A Pro Who Cares About Students

Algebra teacher Patricia Casto posted a problem on the overhead -- (4x){+3} -- and her freshmen at Huntingtown High School rushed to properly distribute the exponent using markers on their white boards.

One by one, they quickly held their board up for approval. In this class, nobody wants to be the kid with the dumb answer.

"No! No! No! No! No!" Casto shouted, shooting down answer after answer. "Way too many nos."

The white boards slapped back onto desks.

A student held up 4{+3} x{+3}. "Not done yet," Casto told her.

Slowly, boards with the correct answer -- 64x{+3} -- popped up.

"Yes! Yes! I like it! I like it!" Casto congratulated them.

Casto, the 2008 Agnes Meyer Outstanding Teacher Award recipient for Calvert County, has been in the classroom only four years.

In her former professional life, she worked as an accountant and analyst at DuPont and as a self-employed consultant for nonprofit organizations. Then she decided to get a master's degree and become a math teacher. She wanted to spend more time with her five children and hoped to persuade some of those math-resistant freshmen that the subject really is interesting.

"By the time I get them, they might have already had a bad experience and been turned off from math," Casto said. "They have to trust you. You have to make them believe that all of this does apply to their lives."

Casto hasn't let go of her corporate attitude and runs her classroom as she would a business in the "adult world." In class, students are expected to be wide awake, respectful and prepared.

Her colleagues commented on that professionalism in the nomination letters they wrote and commended her for working with Huntingtown High's algebra team to improve math classes schoolwide. As a result, Casto's students have excelled during testing, surpassing county and state averages, Huntingtown Principal Rick Weber said.

"In addition to her students' outstanding test results, she has developed a wonderful relationship with her students," Weber wrote in a nomination letter. "Developing a positive rapport with low-achieving students and letting them know that you care about their success is an absolute necessity. Ms. Casto has done that."

Casto talks to her students as though they are adults, and she zeros in on behavior issues the minute they pop up. She also jazzes up her math vocabulary, asking students to make complicated problems "gorgeous for me" or to "take all of this junk to the zero power."

Still, freshmen are freshmen, and Casto is constantly battling for their attention.

"This is stupid," Ashley Lowe, 15, said after a lesson this month on negative exponents.

"Don't say that," Casto said with a sigh. "You gotta learn it; I gotta teach it. Trust me, you'll use it."