Master Teacher

Bannard made do, of course. Every teacher did in those days because those antediluvian devices were all that were available and only the most nimble and creative minds could envision anything more advanced.

 

Life was about to change.

 

“A huge influence on my teaching has been the development of technology,” said Bannard, an Upper School math teacher who will retire in June after 53 years in education, the last 33 at Collegiate. “About three or four years into my career, calculators became available. Ten years in, we got desktop computers. That really changed my approach to teaching.”

 

A native of Long Island, Bannard graduated from The Hill School in Pottstown, PA, then earned a B.A. in economics from Yale and an M.A.T. in mathematics from C.W. Post University.

 

“When I was interviewing for college,” he said, “the admission officer (at Yale) asked me the question, ‘What do you want to do?’ I said that I probably wanted to go into business like my father but I was also considering teaching because I’d had fun running camps in the summer.  

He said, ‘If I have any advice to give you, I’d say try teaching first because you’ll get better experience and responsibility than you’ll get in any other job, and you can always switch very easily.’ Spring of senior year, I had no idea what I wanted to do. That’s when I decided, What the heck, I’ll give teaching a try. Never stopped.”

 

He quickly landed a position at Vincent Smith School on Long Island where he taught K-through-9 science.

 

“In the middle of May of my first year, the Board of Trustees voted to close the school,” he said. “There was a huge exodus on the part of the faculty. A group of parents won a court battle to keep the school open. I had the choice of what I wanted to teach. I switched to math.”

 

Why, I asked, since you were an econ major who had taught science?

 

“Math was always my best subject in school,” he said. “I certainly knew math better than I knew science. It seemed like a natural switch. History wasn’t open. That was probably what I would have wanted.”

 

After three years, he signed on at Groton, a boarding school in Massachusetts where he taught five sections of math (with five separate preps, if you can even imagine), ran a dorm, and coached (at one time or another) squash, tennis, baseball, basketball, soccer, and football.

 

“That’s just what you did,” he said with a chuckle of his 24/7 life. “We taught six days a week. You took it day by day. If you weren’t prepared, you flew by the seat of your pants.”

 

It was at Groton that he met a fellow teacher named Gussie Johns. They married in June of 1977 and ultimately moved to Richmond in 1989 when she accepted the position as head of St. Catherine’s School.

 

As this master teacher and mathematics guru nears the conclusion of his long, productive, and meaningful career, one in which he’s earned both the Joanne Pratt Award for Teaching Excellence (2006) and the Ann Griffin Award for Excellence in Teaching (2018), he continues to approach each day with alacrity and dedication.

 

What is it about teaching that excited you way back when and continues to excite you 53 years later? I asked.

 

“Originally,” he began, “it was the ability to be creative, to work with kids, and decide every day what I was going to do and how I was going to get things across in a way that kids understood. It was the idea that it was a challenge every day.”

 

Just as Bannard’s passion for math, teaching, and bringing out the best in his students has influenced generations of young men and women, likewise he’s drawn inspiration from mentors whom he feels inculcated in him the love for teaching math. One was Groton colleague John Choate, whom he references as “one of the most influential and really inspiring math minds I have ever met.”

 

In the mid ‘80’s, Bannard began working with a group at the North Carolina School of Science and Math.

 

“We were trying to figure out how to incorporate technology into the teaching of math,” he said. “We tried to introduce math concepts through problems rather than teach math concepts and do problems with them.”

 

At about the same time, he began three-plus decades of teaching for a week each summer in the Exeter Mathematics Institute at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. In the early days, when the event was called the Anya Greer Conference for Mathematics and Technology, he connected with colleagues who had grown up as he had before the advent of rapidly emerging modern technology but were fascinated by the myriad possibilities and undaunted by the challenges created by seismic change.

 

“We were figuring it out on the fly, absolutely,” he said. “It was fun. I was working with a lot of really smart, good people, some of the best and most innovative minds in the country. One summer, someone did a session on SMART Boards, which were brand new at the time. I came back and asked Patrick (Loach, the Upper School head who then oversaw Collegiate’s technology initiatives), if there was money in the budget for one. He got me one around November. Basically, that’s how SMART Boards came to Collegiate. I learned about it by just playing with it that week at Exeter.”

What’s kept you fresh, motivated, and willing to learn as your students have learned? I asked.

“Some of it,” he said, “is developing new courses. Math modeling is one. It’s basically taking the math you know and applying it to big problems. For example, over the course of the last 20 years, Lake Mead in Colorado at the base of the Colorado River is down to about 36 percent of its maximum level. How do you fix that? Or how do you fight the wildfires in California? The problems end up being more specific than that. The problem descriptions will be a page long. It’s not a 15-minute problem. It’s a two-week problem. It’s a research problem. Students will write five-to-20-page solutions.  The solutions are quite complex.”

What motivates kids to take math modeling? I asked.

 

“They find that the independence is wonderful,” Bannard replied. “A major element is group work. They have to work with three other people to solve the problem. That means they’re collaborating. It’s very much what they’ll have to do in the future.”

 

He also mentioned another creation called fractal geometry.

 

“It’s the geometry of nature,” he explained. “The geometry we learned in high school is the geometry of flat surfaces, Euclidean geometry. It doesn’t explain very well the bark of trees, the geometry of clouds, of mountains…basically of nature. That’s a whole new geometry. Ninety-nine percent of it has been developed since 1980. It’s fascinated me ever since. It’s been a source of my continued intellectual growth and interest. To me, it’s been important to find an interest that goes beyond what you taught last year. Change a couple of percent each year.”

What advice would you give the 22-year-old David Bannard? I asked.

 

“I did get great advice,” he said. “The key intellectually has been to keep learning and trying new things.”

 

Which would explain your fascination with technology, I offered.

 

“At Groton, we got absolutely the first generation of Apple computers,” he said. “The minute I started playing with that machine, I said, This will revolutionize the world. I’d wanted to be on the cutting edge of technology. I was creating. I was excited.”

 

Seems like you’re still excited, I said.

 

“I get excited every day I figure out something new,” he said. “That still happens.”

 

I’m guessing, too, that you get excited when your students excel, I offered.

 

“Absolutely,” he replied. “When kids have success…that’s as much fun as it always was.”

    ~ Weldon Bradshaw