I am a member of an important yet often overlooked group of professionals—that of elementary school teacher. It is the elementary school teacher who gives a child his/her first formal learning experiences, and these experiences have a profound impact upon the child's success or failure in school.

Because of the strong emphasis now placed on the improvement of mathematical sciences education, the role of teaching on the elementary level is being altered to allow teachers to develop skills in one or two subject areas. This trend is currently evident in elementary mathematics education. A new title is slowly evolving—the elementary math specialist. A math specialist is not a curriculum writer, or a mathematics supervisor, or even a resource teacher, but an elementary teacher who teaches mathematics and only mathematics in the local school. The role of the math specialist is to instruct, diagnose, remediate, and evaluate the progress of the heterogeneously grouped students that comprise each class. This responsibility relieves the regular classroom teacher of the task of teaching mathematics while simultaneously allowing a specially trained teacher to focus on one subject—mathematics.

I enjoy the challenge of planning new and interesting ways of helping my students discover the magic, the mysteries, and the power in the patterns of mathematics. It is exciting to present new mathematical concepts and watch as students experiment and test various mathematical hypotheses in order to reach a conclusion about ratios, percents, or whole number operations.