About Me:
My name is Kyle Larner, I graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics in 2011 from Michigan State University. I completed my internship at Mason High School, before receiving my first teaching job at Gardner Middle School in the Lansing School District where I taught 8th grade math and 6th-8th grade math for English Language Learners. Between my internship and receiving my first job, I also married my wife Rachel, who teaches French at a high school in Kalamazoo, MI. During each of our first years of teaching, we had the pleasure of commuting between Lansing and Kalamazoo (75 miles apart). It was always my desire to end up teaching high school math, so when a part-time math position opened up at Portage Central High School (4 miles from Kalamazoo), I was more than happy to accept the job. After putting in two years of teaching part-time, I was finally able to establish myself as a full-time teacher in 2015, and have not looked back since. I currently teach Geometry, Algebra, and Personal Finance and I am the advisor for the class of 2018.
I am most in my comfort zone when I am teaching traditional math classes such as Algebra and Geometry, as that is what my degree and certification is in, but when I was offered the opportunity to teach our school’s Personal Finance class, I decided to challenge myself and step outside of my comfort zone. I had never taught anything like Personal Finance before, and being a teacher relatively fresh out of college, I felt like I had a lot to learn myself before I could even think about teaching my students. After a lot of reading and a lot of re-designing of the curriculum, I have finally made it into a course that I am proud of, and have grown the program each year that I have taught it.
I am currently working on my Master of Arts in Educational Technology through Michigan State University in Galway, Ireland. I am planning on using this site as a space to share my experiences abroad and as a place to post any work that I complete during my studies. I am very excited to advance through the program and to bring all that it has to offer back home with me.
Below is a video of some of my educational beliefs that I produced for the MAET program.
As somewhat of a final reflection from our first year in the MAET program, we had to make something which shows how we bring passion and curiosity into our classrooms. I strongly believe that the best way to get our students to be passionate and curious about our subject is to model it ourselves first. If our students can tell that we are passionate and still curious about our subject matter, then it starts to become infectious in your classroom. One way to get students to exhibit more curiosity in your classroom, would be to encourage more questioning. Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question does a great job illustrating how the art of questioning can lead to great innovations, and instilling this idea into our students could go a long way in making them more passionate about their education.
Below you will see an infographic created with Easel.ly. My goal with this infographic was to show my thoughts on the two sides of passion and curiosity when it comes to education. While I teach high school math, I tried to think of parts of my teaching that bring out passion and curiosity that could be applied more generally to any kind of educator. I decided on this approach because I believe good teaching is subject agnostic, and these are some of the qualities that make a great teacher.
Kyle Larner 