Jackie John L.

A student Jackie helped

I work with two groups. Most of my time is with Grade 10 and Grade 11 students in a regular classroom setting, teaching Mathematics, Statistics and Probability. Alongside that, I've spent the last three years as a Math Coach, training students to compete against other schools and in the Kangaroo Math Contest, coaching that's produced a champion finish, a 2nd place finish, and a silver medal at Kangaroo.

Those two roles feed each other. Coaching sharpens how I diagnose a student's thinking under pressure, and that same diagnostic approach is what I bring back to my everyday students who just need to catch up, not compete.

I specialize with students who've written themselves off, the ones who've decided Math isn't something they're capable of. I've helped students move from freezing at the sight of a word problem to setting up and solving one independently. On the competition side, I've helped students go from having never seen a contest-style problem to placing among the top finishers against other schools.

One of the achievements I'm proudest of is coaching a team from having no prior competition exposure to earning a champion title and a silver medal at the Kangaroo Math Contest. They started as regular classroom students with no contest experience, the kind of students who'd never been asked to solve a problem they hadn't seen a version of before. Getting them to a podium finish meant building both the math skill and the confidence to sit with an unfamiliar problem.