Joy Lin was an excellent student growing up, graduating second in her high school class. After earning three degrees in natural sciences that put her on the path to medical school, she realized she wasn’t cut out to be a doctor because she didn’t like blood or needles. So, she turned to education. Joy started her teaching career with troubled kids and ended up in the juvenile detention center, where kids are held between arrest and sentencing.
“I was dealing with a group of students who typically do not like to learn from textbooks. They varied in age from 10 years old to 18, “ she says. “I was forced to come up with some kind of a lesson that they could all participate in. The solution I came up with was Marvel DC movies. We would watch a movie and, periodically, I would pause the movie and talk about the physics behind each feat they were accomplishing on screen.”
This superpower approach to teaching took off and eventually led to a series of popular TED Ed videos, putting Joy’s work on the map of education innovators. Now, she is a math teacher in the Austin Independent School District, where she is working on a different way to teach math that involves sentence diagramming.
Understanding the Sentence Structure
She and her colleagues noticed that excellent math students were doing poorly on state math exams because of the word problems. As she says, the math test was more of an English test. As someone who was not a native English speaker, she knew that getting the students to at least understand the basics of the sentences of math problems would help.
“And that’s where sentence diagramming comes in,” she says. “You have to break down the sentence to realize what words are the important verbs or important nouns and what words are just descriptive. You’re trying to get the essence of what the sentence is saying.”
Joy’s approach is working in Austin, and other educators are starting to take notice.
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