Tammy Jerkins hears the “I’m not a math person” complaint from her students regularly — some even insist its genetic, that no one in their family is a “math person” — and always quickly counters it.
“You just haven’t learned it yet,” she says.
Then the Leesburg High School teacher makes it her mission to fill in holes in their knowledge, convince them they can master the subject and show them the “sense and order,” and even beauty, in the subject she adores.
“I love teaching them and showing them they can learn,” Jerkins said. “It’s not some puzzle that can’t be done.”
Jerkins, known for helping struggling and unmotivated students find success in math class, was named Florida’s teacher of the year last week at a ceremony in Orlando. She is the first Lake County teacher to win the statewide honor, according to state records.
Leesburg High administrators describe her as an organized, talented instructor who comes early, stays late and often has a room full of teenagers seeking her help during their lunch hour. She calls students’ homes to check up on them when absent, attends their sports events and performances and, through her church, helps organize school supply and food drives to aid needy youngsters and their families. She also mentors new teachers and works to improve math instruction on campus.
She is the “face and foundation” of Leesburg High, wrote former principal Bill Miller, in a nomination letter for Jerkins. “Her commitment to her community, her school, and most importantly her students, places her on a level above all others.”
Jerkins, 58, was born in Leesburg and graduated from Leesburg High as its valedictorian in 1977. She went to college to be a math teacher and taught for a few years in Georgia after her graduation. Then, back in Florida, she stayed home to raise her four children. She was a regular school volunteer once her kids — three boys and a girl — started school and said she picked up lots of good teaching advice watching her children’s teachers at work.
Eventually, the “longing, thirst and hunger to have my own classroom” pushed her back into teaching. She took a job at Leesburg, which she calls one of her “happy places,” in 2004. She’s often taught classes for students who had struggled to make sense of algebra and geometry but also pre-calculus honors.
She loves math and wants her students to as well.
“I am still in awe of the precision and completeness in math, the truth and honesty in math, the finiteness and infinity in math, as well as the simplicity and complexity in math,” she wrote in a questionnaire she had to fill out as part of her nomination packet.
Miller, now the Lake school district’s chief academic officer, said Jerkins worked to boost math performance school wide during the years when Leesburg, given a string of D’s on the state’s school report card, faced lots of scrutiny.
She also modeled a “fierce sense of school pride,” he wrote, carried with “a sense of dignity and respect.”
Leesburg, which earned a C on the state report card this year, enrolls many students who live in poverty, and Jerkins said friends have often asked why she didn’t seek a job at another campus with fewer challenges.
“These students need me the most,” she wrote in her packet. “Surely they need the math content, but many of my students need so much more … I want to be that teacher, the teacher who went the extra mile.”
Dennis Neal, who was Leesburg’s principal this past year, called her one of the finest teachers he’d worked with in his 25-year career. “I have never seen her give up on a student, no matter how tough and/or unmotivated,” he wrote.
Jerkins said her philosophy is, “If students know you care about them, they will work for you. I love my kids. When they come in, they’re mine.”
As teacher of the year, Jerkins will be relieved of classroom duties for a year. That, she said, will be hard.
But the award, which comes with a $25,000 prize, is a “blessing” that will give her a chance to tour the state, touting Florida education and teaching.
Jerkins, whose three oldest children are now teachers, said it is a “wonderful profession” but one she worries fewer people want to enter or stick with as a career.
“Unfortunately, we are losing teachers,” she said, and that hurts students.
During her teacher-of-the-year stint, Jerkins said she plans to speak about teacher retention and to push for programs to help beginning teachers feel supported and eager to keep working in the classroom.
“I can’t imagine any profession more rewarding than being a teacher,” she added.
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