Learning—and Having Fun at the Same Time
How Two CTY Alumni Are Making a Difference
A Monument to Mathematics
Bulbs dangling from cords provide the only light besides the laptop computer glow onto Glen Whitney’s (CTY Carlisle, 1982) face. He’s in the raw construction space at 11 East 26th Street, Manhattan, set to open in 2012 as the Museum of Mathematics, or MoMath, across from the green urban oasis of Madison Square Park.
Despite its name, the new museum won’t display an embalmed Euclid or a frozen Fermat. Instead, visitors to MoMath will pedal a square-wheeled tricycle that rides bump-free over a compensating undulating track, play with light-up molecule shaped rods and bulbs to show how math and music relate, and see how math is practical, fun, and accessible.
The point is, according to Whitney, to reshape the way many people think about mathematics. He told the New York Times, “It’s the only field [where] you can go to a cocktail party and talk to people with pride about how lousy you are.”
Whitney’s story is quintessentially CTY. A brilliant student, he grew up in Roselle, New Jersey, in a modest neighborhood. He says his father, a chemist by trade, encouraged his math talents and found CTY, then little more than a whisper program.
Whitney’s successful business career has enabled him to invest in a massive PR campaign of sorts to demystify mathematics. He believes that CTY students and alumni-especially those now with children of their own-compose an ideal audience for his temple to trigonometry, his palace to Pythagoras.
But just as some mysteries—like learning math—begin to clear, others take their place. In a twist more befitting a novel’s plot than a Möbius strip, Whitney, ttended this year’s CTY awards ceremony as proud father of his daughter who placed first in the country among CTYers taking the SAT—in critical reading.
CTY alumnus Glen Whitney, left, is fulfilling his lifelong dream of building the nation’s first museum of mathematics. The Museum of Mathematics, or MoMath, will open in Manhattan in 2012.
Creative Teaching, Dynamic Learning
When it comes to teaching CTY students all they need to know about 4 billion years of life on Earth, Summer Programs instructor Christine Metzger isn’t afraid of looking silly.
Stop by the paleobiology class Metzger teaches at our Los Angeles site and you might find her enthusiastically belting out a song about decomposition, presiding over a game of “Evolutionary Red Light Green Light,” or thundering around her lab like a bipedal dinosaur, a velociraptor skull on her head.
Video“My teaching philosophy is to learn and have fun at the same time because eventually the two become seamless,” says Metzger, a college environmental science professor who began work as a CTY instructor in 2005. “My CTY students learn so much better if I’m really dynamic and passionate and willing to take risks and embarrass myself. I don’t see a separation between creative things and scientific things. I learn better when I’m having fun, and I think my students do, too.”
Her insight into how CTY students learn isn’t just rooted in her years of teaching: She’s a CTYer herself.
My CTY students learn so much better if I’m really dynamic and passionate and willing to take risks and embarrass myself. I don’t see a separation between creative things and scientific things. I learn better when I’m having fun, and I think my students do, too.”
— Christine Metzger, CTY instructor and alumna, shown here as a CTY Summer Programs student, 1993.
In June 1992, Metzger, then a shy 12-year-old, flew 2,400 miles across the country alone to attend her first CTY summer program, a writing class at the Los Angeles site where she now teaches. There she discovered new authors, made new friends, and became more confident and outgoing. “CTY gave me the sense that I could be part of a community of learners. It also taught me that if I was willing I could really expose myself to all sorts of exciting, new, challenging, and creative things.”
She cried when it was time to go home. “I knew I wanted to come back to CTY as soon as I left.”
Metzger participated in summer programs for three more years, returned as a teaching assistant in 2001, and then became an instructor. “CTY was such a huge, huge part of my formative years and I think it is part of why I’m a really passionate learner today, and why I’m open to learning new things and meeting new people,” she says. “Being a CTY instructor makes me feel like I’m giving all of that back to CTY.”