” cohort to test and try your model: so many of them love math and consider themselves strong mathematicians!